Dodging theodicy: 'On Faith' panel stumbles over Haiti and God

[Edwardo Piet]

I don't see how "Good" can exist but not "Evil". Because I don't see how Evil is simply the absence of Good any more than the other way around. After all, I see the absence of Good as amoral, not immoral. Murder isn't evil simply because it lacks goodness.... sitting on your ass and not helping people lacks goodness but that's not the same as going out and killing them yourself is it?

EvF

[Autumnlicious]

I don't see how "Good" can exist but not "Evil". Because I don't see how Evil is simply the absence of Good any more than the other way around. After all, I see the absence of Good as amoral, not immoral. Murder isn't evil simply because it lacks goodness.... sitting on your ass and not helping people lacks goodness but that's not the same as going out and killing them yourself is it?

EvF

Hence why comparing light and dark, which is based on a perception of a system that can be directly measured, with good and evil, something than can not be measured or quantified, is fundamentally ridiculous.

[Rhizomorph13]

Hey, I keep my evilometer right next to my bullshit detector!

[fr0d0]

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

You've gotta love Dawkins

Yet continental drift exonerates nature from any blame. Poetic.

[Zen Badger]

Educated apologist, how dare you weep Christian tears, when your entire theology is one long celebration of suffering: suffering as payback for 'sin' - or suffering as 'atonement' for it? You may weep for Haiti where Pat Robertson does not, but at least, in his hick, sub-Palinesque ignorance, he holds up an honest mirror to the ugliness of Christian theology. You are nothing but a whited sepulchre.

You've gotta love Dawkins

Yet continental drift exonerates nature from any blame. Poetic.

How can you assign blame to nature?

It will do what it does regardless of what we think.

[fr0d0]

Precisely. Ditto for Christian Theology/ God. Yet this was science's answer to human suffering.

[Edwardo Piet]

Science's answer is based on facts not a load of bullshit unlike religion.

EvF

[Zen Badger]

Precisely. Ditto for Christian Theology/ God. Yet this was science's answer to human suffering.

But I thought God loved us.

Whereas Nature is just a collective noun for the various sytems( weather,geology etc)

that blindly and unthinkingly do what they do, and we get caught in the fall-out.

[Autumnlicious]

Precisely. Ditto for Christian Theology/ God. Yet this was science's answer to human suffering.

A poor comparison from you fr0d0. God is ascribed human characteristics, has others write about him wanting and doing. By most definitions of a person qualifying through actions ascribed to him (God), he is a person, and therefore can have the blame we ascribe to each other assigned to him.

Nature, with it's representative Science, however, has none of these qualifiers, is not considered a person in any well known society, cannot be blamed the same way as a person, so therefore is considered closer to that of a dumb functional machine.

You do not blame the chainsaw for cutting off your arm but your own stupidity (read: You or something that is part/defines yourself) if you did it to yourself. You can blame an imaginary all powerful being with human characteristics because it is a person in some manner like you.

[fr0d0]

Ah so you have to add in other bits about God to get to see why it's bad ....riiiiiiiiiiiiite

No... what we're talking about here, without introducing any irrelevant ideas, is that nature can't be bad because it just 'is' is precisely the same as God can't be seen to be bad for the exact same reason.

If you say God is based on bullshit then you are also saying that science is based on bullshit.