Benevolent Creator God?

[The Grand Nudger]

Still muttering cantrips at us, eh?

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Not to mention the number of absurd threats is potentially infinite and I couldn't worry about all of them if I tried.

Have you ever heard about Pascal's Mugging? It's a thought experiment that shows the faulty thinking involved in Pascal's Wager-ish type stuff. For me, it was the final nail in the coffin for Pascal's Wager.

Pascal’s Mugging always puts me in mind of an old joke about Queen Victoria. One of her courtiers asked if she would sell herself to a man for £1 000 000. After some hemming and hawing, HRM admits, ‘Well, possibly. Dependent, of course, on the circumstances and in a good cause.’

‘Very well. Would you sell yourself to a man for £2?’

‘Certainly not! Do you think We are a common slattern?’

‘We’ve already determined that, Majesty. Now, we are simply determining your market price’

Boru

[Spongebob]

[R00tKiT]

[Astreja]

your perspective... but at least you've been enjoined. Why go there?

Why not? It's not as if your imaginary friend poses any actual threat to me, and it's enjoyable to deconstruct the Christian worldview and point out its absurdities.

[pocaracas]

[R00tKiT]

We're still dealing in finite actions and finite sentences in the case of murder.

I will not yield on this point:  I consider eternal punishment to be the quintessence of pure evil, and I will not worship any deity that allows such a place as hell to exist and that refuses to liberate sentient beings from hell.  In my opinion, it is the ultimate deal-breaker.

And you think a murderer should enjoy ever-lasting happiness once the finite sentence is over? What about serial killers, or people who carry out genocides taking millions of lives, millions. What kind of finite sentence will account for the Holocaust, the cambodian genocide, and other unimaginably horrific episodes of human history? Do you think a benevolent God should put Hitler in heaven after some extended period of punishment, for example?

And actually, your stance against the existence of hell is completely irrational. If we tell someone that jumping out of a window from the 8th floor of a building will cause instant death, that doesn't make gravity an immoral thing or something a benevolent God wouldn't create, we're simply telling them the way it is. Similarly, God asked people to do very very simple things: not to dishonestly reject his message, not to murder people, etc. But people go ahead and do these things, knowing that hell is the consequence, why should they object to it ? God is omnipotent, after all. Sentient being simply can't object to anything an omnipotent being does.

You say, "I consider eternal punishment to be the quintessence of pure evil". Well, those who are entitled to eternal punishment have committed pure evil themselves, no theist is telling you that hell is a pleasurable outcome, either.. many people are capable of malevolence, they are capable of inflicting huge amounts of suffering to one another, why do you think these people deserve anything other than pure evil?

And if you still don't accept anything above, you can think of it this way: what would you wish to someone (I am really asking you for your personal opinion this time) who causes great harm to someone you care about? What would you think of a deity who allows this person to enjoy anything in an afterlife? What would you think of a deity who would reward serial killers, rapists, people who sell children for sexual purposes or to steal their organs....?
A possible objection is to say, a deity could simply make them cease to exist instead of torturing them. Not really a solution, either, because it doesn't cancel out the injustice. If we make a mass murderer cease to exist as a punishment then, at best, we canceled out the unjust murder of one person, what about the other thousands who died unfairly? This is a very simple example to give you a rough idea... 

And how do you know which ones I checked and didn't check?  Name them.

So far, every religious claim that I've examined has failed the believability test.  Every single one.  If the same thing keeps happening, why should I waste any more time on it?  I have more important things to do.

Well, actually, you can't say that to a theist, here is why: the theist picked some answer which they believe represents the ultimate truth, they don't need to check the rest of the answers. As I said to Spongebob before, imagine you have a row of 50 doors in front of you, only one door contains a prize and all other doors are dead ends, and you are allowed to open as many doors as you want (everybody gets the prize in the end), then what you would you is to randomly pick doors and open them, you may start by opening door 3 for example, you find it empty, then you open door 5, also empty, you keep going, until you open the door 17 for example, bingo, you find the prize.

Now, do you think it makes sense to keep opening doors after you found the prize (the only prize that exists) ? Clearly, it's really stupid to do so, you know beforehand that all the remaining doors don't contain anything. It's also clear that, before you found the prize, it was necessary to keep checking doors, and unless you exhaust all the doors, you can't say there is no prize.

Similarly, a person checks religious claims then finds some compelling claim that provides good reasons for its validity, they go for this claim and embrace religion x. Well, that's it. Religion x tells him all other religions are factually wrong. He found the prize, no need to check the remaining doors. He can be wrong, of course, but until he's presented with a very good reason to doubt the validity of x, he doesn't need to check other religions, that would clearly be meaningless.

[zwanzig]

I don't mean to derail but this

And this is also true about other founders of religious movements. It's difficult for me to say that Joseph Smith, for example, was a full-blown manipulator. But his production (the Book of Mormon) seems to be plagiarized from the OT/NT, it could be that Joseph Smith was so well acquainted with the Bible that his religious experience(his subconscious at work) was more or less some fresh and passionate way to present christianity, but no genuinely new material.

Is not the truth. It's difficult for you to say it because you don't know what you're talking about.

