Is God a mass murderer?

[afleitch]

Crypto-Marcionite talking points aside, I think it might be misleading to treat this separately from the question of natural evil.

Not if the concept of 'natural evil' from a theological perspective  was in part postulated in order to give a justification or at least a framework for god ordained biblical atrocities.

'Natural evil' is not a concept a non believer would need to grapple with as he has no reason to judge naturally occurring atrocities in moral terms.

So I think it should be treated separately from that branch of apologist theology.

[afleitch]

Assuming one believes in the concept of spiritual immortality, be it of the reincarnation or afterlife variety, then termination of corporeal existence is not the same as the termination of existence. And since if you don't believe in that concept, you also likely don't believe the historicity of the accounts in the first seven books of the Bible, then what deaths are you actually charging God with?

I'm making an assumption for the purpose of this exercise that these things happened. You know Ernest, that thing people do sometimes to engage in discussions. A bit of 'let's pretend'

[afleitch]

Crypto-Marcionite talking points aside, I think it might be misleading to treat this separately from the question of natural evil.

Not if the concept of 'natural evil' from a theological perspective  was in part postulated in order to give a justification or at least a framework for god ordained biblical atrocities.

'Natural evil' is not a concept a non believer would need to grapple with as he has no reason to judge naturally occurring atrocities in moral terms.

So I think it should be treated separately from that branch of apologist theology.

The idea that 'natural evil' is a concept that only 'apologist theology' would want to deal with isn't one I've encountered before. One needn't be interested in 'apologist theology' or even religious to have a desire to account for a morally significant universe.

Even if it is only relevant to 'apologist theology', I don't really understand why you think that that makes it irrelevant here. Obviously it would be irrelevant to your interested, but the OP was asking all of us, and the question posed presupposes (even if only for purposes of argument) that God exists, so for those of us who do believe in God it falls into the same category of 'questions that require God's existence in order to be interesting' that you think the question of natural evil does.

Put another way, 'if God did exist, would he be a mass murderer?' is the sort of question that can be--you'll probably disagree that it should be, but it can be--answered in the same sorts of ways as 'if God did exist, whence ebola and hurricanes?'.

That's not quite what I was saying. 'Natural Evil' is the apologists answer to gods less than pleasant actions, or inaction but this 'answer' (categorising natural phenomenon as moralistic in their impact) is in itself a 'cause' (and in a round about way can be used to absolve god of responsibility)

For example, why consider a drought to be a moral action? It's amoral. It's just a drought. It's impact on us, we consider a moral action because it impacts us. To consider these phenomena to be a 'natural evil' assumes that we are the arbiters of morality and that goodness and badness in things and acts are measured by their positive or negative impact on us. But the Christian position is one in which we are not the arbiters of morality. God is. Things that we enjoy and that independently we might consider 'good' might still be immoral because god is the arbiter of that. So our opinion on 'natural evil' is moot, because it's not up to us.

(Slight segway into something I posted a few months ago: Sin by it’s definition is an action against god; a sin need have no grounding in whether that action is right or wrong. If things are ‘good’ because god says that they are good, or because they line up with his will, then morals are arbitrary and subjective. Because good is what god says it is, then it robs ‘good’ from its definition. ‘Good’ is simply what something powerful mandates. If god mandates it, then ‘good’ means nothing. Saying ‘god is good’ is simply saying he is god. It says nothing meaningful about his actions because god would be ‘good’ no matter what he does.)

So strictly speaking making the assumption that because floods and storms and droughts and plagues harm me that it is a matter for universal ethics is very human centric. It's not really important to anyone who doesn't think that what happens to us is a matter for the universe to answer to.

Is it not therefore possible to construct an answer to this question without making the assumption that natural acts have any intrinsic value at all?

[afleitch]

Hell isn't discussed at any great length in the Old Testament.

Why would it be? They have no concept of it. They knew (before the advance of Hellenistic Judaism advanced greek notions of Hades which is a side topic in itself) that sheol was a repose for all souls, held accountable for a finite time period because god's justice would not be served by eternal suffering. However if you're both talking about god, then the Christian concept of hell and how Christianity stumbled on that (as it did with almost every other key parts of the faith) in the centuries after Jesus' death is important. You can't just hive it off as someone else theological problem.

