Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[watchamadoodle]

The person in that example is using the word "pastichalony" as if everyone just knows what it means. When he is pressed to offer a definition, he just keeps using the word which is not understood.

Using a word as a descriptor and assuming other people should be able to define that word without reference is, indeed, without sense.

I think you're being a little bit unreasonable, @Ignorant. Let's say you are trying to teach a child what "blue" means. You might show him a blue egg and say "blue". Then you might point to the sky and say "blue". After you show him a dozen things, he begins to understand that the common attribute is color and that color is "blue".

(1) I gave a list of things that I consider "good" (environmentalism, etc.)

(2) That wasn't enough, so I gave a definition where "good" is a metric used in decision theory. We all make choices, so we all must have a notion of "good". (I'll include a quote that might help make this clearer BTW)

The idea of expected value is that, when faced with a number of actions, each of which could give rise to more than one possible outcome with different probabilities, the rational procedure is to identify all possible outcomes, determine their values (positive or negative) and the probabilities that will result from each course of action, and multiply the two to give an expected value. The action to be chosen should be the one that gives rise to the highest total expected value.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_theory

(3) That wasn't enough, so I emphasized that I consider "good" to be subjective, yet I believe that democracy proves that subjective notions of good are sufficient for government.

The definition you offered merely defined "good" in terms of "human fulfillment" which was left undefined. Then you said "God is good", because he is defined that way. I don't blame you, because I know that your view is an abbreviated version of the Catholic Encyclopedia article. That all makes sense to you, because you are a Catholic. Also I don't mean to oversimplify your definition. I probably overlooked some subtleties.

So I really don't see why you are using me as your example of not giving a definition for "good". It seems you are simply trying to avoid engaging with the thread topic by making this into a bigger problem. Sure, it would be nice to have an objective definition of good, but many atheists are moral relativists and don't believe there is an objective definition. However, we can still aggregate subjective definitions of good through voting and discussions like this. So let's discuss whether God is good.

BTW That is a cool word you invented "pastichalony". It seems like it should be part of the theology for the Flying Spaghetti Monster. Maybe I am a pastichalonist.