If God was the Devil, How Would You Know?

[Purple Knight]

Questions for debate: If the more powerful being were the evil, and the rebel the good, how would you know this? What clues would you look for? Would it even be possible to glean such knowledge in a universe where the evil being is omnipotent and controls all? Is it a nonsense question because a being that was truly all-powerful would have every authority and power to set up the rules for good and evil and simply favour itself?

[brunumb]

If other nations are so evil that they sell own people, I think it is ok, if Jews buy, especially if they obeyed all the rules that were given to them.

No, no, NO! Owning people, regardless of any rules, is morally wrong. People who buy and sell other people are evil. Any deity who does not condemn the practice outright is also evil.

[brunumb]

Again, you twist direct words. Showing love is not the reason. The reason is the homosexual act, which is stupid act.

When was stupidity made a sin? If it is, then many of the acts of your God make him a sinner. People gaining pleasure from homosexual practices would not regard them as stupid. Wearing special undergarments to please God is stupid. Bobbing up and down or waving your arms in the air while muttering incantations to the sky is stupid. All clearly sinful.

[brunumb]

Committing genocide,
Genesis 7:23
In this way God wiped the earth clean—he destroyed every living thing on the earth—every human, every animal, everything that crawls, and every bird. All that was left was Noah and his family and the animals that were with him in the boat.
and all to no avail. What does that tell you?

He did that, because they were evil and violent. I think it is not bad. And because God is the one who has given life, I think He has every right to decide how long life He gives.

So ALL were evil and violent, even the animals? How did societies manage to survive with everyone being evil and violent? How did Noah manage to select the only pair of each animal on the planet that wasn't evil? Such a wilful, violent act causing death and destruction on a worldwide scale is surely as evil as the alleged crimes of the people God killed. Simply creating sentient, feeling human beings does not give a deity the moral right to inflict pain, suffering and death them. A truly intelligent and empathetic being has other options available. A barbaric deity created in the image of primitive human beings behaves the way Yahweh did.

[2ndRateMind]

Questions for debate: If the more powerful being were the evil, and the rebel the good, how would you know this? What clues would you look for?

So, this is actually a rather good question. It's tackled in a book I have, by Stephen Law, called 'Believing Bullshit'. My own feeling, though, is that it is better to have lived and loved, than never to have lived at all. Thus, I am more than prepared to give our creator God the benefit of the doubt.

Best wishes, 2RM

[1213]

...When was stupidity made a sin? ...

Bible tells eternal life is for righteous:

These will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
Mat. 25:46

For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Romans 6:23

Righteousness means wisdom of the just, right understanding that can be seen in the actions of righteous person.

He who does righteousness is righteous, even as he is righteous. He who sins is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning. To this end the Son of God was revealed, that he might destroy the works of the devil. Whoever is born of God doesn't commit sin, because his seed remains in him; and he can't sin, because he is born of God. In this the children of God are revealed, and the children of the devil. Whoever doesn't do righteousness is not of God, neither is he who doesn't love his brother.
1 John 3:7-10

[Purple Knight]

If a type of fruit makes people get sick or die, would it be able to tell healthful fruit from the dangerous? What if the poisonous fruit was called "good" but the healthy fruit was called "poison"?

How Would You Know which is which? By what affect each has respectively

I think this is a great answer because it really addresses the question for the world in which we live. Everyone is perpetually harming everyone else and on every set of lips, the same reason: That other guy is evil.

Are they both evil? Well no, not necessarily. He who poisons the poisoner is good. He who is stopping the evil is good. So who is good? Well, whosoever isn't lying. Max one of these two (though it could be zero).

This is where it gets mucky because each fellow is able to point to something the other did that he calls evil. And ultimately, it will be something about which the good or evil of the act is highly debatable (I mean we do debate it on this forum, we debate it all day long). Is being a Republican evil? A lot of people think so. Arguably non-open borders are evil. I think Jesus would have opposed conservatism on almost every basis.

So the Democrat gets violent and poisons evil. Reference below.



Is this fellow good or evil? Well it depends on whether being a conservative is evil. I don't have the answer to that. My answer to that is that it's debatable, but it shouldn't be. It should be obvious. It should be super-obvious. To everyone. Including me. If I wasn't endowed with enough reason to make that determination, I have every right to blame God if it exists.

Now, I'm a big fan of the old Star Trek (and TNG) and the morality system exemplified within. The takeaway from that moral system was that I can't know, but that the poisoner can't either, so he - the poisoner - is evil. This is the moral system I knew and loved as a teenager, but it fails very badly to only make 1st-order determinations of who is poisoning. Do you catch the inconsistency? We just said the poisoner was evil. Well, the Trump-voter and his actions may be the 1st-order poisoner and thus the nursing home worker is at least as good as we just made ourselves out to be when we made the determination that he was wrong. In making a 1st-order determination, you yourself have assumed a massive knowledge in yourself that the fellow the 1st-order poisoner poisons was not himself a poisoner!

