(July 12, 2017 at 11:38 am)SteveII Wrote:-and there it is again..gods plain immorality by any standard, objective or subjective..requires a defense of a "greater good", unfortunately for god's moral status this defense is so weak that it doesn't hold water even in the case of we lowly human creatures. No ones "free will" to commit the crime is impacted, in the least, by preventing them from -accomplishing- the crime. The god of scripture being a thought criming god...you'd think this would have occured to him...but obviously it didn't. Yet another thing that an omniscient being, apparently, didn't know.(July 12, 2017 at 10:56 am)mordant Wrote: Irrelevant. Nothing happens without god either permitting it or causing it, and nothing is outside his ability to prevent, so he is still ultimately responsible for the mayhem. If a burglar comes into my house and slits my children's throats while I passively watch, I can't claim I'm a good father, using as an excuse that I'm not interfering in the burglar's free will.
Your analogy is lacking. So while God does permit evil, it is only because it is a by-product of a much greater goal: free will. Without free will we would have just been happy puppets always following a predefined path. God instead wanted people to *choose* to obey, love and worship Him as well as having loving, respectful, etc. relationships with others (none of which is possible without free will).
Quote:You seem to think that God should intervene and prevent evil things from happening. It does not seem to me that we could have a world where we have free will and not have suffering because every wrong choice we made that resulted in suffering (however small) would be met with a supernatural intervention. Such a state of affairs would result in a complete lack of morally sufficient freedom --effectively eliminating free will. So it would seem that a world in which everyone had free will but no possibility of suffering would not be able to be actualized.Obviously, a Much Better World™ is the one in which god arbitrarily decides to step in and help some specific master race, from time to time, by slaughtering their enemies and suchlike. Why can't these immoral heathens see the holiness trumping mercy..Steve?
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