sourdough

S-Mother T wasn't so goody-good as they make her,
after collecting millions of $$ FOR the church and herself,she didnt give the poor starving sick people more than a bowl of soup a day if that so spare us the saintly preaching.
see www.secularhumanism.org. click on dangerous reading for details on MT from one of her nuns who worked for her.

Magus55

Fair enough, i don't believe in your god or some of your views. I believe in the God of the Bible so obviously we aren't gonna agree on some points. God didn't create evil in the sense that he created pain and suffering and hate etc. for the heck of it. He only created the possibility of it by allowing free will. We actually created evil by disobedience.

However, i do agree with you that God isn't subject to our basis of morality. He created the universe and what he does is perfectly righteous by his own nature and perfection.

sourdough

so when He drowned all the living things,including the innocent children in the Great flood that was from the goodness of His heart,right?
and every time some tornado,flood,earthquake i.e an ACT OF GOD happens and kills however many of HIS children its just Him working in his mysterious ways?
get real!
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www.thewaronfaith.com

rubbercok3000

Hey Soma you ever try Amanita Muscaria????????

Magus55

So its more cruel to you for God to kill the children and bring them to Heaven while they aren't accountable, then to let them live their full life, grow up, reject him and end up in Hell? The soul and eternity are more important to God than an eye blink of time on Earth, especially when he knew the children would grow into their own destruction due to the disgusting, sinful times they lived in.

Natural disasters aren't necessarily acts of God, he can use them to bring about good but he doesn't sit in Heaven finding the best site to release a tornado in order to kill people. Sin turned the world corrupt, the world is a self replicating plague. The earth is violent and unpredictable because of it. Tornadoes, floods, and earthquakes didn't exist in the Garden of Eden.

xsquid

Oh, I see...you mean "might is right". Why didn't you just say so?

HRG

No, he can't, just as he cannot create square circles. "Objective" = "not dependent on a specific entity". Any moral system that God postulates (a moral system is not a thing which can be created) is subjective - for that very reason that a specific entity postulated it.
By definition he can't. Any such morality will be subjective to God.
Morality and power are uncorrelated, else Stalin would have been an important source of morality.

HRG.

Psycho Economist

I call bullshit on:Because you said this in response to me:(emphasis added)

First, in contradiction to what you said later, your notion that your deity can change reality such that the universe synchs with his opinion is an "ability to subject us to what he decrees".

Secondly, judgments are inherantly subjective statements. Subjective statements cannot be factual in themselves. So your god's subjective judgments are opinions too... assuming (and you haven't given us reason to accept this assumption) that such a deity exists. And to say that your deity can go about changing the universe such that right and wrong correspond with his opinions is even more preposterous. We'll talk about your deity changing the basics of the universe when he makes it plainly obvious to all that he exists, and that 2+2 now equals 5.

A *truly* *objective* morality would exist en toto regardless of your deity's opinions. Would be binding on your god. Saying that right and wrong are whatever please your imaginary friend is to say that right and wrong are subjective and arbitrary distinctions. To an atheist, they may still be subjective, but they're not necessarily arbitrary.

the_cave

Mageth--just to answer your question, I don't think that most Christian churches have any "doctrinal" answer to that. Magus55 has espoused one alternative--in heaven, souls would be free to choose evil, but never would. I suppose there could be other alternatives, though this one seems at least consistent to me. Again, believers aren't required to have a position on it.

However, I'll admit there is at least one problem with this formulation. Presumably if there's freedom in heaven, there's at least as much as there was for humankind, and Lucifer, et al. So why did they sin, but believers in heaven won't? Why wouldn't god just create a world like the one that will exist in heaven to begin with? This problem leads many to suppose that in fact there is no longer any freedom in heaven; but then this in turn creates a world where there is no freedom at all--which is supposedly just the kind of thing god wouldn't do (since he gave us freedom presumably for a good reason!)

I think the way out of this would be to view both heaven and the universe as a single system; having freely chosen in this world, believers have used their good freedom to in fact dispose of itself, by choosing to live well, becoming united with the divine in the process. This is kind of how freedom works in the world anyway--when we make a choice, say, in something important, like choosing to love someone, we're not supposed to go back on it. But it wouldn't be worth much if we hadn't made that original choice freely. So, there might be less freedom in heaven--but that's acceptible, because of the freedom that exists in the world preceding heaven. That's how I would approach it, anyway.

sourdough

thats exactly the reason I hate religion/god worshipers;you DONT think about difference between right and wrong!
if your preachers tell you that god told them to kill/burn some witches,or blow up an abortion providing doctors,your regular braindead religious nutcase will blindly follow/do EVIL while thinking its good b/c god says so.
religions dont care for others who dont share their particular brand of worship,therefore:
believe in Gods must DIE before there will be peace on Earth.