Joseph Smith was a conman who came from a family of con artists. Before he was a "prophet" he was using the seer stone(the very same he supposedly used to translate the BoM) to scry for buried treasure in the countryside of New York and New Jersey. The scam goes like so: you find some land and the mark that owns it. Then you place something there beforehand, like a feather or a piece of metal, underground a little ways. Then you convince your mark that you saw some treasure protected by spirits on his property. You get some sort of deposit or payment beforehand and then set up a time and place to find the treasure. You gotta kill a goat on the spot, shedding its blood, to bind the spirit(theatrics). Then while the seer keeps an eye on the treasure underground, the mark and whatever men you've hired to dig, start to dig. They find something! A feather! Or a chunk of metal! Hoo-boy! We're cookin' now! Gonna get tha treasure! Keep digging. Then, oh no! What's this? The seer says something has gone wrong. The guardian spirit that is protecting the treasure has broken free of its binding somehow! And now it is sinking through the earth with the treasure! Oh, gosh darn! that treasure sure is slippery.

It's called money digging and Joseph Smith was arrested and taken to court three times for doing it. And he was known as a storyteller as a young boy, regaling his family with tales around the fire at night. The Book of Mormon was not just plagiarized from the Bible but several books made and popular around that time, including a children's history book of the war for independence in New York and View of the Hebrews, which also told stories of ancient Israelites traveling by sea to the Americas, eventually becoming the Natives that colonists found here when they arrived. And guess how polygamy among the Mormons started? Joseph was caught screwing the 16 year old nanny, Fanny Alger, and told his wife, "No, god wanted me to do this. It's uh....revelation! Surprise! I'm bringing polygamy back!"

So, don't kid yourself that he was "inspired" or spread misinformation about the nature of where the Book of Mormon came from. It was a scam run by the Smith family from the beginning attempting to accrue wealth without doing labor or working the land to get it(Joseph Smith Sr. was a failed farmer).

[The Grand Nudger]

 He can be wrong, of course, but until he's presented with a very good reason to doubt the validity of x, he doesn't need to check other religions, that would clearly be meaningless.

As meaningless as you presenting pascals wager, apparently.  If you don't need to check other religions, I don't need to check them either.

In the end, it's just an exercise in whether or not you can manage to think clearly - since neither of us is in any danger of hell.

[R00tKiT]

Oh boy... You really are hung up on certain ideas that have been sold to you.

An Experience that would come from God would be external to the person, to the person's mind and hence would be registered as any other external stimuli.
A delusion, hallucination, vivid dream or equivalent would necessarily come from within the person's own mind.
That's the meaning of "altered state" being used here. But you seem to be deliberately missing that notion for some god brownie points or something...

Well.. so what? By brain state, I mean any state a human brain can have, whether there is some external stimuli or not. And, to use your definition of delusion above, Muhammad definitely didn't have a delusion. It would really be a very severe mental illness if what he perceived as the angel Gabriel -following him and almost forcing him to recite the Qur'an for 23 years- was a pure product of his own mind, this is simply inconsistent with his career as a social reformer and military leader. 

Someone who experiences a debilitating mental illness generating all kinds of supernatural entities (jinns, angels, heaven and hell, etc.) just can't do what Muhammad did, it doesn't add up.

That is true. That's why I don't even try, I wave it away.
But what would we nowadays say of someone claiming what he claimed? What would we say of someone like Moses?

Why should it matter how we would react if Moses came in our time? We already know people killed many prophets and prosecuted them. We also know they were accused of being insane, including the prophet of Islam. Why should any of that matter? 

If we were to accept the religios narrative, Moses didn't just claim he is a messenger, he also performed a miracle, many people continue to reject his message despite witnessing the miracle. Muhammad came in a time where Classical Arabic was at its peak, his miracle was adapted to this context: the Qur'an as an unsurpassably great example of Arabic literature,

Muhammad even challenged them to come up with something alike or better -this kind of challenge was very common among poets in his time-, the Qur'an is still regarded to this time as the finest piece of literature in classical arabic, add that to the fact that he was reportedly illiterate and had a very tough childhood -there is no way he received advanced training in Arabic literature or religious studies at an early age, his biography is well-known.

Then how do you propose one discerns natural events from divine ones?
Is it "Mister so-and-so said so"?
Remember that, in navigating this world, we must be aware that many "misters so-and-so" are lying, and many are mistakenly certain of what they claim. We can't just accept any claim from anyone, regardless of how charismatic that person may be.

As I said above, prophets did more than just claim. In the case of Islam, one should evaluate whether the Qur'an could've been made up from the knowledge within local environment. This is a vast subject, but we know, for example, that many verses in the Qur'an mention natural phenomena in a way that seems to agree with modern science, this is clearly an unnecessary risk taken by Muhammad. In the case of the claim of divinity by the Pharaoh, imagine if it turned out -after we managed to decipher hieroglyphics - that the pharaoh of the Exodus worshipped some pagan deity..! That would clearly undermine many verses in the Qur'an.