If the more powerful being were evil we would not be able to ask the question.

I dispute that. I just did ask the question and I would in any universe. In any universe with good and evil, any being can say, "This is right" (note: I agree with you about the hypothetical pure evil universe) and I will be there to bloody ask the question of whether it's true or not. Me or someone like me. If God really is good and Lucifer the Light really is evil, it's just a stupid question. If, on the other hand, I'm onto something, I can be stabbing in the dark and still score a hit, and if I have a purpose in my life it's just that: To probe in the dark, and to seek the truth.

We ask because we can observe the existence of good. In an universe dominated by an evil god, why should he allow place for good? Why would such a being permit for a good rival to exist?

To rig the game and crush the good rival.

In a world of nothing but evil there wouldn't be a whole lot of conflict of the sort evil people feed upon. There would be competition, but everything is in-bounds, so whoever wins would just win. There would be no such thing as a low blow. Evil isn't really happy like this. (I say this, yet I consider myself evil and I often think of this as a wonderful world, because I'm permitted to do whatever to defend myself and my loved ones and no one even has the conceptual awareness to pull out the no-you-can't-do-that-it's-morally-wrong.)

There's a sort of evil that feeds on misery. The deepest misery can't happen unless good exists and people are punished for it, made to feel guilty for it, and universally despised for it. I think this is the world evil truly wants.

[Purple Knight]

If other nations are so evil that they sell own people, I think it is ok, if Jews buy, especially if they obeyed all the rules that were given to them.

No, no, NO! Owning people, regardless of any rules, is morally wrong. People who buy and sell other people are evil. Any deity who does not condemn the practice outright is also evil.

Yes, yes, this is absolutely what I was just talking about in my reply to JW!

However, what you're doing is a perfect example of the failure of a 1st-order system I just described. I'm actually taking the side of 1213 here. If X is evil because he does X, then doing X to X to stop the evil must not be evil. I proved this when I examined the case of the Trump-voter-poisoner.

If you make the determination that being a 1st-order poisoner is evil and must be stopped, you at least have to ask whether the person he's poisoning was themself a 1st-order poisoner and got stopped by being poisoned. This is a knockdown against only making 1st-order determinations unless you're a pacifist.

[JehovahsWitness]

We ask because we can observe the existence of good. In an universe dominated by an evil god, why should he allow place for good? Why would such a being permit for a good rival to exist?

To rig the game and crush the good rival.

If "evil" is the complete absence of good, it cannot create good any more than total darkness can create light. If that which is good created itself or is infinite and uncreated it is not inferior to that which is evil. If evil needs good to exist (or be satified) then it is the good not the evil that is superior. Thus an evil god by definition cannot be superior if goodness exists.


JW

[Purple Knight]

If "evil" is the complete absence of good,

I can't think that it is, especially since evil is often designated as doing something immoral. Without at least the knowledge of morality, which is arguably itself good, there could be no evil.

People, I would think, would have to have the capacity for good before they could be evil.

I think (though I could be wrong) that a better example of evil is knowing the right thing and refusing to do it, or doing something you know is wrong.

It depends on how you designate the "pure evil" universe (which I call pure evil, but I don't really know) where people don't even have the conceptual awareness to pull a you-can't-do-that-it's-morally-wrong out of their bums to throw at people. Are people there really evil? Seems they can't be either good or evil. Pre-apple type deal.

If evil needs good to exist (or be satisfied) then it is the good not the evil that is superior. Thus an evil god by definition cannot be superior if goodness exists.

The first bit I agree with. The second bit I don't because of the way in which good is superior. Good could have less power than evil, just as the parasite often succeeds over the non-parasite it parasitises, and for the same reason.

It's ultimately self-destructive, which is why I think societies tend to fall. But that doesn't mean evil can't have most of the power or that it can't be keeping good alive like a society of vampires with the humans enslaved. The humans can be superior in that everyone can be a human (but everyone cannot be a vampire!) but that doesn't mean the vampires can't win.

It absolutely doesn't rule out the idea that Lucifer the Light could be the good guy. Though of course it doesn't prove it either. In fact if this is true, and the more powerful being the evil one, any evidence we could acquire as to the truth of that matter would be pre-tainted by the evil being's all-powerfulness to make it seem false.

[JehovahsWitness]

If "evil" is the complete absence of good,

I can't think that it is, especially since evil is often designated as doing something immoral. Without at least the knowledge of morality, which is arguably itself good, there could be no evil.

So how would you define evil?