4“But you must not eat meat that has its lifeblood still in it.5And for your lifeblood I will surely demand an accounting. I will demand an accounting from every animal.* And from each human being, too, I will demand an accounting for the life of another human being.*
6“Whoever sheds human blood,
by humans shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made mankind.
According to scripture animals ARE held accountable for the blood of any human they harm.
But that’s another story.
Sorry CyberLN, but I think your question is faulty. It compares apples to oranges.
God is a moral being and his actions or inaction should be seen in that context.
But do dogs really have any moral sense by which they can choose to allow or prevent harm?
Surely they are reacting on an emotional level, with no clear understanding of the moral issues involved in their actions or inaction?
I can’t see any kind of proper equivalence here - between God and dogs.
Dogs are motivated by trust, mutual safety and survival. It’s humans who drag all of this morality baggage along.
Then we attach it to a supreme being so it doesn’t leave the appearance that we naturally evolved with similar survival methods…or just made the shit up.
My question was intended to demonstrate that actions taken to protect the vulnerable (or inaction to protect self) is rooted in instinct whether human or canine. I don’t think morality has much to do with it.
Thing is god isnt just some detached observer coming upon a situation he didnt expect, or even a father figure or guardian who somehow has no power over or knowlege of the circumstances leading up to that point. He is the creator of all of existance, not just Adam and Eve but the garden, the apple, the tree and the serpent, and is ontop of that is supposedly all knowing.
Your profile says you’re an Atheist. Yet you’re making god claims that this deity exists.
Tell me, did you lie? Because if that is the case, Tao. I will not believe anything further that you post because of your first lie. Trust is earned, not given.
Everyone seems to be talking about the christian one. Given that they are supposedly the all-knowing, all-powerful creator of the universe, its rather difficult to arguee that god is not responsible for everything that happens in it.
To me this would suggest that the term evil is both relative, and subjective. Then again maybe I’m indulging selection bias, so I would value the input of others.
Sorry, I think I was expressing myself badly. I was pointing out that the christian god cant escape moral responsibility for the bad things things that happen in the world. And thus would have a responsibility to intervene to protect people. Which it obviously does not do. Because it doesn’t exist.
How old are they? Might they have done something, for example commit murder or rape, would you be morally obliged to protect them from the consequences?
Morality is ultimately subjective, and relative. Does anyone imagine their notion of evil would be objectively the same as Nazis, the Taliban, ISIS, Stalin, Hitler. Himmler, Trump, an evangelical preacher, even a moderately decent one etc etc..?
Using myself as a starting point to talk about the morality of the Christian God, as described in the Bible. It was largely agreed that if I allowed my young and innocent children to come to harm when I could have protected them, then I bear the responsibility for the harm that befalls them.
Transferring that over to the God of the Bible, he foreknew that Satan would harm his young and innocent children, Adam and Eve, but did nothing to protect them from that agent of harm. Therefore, just as I bore the responsibility for the harm that befell my children, so God bears the responsibility for the harm that befell, not just Adam and Eve, but all of creation.
He is the true and ultimate cause of all death, decay and disease in the world. He is the true and ultimate cause of all pain and suffering in the world, animal and human.
God’s refusal to act like a loving father is especially egregious when the Bible gives three examples of how God could have protected them - by imprisoning the fallen angels in chains of darkness - rather than allowing them a free hand to wreak havoc and cause suffering.
While I agree that morality is subjective, in this case, because I’m playing devil’s advocate, it is not. I’m employing the words of scripture against itself, taking it as read that it is all true and internally consistent - the very stance that many, if not most Christians take. Therefore, if their own holy book clearly shows that God could have protected his vulnerable and defenceless children, but chose not to, what does that say about the morality of God?
This would have been the situation before Satan entered Eden.
Please note the colour scheme. The World is blue, Eden is green and Adam and Eve are white to signify their complete innocence. At that time the knowledge of Good and Evil was confined to only two places - in God and in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Nowhere else.
Which meant that Adam and Eve could not have known or understood what good and evil were. Death has not entered into the world yet. That would only happen after they had made their choice. So God’s warning to Adam, that he would die on the day he ate the forbidden, would have fallen on deaf ears. How could Adam or Eve know what death was?
But the key question is this.
Can anyone make a free and fair choice if they don’t understand what they are deciding between and what the consequences of their choice would be?
Not in my opinion. At least not in any absolute sense.
I have had reason in recent weeks to think about the saying “youth is wasted on the young”. Meaning that you have no context or experience and usually very little sense of the ephemeral, time-limited nature of life, and think there are infinite do-overs and mistakes are of little consequence. In relative terms there’s even some truth to that and one has to be at least free enough ideally to experiment, etc. But the decisions I and others I know well made in that time of life (adolescence, early adulthood) would have been different if we had truly understood the options and tradeoffs and had better knowledge and understanding of ourselves and others and life generally. Some outcomes would have been better (and perversely, the higher stakes would rob that period of life of some of its innocence and purity).
Even if you have relatively good knowledge and understanding of what you’re getting yourself into it’s not perfect and there’s no guarantee you won’t think with later hindsight that you could have made a still better decision. So to expect someone to make a “decision” on pure faith and call that a “free” choice is just beyond the pale as far as I’m concerned.
But the whole point of playing devil’s advocate here is to demonstrate the flaws and contradictions of Christian belief… on their own terms using their own holy book.
So, if we take it all as true, just as they do, even then it doesn’t stand up on its own merits.
Doing that just shows that Adam and Eve couldn’t have a made a free and fair choice in Eden.
It also shows that it was God who made the Fall a certainty, not them and not Satan.
This is why, in the eyes of human law, children under a certain age are deemed to have no ability to properly comprehend the choices they make and no ability to foresee the consequences of their choices. Christians themselves hold to the notion of the Age of Accountability, where very young children are not held accountable for their sins because they lack sufficient maturity and awareness.
But why oh why can’t these same Christians apply that to Adam and Eve?
They were clearly immature and innocent children in the bodies of adults.
They were not culpable for their decisions because they had no concept of good, evil or death.
They didn’t and couldn’t make a free a fair choice because God had made that impossible.
The REAL evildoer and bringer of harm and suffering in Eden wasn’t Satan.
It was God.
He entrapped and set up his own children just so that he could glorify himself as our saviour and then bask in the undying praise, worship and adulation of his gullible followers.
What a self-serving, self-centred, selfish, narcissistic, sadistic bastard!
