I noticed the user Catholic lady posted an OP asking how you would react if the Christian God showed himself to you & explained, with his divinely perfect logic, that he is moral. Some user said that that was a big 'what if,' but that they would immediately convert. But some others said they would still not accept him. I got the distinct impression that many, though by no means all, of the atheists respondents believe that the world is evil & that thus God would be evil. Many of the comments had an almost gnostic flavour to them, and it felt as though the commenters were gnostics that had lost their faith in a spiritual world.
We should distinguish, regardless of our personal beliefs on God, between natural and human evil. Natural evil is everything from the Onchocerca volvulus worm David Attenborough is fond of mentioning, to hurricanes, earthquakes and everything else not a product of men that harms us or causes us suffering. Human evil is whatever is unjust or wrong with our society or with an individual as a result of human action. Sometimes, as in the case of psychopathy, which is a mostly genetic, natural condition, the lines may be blurred a little. I should also say that I am coming from a pantheistic position; I don't believe in objective, natural evil; I believe that morality is an evolved instinct primates and possibly other social animals have to facilitate their cooperative evolutionary strategies. Morality serves an end; genetic survival. Nature, and God, are in my view, beyond good and evil. I understand some of the things I am criticising may be valid attacks on the Christian conception of God.
Many of the atheists in the thread seemed to think that God owed them something, or that the world should be without struggle, or that man should get to decide what God ought to do and not the other way around. Many people seemed to have a problem with authority in general, or to be narcissists. I think some atheists are angry at nature, and hate the world. They don't want there to be a God, because they want it to be true that, to quote Protagoras, 'Man is the measure of all things.' The idea of something higher than man, greater than man, offends their narcissism. For this fraction of atheists, atheism seems to be more a normative position than a descriptive one.
We should distinguish, regardless of our personal beliefs on God, between natural and human evil. Natural evil is everything from the Onchocerca volvulus worm David Attenborough is fond of mentioning, to hurricanes, earthquakes and everything else not a product of men that harms us or causes us suffering. Human evil is whatever is unjust or wrong with our society or with an individual as a result of human action. Sometimes, as in the case of psychopathy, which is a mostly genetic, natural condition, the lines may be blurred a little. I should also say that I am coming from a pantheistic position; I don't believe in objective, natural evil; I believe that morality is an evolved instinct primates and possibly other social animals have to facilitate their cooperative evolutionary strategies. Morality serves an end; genetic survival. Nature, and God, are in my view, beyond good and evil. I understand some of the things I am criticising may be valid attacks on the Christian conception of God.
Many of the atheists in the thread seemed to think that God owed them something, or that the world should be without struggle, or that man should get to decide what God ought to do and not the other way around. Many people seemed to have a problem with authority in general, or to be narcissists. I think some atheists are angry at nature, and hate the world. They don't want there to be a God, because they want it to be true that, to quote Protagoras, 'Man is the measure of all things.' The idea of something higher than man, greater than man, offends their narcissism. For this fraction of atheists, atheism seems to be more a normative position than a descriptive one.
