(August 14, 2015 at 3:55 am)robvalue Wrote: Let's pretend that a god exists, and it's any of the popular religious characters. Let's say he had at least a very strong influence in my "construction".
Now. I feel it's fair to say he is responsible for the scope of my imagination at least, if not the fine details.
I can very easily imagine a god much more powerful, impressive, loving and intelligent than the stories told about him, and by considering the quality of his work.
I can very easily imagine a reality where myself, and everyone, would be much happier in every way while retaining free will. The current reality isn't even anywhere close to that, the rating I would give it is very close to zero out of a million. This is bargain basement fucking awful.
So the question is: why would this God give me the ability to very easily imagine beings much superior to him, and taunt me with visions of an infinitely better existence than the one he has given me? Is my imagination superior to his potential, or is he deliberately being sadistic? If my imagination isn't superior to him, his power is far greater than anyone has ever described to me, and pathetic excuses about him not being able to get ancient people to stop having slaves are even more laughable. Or having to fine tune the universal constants exactly just to edge a tiny amount of hospitable environment into play for us.
If you think this is the best world a powerful God who really cares about us could make, even while expending no effort or resources, your imagination is clearly dwarfed by mine. And assuming it's the same God as yours, my imagination wins. He made me too.
I imagine the first response to the "infinitely better reality" wil be that he is showing me glimpses of heaven. Well, it doesn't seem anything like what anyone has described heaven to be, which is shit awful. Also, he's not there, and we still have free will which is apparently impossible if there was no evil according to many theists. And even if he is taunting me with heaven, he's simultaneously inflicting a reality on me so horrible that I've been suicidal for 8 years. Presumably killing myself would fail whatever kind of sick "test" this is meant to me. Fuck tests. Testing us in this way, while showing perfect happiness then snatching it away for not achieving arbitrary goals and toadying around him implies a psychotic, evil God who for all we know sends no one to this "heaven". And that's his own creation reviewing him, with a mind largely influenced by him.
Once again, whatever road I take with these comic book character gods, I find myself totally unwilling to worship them or align myself with them in any way even if I thought they were real. This moral rejection argument is I think far more potent towards religious theists than the lack of evidence. This can't be scooted around with the argument from ignorance.
The reason you can imagine something better is because you are not able to calculate all the different variables in the hundreds of trillion indivisuals interacting with each other and a limitless combination from here to eternity future.
Some people are just bad. You believe we are all inhearently good, completely ignoring that real evil lives in people. Evil that wants to see everything and EVERYONE burn for the sake of letting it burn. This is not the case. you would think with ISIS and Nazis and the like you'd in your fantasy could imagine that if we were autonomous and could think for ourselves to some degree given enough time those who hate or resent god and his followers would try something like that again.