You say, how should one discern natural events from divine ones. The assumption of the existence of God is very helpful here, again. A message from God should obviously be clear and unequivocal. Something like Buddhism clearly doesn't satisfy this criterion, we just see that Buddhism is a mix of ancient myths of philosophies. Islam, for example, has very simple articles of faith, and one requirement: to believe there is one god and that Muhammad is a messenger, that's it. All the rest is details that one learns along the way, the message is clear and uncompromising.

To put it in another way, Islam is the kind of message you would expect a God who cares about clarity would communicate to us. There really is nothing complicated about monotheism or following the sayings of some prophet, people are wired to follow their instructors, their parents, etc. A prophet is simply a spiritual instructor, nothing more.

I said before that these things aren't the product of one person alone, but I believe I failed to properly convey my idea.
These things, such as Islam, arise because there is a following, a bunch of people who follow those ideas that, in the case of Islam, were allegedly spoken by Mo himself and Mo alone. Same concept as the disciples of Christ, same with the disciples of Socrates, etc.
Of course they come from a cultural position where the ideas were already accepted by that group and, probably, by the majority of the people in the region.
It would be easy to compile a group of things that these people already agreed with and would wish to see spread all over the land, whether or not they were spoken by a particular man is irrelevant. It is a given that this leader would be in agreement (at least the rest of them would think so).

This is definitely true for most religious movements. But why should this undermine the message, or explain away divine revelation...? Okay, let's admit Muhammad needed disciples to spread the message, and had a favorable environment to form the world religion of Islam, so what..? Why is this a threat to the divinity of his message?

Again, you seem to assume that a divine message must somehow spread magically, or that people should magically accept it without ever being able to second-guess it or doubt it.....? And let's not forget what all this does to their free will.

No, size is not very relevant. But it does speak as to the creator's priorities.
If the purpose is to have this planet be somehow important, then why bother with the rest?
All the stars we see in the night sky are from our galaxy, heck, they are from our corner of the galaxy. Why bother with creating a Universe with as many galaxies as we have stars in this galaxy alone if it's only for the benefit of humanity?
For us to wonder and marvel at the extreme power required? That would not have been an issue 14 centuries ago.
It makes more sense to think that we are not special, even if there is a creator god.

If size isn't relevant, you won't get very far arguing from the vastness of the universe. This is clearly an argument from ignorance. Additionnaly, God has infinite resources. He could create billions of galaxies as big as the universe surrounding some selected species, where is the problem?
Also, the Earth was more than enough for people to thrive (climate change and other similar issues notwithstanding) why would they need the entire galaxy at their service? Why is it important that every atom of matter should directly serve their needs or be a resource?

And one more thing, I assume you are familiar with fine-tuning arguments. All of them posit that the universe really had us in mind, it's true that we adapted to the universe to exist and survive, but this still required life-permitting conditions that are linked to the laws of physics that govern the entire universe.

You think?
I believe you missed my argument where the fact that there are multiple religions, multiple prophets, heck, the fact that such a thing as a prophet is how the divine creator decided to communicate with humanity is the clue to the non-benevolence of this creator entity. It's a clue when you combine it with the obvious result in human history.

I'm not saying there was any mangling by the supposed recipient of the message, it's what comes after, the interpretations.
If the message was so perfectly preserved, how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims? The message got mangled and these two factions appeared and have most certainly generated suffering simply due to that.
You may dismiss this as "free will", but I submit that the benevolent creator would, in its infinite wisdom, account for that and proceed accordingly.

I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one... certainly not the most benevolent one.
I present a simple, yet, in my opinion, far better way to pass on the message: communicate with every intelligent being on the planet (and other planets with intelligent life in the Universe).

At this stage, all theists I've discussed with will point out again "free will". My solution inhibits it by having god present itself to everyone, thus excluding any possibility for the individual to reject belief.
As someone who posits no value on belief, I don't see a problem in this.
I can't say for sure, but I'd guess that a creator entity who desires humanity to behave in a certain way, within its characteristic free will, would not care whether those humans believe it to exist or not, but would care about passing on a message in a way that all (or most, not to exclude people with actual mental disorders) would acknowledge and accept. Clearly, if we accept that communication was achieved for a few prophets, the creator entity can do it for anyone... unless there is some limitation from its side.

You say, "how come you now have Shia and Sunni Muslims?" . I can simply respond: how come you have a flat earth society? how come you have people who deny the holocaust? how come you have people who think 9/11 is an inside job?

People can deny anything, even the clearest facts, let alone a politically charged subject like who is the successor of Muhammad. You seem to understimate what people can with their free will. Shia Islam (except a minority) doesn't disagree with Sunnism on major articles of faith like monotheism or Muhammad's prophethood.

You say, "I cannot accept that the way things are is the best possible one". Well, that's simply another instance of incredulity. Religious narratives answer a great many of you questions, God and his messengers did show people miracles and many still rejected their message. It's not clear at all that it would be better (while preserving free will), if God showed everyone some miracle or communicated some message.  We know there are people who rejected Jesus despite being able to reanimate the dead.

And to give you a more "secular" example, smoking is universally known to be bad. Medicine "communicated" the clear message that people should avoid smoking cigarettes, it's the most stupid thing one can do to their health, and guess what? People still smoke, they are proud to show it off.