[afleitch]

Omnipotence is not the ability to do any action, it is the ability to do any possible action. Big Brother might be able to make 2+2=5; God cannot. To cure original sin with a wave of Her starry hands, God would have to also eradicate human free will. For original sin is only partially based on the inevitable commission of evil by humans. Its primary basis is our conceit that our inevitable evil makes us so unlovable by God that He cannot love us.  But God in Their perfection are love and accept us for who we are, so long as we do our best to avoid and mitigate our evil by following the Way that They have shown us. If God were to deny us the ability to engage in self-hate, then It would be destroying our free will. Lastly, for God to make possible for us to not commit evil, then Ey would have to remove our lack of omniscience, for only the omniscient can possibly see what actions are best, and then we would no longer be human.

(Yes, the varying pronouns was deliberate.)

On the pronoun thing, despite being confusing, whatever you think god is, the Christian god presented itself as male. Twice. It ‘seeded’ a woman (a ‘male’ act) and was born as a man. Even if it had to do the first of these in order to manifest itself, it didn’t have to engender as a male by birth. Dworkin hits the nail on the head here; insemination as an act is an act of greater maleness than committing a mere sexual act because it redeems a man from the ‘gender ambiguity of any sex act he might commit for his own pleasure.’ Which is why god doesn’t do what other ancient gods do and commit the deed himself. Inseminating Mary is evidently more ‘male’ than actually being born in a male form. God did both of these things.

That aside, why do you keep talking about ‘free will’? It’s as much of theological invention as ‘natural evil.’ As I said to Madeline earlier on, you can’t get round theological problems by inventing a theological framework (in saying that nature can be moral and people have free will) by which to then excuse the original theological problem.

‘Free will’ was advanced forward in order to try and explain away the inconvenient paradoxes within a theistic universe. If humans can voluntarily choose to be evil (which makes us worse than god because he isn’t) because we have such a thing as a ‘free will’, then it no longer becomes a problem with god but with mankind.  The problem is that free will doesn’t make sense.

You can theorise a soul as a sort of spiritual facsimile of your conscious being that isn’t subject to entropic demise, however the fleshy bit of you; the body and the brain and the resulting consciousness are subject to causality. No human being has exactly the same cognitive and physical abilities as the next person and they partially determine the course of action that you take and the decisions that you make. Therefore no human is ‘fully informed’ of all choices that are available. You are afforded the choices that evolution has granted you and what causality has determined. There is a chunk of the human experience that as someone with very mild Aspergers is forever just out of reach. Given that spiritually speaking, that may result in me by default making a ‘sinful’ decision that someone else may exercise their volition and avoid then one would hope that wouldn’t be held against me.

But it would be held against me, if you keep advancing the idea of ‘free will’; it’s why so many countless people have been told when facing an experience that to them makes perfect complete and utter sense but runs contrary to doctrine that you’re just not ‘trying hard enough’ to see things the way they ought to be.  Even if you were to assume that the soul was the ‘fully informed’ part of you then it can be easily inferred from the actions that people take, that this soul is incapable of informing the rest of you, because you’re still making ‘mistakes’ as your cognitive abilities are still subject to your consciousness which is still rooted in the physical.

If the concept of a genuinely free will isn’t compatible with a materialistic view of the universe, even if you subscribe to a spiritual/metaphysical view of the universe (where there is a soul), there isn’t any evidence that this soul is informing you in addition to or in place of your consciousness.

If the soul was truly ‘free’ from that ( yet still somehow ‘you’), it would allow you to experience cognitive processes that you would not otherwise be able to experience due to your physical limitations. If it was making its presence known then it should, at least occasionally be able to ‘burst out’ of your physical and cognitive confines rather than hide behind it. Yet this doesn’t happen. If the soul is acting behind the scenes, then it’s following exactly the same processes as your body and isn’t guiding you any more or any less than your consciousness is in making moral choices.

So how can you say that a soul exists independently or even co-dependently of your consciousness? How can you say that it exists at all? But it has to exist in order for ‘free will’ to exist in turn in order to help excuse god’s theodicy. So much has to be constructed in order to excuse the acts of god that manifest themselves in the Bible.