4gold wrote:
You ask what areas would be clear to me, but not to an atheist. One example is the moral obligation to love God. What makes me so sure? I believe in God, and the atheist does not. It's not a special revelation I received from God. It's because God exists that such morality exists.
Why should you feel morally obligated to love God?
If you created a sentient android would you demand that it be morally obligated to love you?
I don't know about you but I most certainly wouldn't demand that.
Sure, I might hope that it would love me simply because it views me as something worthy of loving. But I most certainly wouldn't demand that it loves me as a moral criteria.
Moreover if it had questions concerning me and how I came into being I would be more than happy to share that information to the best of my knowledge. I also wouldn't play hide-and-seek with my android or expect it to come searching for me.
If my android had questions about why I created it in the way that I did I would answer them the best I possibly could.
If my android complained about it's own design, I would certainly take that into consideration as well. I wouldn't just tell it to shut up and be grateful that I did the best I could.
In fact, as a designer of a sentient being like this I would feel compelled to answer all it's questions and address all of its complaints to the very best of my ability.
If it still wasn't happy after that I would consider myself to be a failure and not the android.
Also if my android was unhappy for any reason I would strive to the best of my ability to provide it with whatever it might require to make it happy, including providing it with a mate.
After all it would be really cruel of me to design the android to have a great desire for a mate, and then not provide it with a compatible mate.
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The bottom line in all of this is pretty clear to me.
I would treat an sentient lifeform that I might create far better than my creator is treating me.
Moreover, I'm not even sure that I would want to take on the responsibility of even creating a sentient being if I wasn't capable of providing it with all it needs to be happy and answering all it's questions.
So for a God to have created me and then play hide-and-seek expecting me to seek it out when it's the one who is supposedly omniscient and omnipotent is utterly absurd.
What would be the point to that game of hide-and-seek?
The omniscient omnipotent entity is the only one who is in a position to take care of all these things. Therefore the responsibility for clear communication is entirely on the head of the omniscient omnipotent creator.
If I did try to create a sentient android I would no doubt make a mess of things precisely because I'm not omniscient nor omnipotent. Therefore if I created an android and it was extremely unhappy with how I had created it I would feel really bad about having created it. Because it would be entirely my fault.
So if I'm willing to accept full responsibility for anything I might create, then why shouldn't I also expect the very same behavior from any entity that might have created me?
Moreover, since I am clearly willing to take
full responsibility for any sentient being that I might create, then my creator would necessarily be less moral than me if he/she/it doesn't take
full responsibility for having created me.
To pin the blame onto me for anything at all would be an outrageous violation of morality.
If I created a sentient android and it become evil and started killing people I would even need to take the blame for that. I could hardly blame the android if I'm the one who created it.
These Hebrew myths are clearly not very well thought out at all.
Either that or the Hebrews had absolutely no sense of personal responsibility at all. They might have been ignorant and barbaric enough to blame a sentient being that they created if they were capable of creating such a being.
But there's no way that I would be like that.
So clearly I'm infinitely more moral than the Hebrews, and their immoral myths.
And therefore I'm infinitely more moral than their fictitious jealous God as well.
Of course, it's been suggested to me that maybe the Biblical God fully understands all of this and has indeed prepared a place in Seventh Heaven for me precisely because the things I say are truth.
However, for that to be true, then much of what is actually written in the Bible verbatim must necessarily be false.
So that's the oxymoron there.
The Bible can't be true verbatim or the Biblical God would necessarily need to condemn me whether it's the morally correct thing to do or not. So there's extreme contradictions going on with these Hebrew myths when taken verbatim.
And to dismiss them verbatim requires dismissing scripture as being totally false in any verbatim sense.
