Reduced to a Piece of Clay: False Humility and Human Dignity

[SteveII]

OK.  I agree that from your perspective, which is only centered on this lifetime on earth, he could look pretty evil.  If we see our existence as eternal and recognize the fact that we are often purposely evil and subject to justice, and will live forever, then we can view God as loving and just. He doesn't give us the punishment we merit and sacrificed himself to achieve that end.  I can see that is too much for you to understand or accept, so I'll live with the fact that you think God is evil.  I believe that when you come face to face with him, then you will know the truth.

No. No, no, no.

Even presuming your beliefs to be one hundred percent true, that doesn't change a whole lot of my estimation of god, it just makes it worse. For all that you rail about justice, your god doesn't dispense justice in any sense of the word. It's not just, for example, to punish a finite crime with infinite punishment- at some point, the punishment will begin to exceed the crime committed, and at that point it'll still be going on forever - but that's what your god does. It's not just to punish every crime with the exact same punishment- a murderer has committed a worse crime than a liar, and that's core to our understanding of justice, it's the whole reason we have more than one sentence in court- but that's what your god does. It's not just to punish people without due representation and some attempt for them to speak their side of the story to an impartial adjudicator, but your god just does that.

And who exactly decided that god gets to be the dispenser of justice anyway? Who decided that the sins he's all riled up about require justice anyway? Oh, he decided he's the judge, and he decided that sins- which are really just people having the temerity to do things he doesn't personally like- are worthy of justice? How circular! How completely devoid of justification!

I know you're about to say that god made us so he gets to do whatever he wants with us, but that's not an argument, that's just a fiat assertion you're making because it's convenient. For one, it's not true of any other relationship between a maker and a made thing, where that thing has sentience; we have child abuse and endangerment laws precisely because you don't get to do whatever you want to a living thing that you've made. And if god gets to set a standard so that he's the exception to that, then again, all you've got is a circular argument unless you can actually justify that position without recourse to some imagined authority or flat assertion, and all of theology has simply failed to do that. It can't, because it refuses to consider the christian narrative outside of the asserted authority of its key figure.

There's nothing morally good or righteous about your god, Lek, and tweaking my view of the world so that I and everyone else is immortal within it doesn't change that. It just makes it infinitely worse.

I just wanted to clarify. You don't go to hell for a sin or series of sins. You go to hell for one thing: you have rejected God.