Yahweh and Allah. Are they moral and ethical Gods?

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Yahweh and Allah. Are they moral and ethical Gods?

Some say we cannot say or know, because it is all myth.

http://bigthink.com/videos/what-is-god-2-2

I think they are wrong as men can judge actions.

I think we can at least know if Yahweh and Allah, and the religions they spawned, are good or evil.

Since God is a Man interpreting God’s words, believers all following a Man.

We invent our Gods and put them above us. But ultimately get all we know of God, and his morality from others around us. Priests and imams interpret and are the spokes in the religious communication network. Those priests and imams are teaching violence against their neighbor instead of love. I do not see that as ethical behavior for any moral religion.

From what you know of Yahweh and Allah, and the religions they have spawned, would you say that those two War loving Gods, as we also love it in their image, good Gods, or would you say they are something else?

Regards
DL

God is Good.
Good and Holy as used to talk about Yaweh is much much more than the human mind can comprehend.

If you haven't done it lately read all 66 books. Much better than the movies or T. V. showings.

Love and prayers for those that are into this kind of thing.



Shalom,
Zvi
"Reader and Righter"

Nope. For proof that they're not, just read the bible. Also, Yahweh and Allah are actually the same God. At least according to Muslims, Allah is just a different name for Yahweh.

By definition, all gods are typically perceived as morally perfect as judged by the culture that believes in them. Most are therefore morally bad to some degree as judged by other cultures.
Ethics are far more objective: To be purely ethical, a god would have to do no harm to anyone. People can argue over the details of the local definition of "harm", but there is much that is universal and agreed upon.

You have to distinguish between the Real God and the cartoon God the priests, imams, preachers, rabbis present to us and say it is God. The Real God probably has no interest in humans. We are a statistically improbable side effect of genetic variation and natural selection. See what Epicurus has to say about the matter.

The do no harm would necessitate a completely 'hands off' approach.

This would, if an agreed upon definition, would negate the argument of "Why does God allow bad things to happen."

And therein lies the rub - if the 'hands off' approach is taken a perfectly ethical god *must* create at the onset a universe in which no harm is done.

This is why the Church was pretty much forced to go with the "Free Will" approach starting in the Middle Ages / Aquinas era, but it is only a sidestep, a distraction. The question of the ethical nature of the god still remains.

I gotta think about that one. It's late and I'm not fully following it....

Love?

You have a strange view of love.

Have you not read where Yahweh seems to like to punish the innocent instead of the guilty?

Even innocent babies and children are not immune to his murdering love.

I am willing to debate against God as a moral entity. Are you ready to argue for it?

Just in case you are, please let me take the first hit.

This is for Yahweh.

https://vimeo.com/7038401

This one for Jesus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUfGRN4HVrQ

Regards
DL

Basically correct although Allah makes promises that Yahweh never did.

In terms of heaven, I will take the Muslim fantasy over the Christian fantasy.

Regards
DL

I do not think I can agree with your point. ---

"To be purely ethical, a god would have to do no harm to anyone."

I know some judges whom I would call moral as well as ethical and they have definitely done harm to criminals that they have had to punish and do harm too, from the prisoners POV.

From our side, we just call it justice.

Regards
DL

I have no argument here.

I just wanted to show how I reply to Christians who try that B.S. free will gambit.
I hope you agree with the logic trail.

Christians are always trying to absolve God of moral culpability in the fall by whipping out their favorite "free will!", or “ it’s all man’s fault”.

That is "God gave us free will and it was our free willed choices that caused our fall. Hence God is not blameworthy."

But this simply avoids God's culpability as the author of Human Nature. Free will is only the ability to choose. It is not an explanation why anyone would want to choose "A" or "B" (bad or good action). An explanation for why Eve would even have the nature of "being vulnerable to being easily swayed by a serpent" and "desiring to eat a forbidden fruit" must lie in the nature God gave Eve in the first place. Hence God is culpable for deliberately making humans with a nature-inclined-to-fall, and "free will" means nothing as a response to this problem.

If all sin by nature then, the sin nature is dominant. If not, we would have at least some who would not sin. That being the case, for God to punish us for following the instincts and natures he put in us would be quite wrong.

Regards
DL

No. If they existed, I would think that they were immature, judgmental @ssholes. I know of human beings who would make better gods. All I had to do was read bible stories as a kid to realize that God is a jerk.

GnosticBishop: Quoting from a thread I began called Reconciling Advanced God with Primitive Religion:

I have thought deeply about all aspects of religion as long as I remember having grown up in a fundamentalist church and have to come to the conclusion that it is impossible to try and reconcile an advanced creator who developed an advanced and mathematically sound universe of unimaginable complexity, with the man made idea of a god who demands the sacrifice of blood for sins - whether this blood be from animal or human sacrifice, or that of Jesus. It just doesn't add up and I'm inclined to believe humans, who hail from a primitive background and have had a few thousand years to develop compared with the approximately 600 million years since life began evolving, needed to assuage their feelings of guilt by introducing the notion of sacrifice.

I'd appreciate some thoughts and feedback on this idea. Attending church as a child I recall the minister intoning how "the sacrifice of blood is necessary for forgiveness of sin" but no source was given.

Consider the primitive backgrounds of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and their bloodthirsty histories.

An advanced Creator who has been around for billions of years wouldn't need anything from us. Try reconciling that with the Old Testament and a being who insisted on circumcision of the chosen people and on what types of fibre should be worn. It just doesn't seem to make sense!

Your feedback on this dilemma would be appreciated! Because the descriptions in the OT are anything but advanced.

If you take their depictions in the Torah, New Testament, and Quran as being accurate and literal? Nope. Special kinds of nope. All the nope. There's too much genocide in the Torah, but at least it doesn't include the souls of human beings being thrown into an eternal furnace whose fuel is "stones and people" (in the words of the Quran).

In reality, though, it's fairly obvious that the genocide described never actually happened. A lot of branches of Christianity and Judaism, at least, see hell as something less literal and sometimes as entirely subjective (in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, God treats everyone with the same love, but sin makes you reject that love to the extent that it's painful). So, it gets a little more complicated.

It was good that you could discern morality as a child.

It is unfortunate that religious adults today cannot.

That God damned religious indoctrination and brainwashing should be outlawed because, as you say, it makes for immoral adults and allows for the moral ones to be better than the Gods on offer.

Regards
DL