Christians, Prove Your God Is Good

[Ignorant]

Do you believe, ignorant, that a "list" of moral rules is preferable, in your opinion, to using our own morality on a subjective basis?

If so, why?

No. I personally don't believe that a "list" of moral rules is preferable.

Edit: I believe what is preferable is that we, using our own subjective moral judgments, improve upon the goodness of our actions in a direction which trends toward the fullness of what human beings are in reality. In short, I think we should all be and act as human as is possible. But, in order to do that, we need to have a common understanding of what a human is and how a human becomes "fully" human. "Love, and do as you will." -St. Augustine of Hippo.

Ignoring the obvious subjective aspect of human action (i.e. individual judgments about what goods to seek and how to seek them) seems largely inadequate to me.

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I really cannot understand what you are saying about christians, ignorant. If they claim the bible is the word of God, which most of them seem to, then I don't see what justification they have for then overriding it as they see fit. Can you address that?

I am not quite sure what you mean. Have I said this somewhere? If I may attempt an interpretation of what you mean here, I do not think they are "overriding it" as they see fit, even though I think some of them clearly do. The question is one of hermeneutics (i.e. the interpretive framework with which a text is interpreted). The different Christian traditions have different hermeneutics they apply to scripture. The Catholic Tradition, for example, has a single general understanding of hermeneutics which is open to differing yet compatible particular hermeneutics.

And to try and imply that our conscience is somehow some magical thing which has pulled pieces together from God or something... Again it doesn't line up with the bible, which most christians say is the word of God. And also it's a baseless assertion and an unnecessary assumption, when we already have very good explanations.

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Well, that is a complicated philosophical/theological history as I have alluded to in another post. "Conscience" is, itself, a term understood in many different ways while we all assume that everyone just "knows" that it means what "I" mean by it. I can't speak for all Christians, but I would never call conscience something in any way magical/supernatural.

I have yet to meet a person who would disagree with the imperative: "Do and seek the good and avoid what is evil." Not even the Bible diagrees with this. The disagreement ONLY comes when you ask: "What is good? What good should I seek?"

I don't dislike christians, I dislike Christianity. If they weren't claiming the bible was the word of God, then what you say might have some merit. But they do, and it's the stupidest claim ever as they contradict it on a daily basis.

Is it also possible that you only dislike Christianity "in as much as you have understood it"? Do you think every Christian agrees about what it means to say that the Bible is "the Word of God"? As a Christian, I can tell you that the sad answer is a resounding no. Some treat it as if the book fell from heaven. Others think it was mostly invented by men, and still others have a more complex understanding of what the texts actually are. Unfortunately, not every Christian can give an articulate account of what exactly the biblical texts are. Fewer still can propose a rational description of the ethics which the texts, taken as a whole, eventually teach (I am personally working on a START to such a task).

But that is a different discussion entirely.

What does goodness mean to you? When you say that something is good, what do you mean?