God is Great, humanity is evil!

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Imagine YOU are God, and you want to love humanity by giving it liberty and the belief in God,
how would you approach this, without destroying one or the other?

I mean, if you give people the chance of believing in an omnipotent loving and caring being, you must
destroy its free will, and give EVERYBODY the belief in you, wether or not they want it.

This also includes miracles. If you, as God, perform miracles amongst the humans, visible for everybody to see, right here and right now,
just like gravity, by simply calling God for a miracle to happen wenever you want it, just like proving Gravity by throwing something out
of the window, you will inevitably end up making everybody believe in you, wether they want to or not. Thus you destroy free will.

I think God is good, but he doesn't intervene in our world, which is ultimately created by evil human beings!

I am an agnostic. However, for the sake of argument I will provisionally accept your propositions as true. Perhaps believing in God destroys our free will. If I do something out of a belief in reward and punishment, a free will decision in favor of doing good evaporates. For example, even Hitler would do good ( reluctantly) . He was smart and evil. However, even he would do good if he knew that he would go to hell for doing evil and heaven for doing good. However, he would still be evil.
I have never understood "faith". It destroys are capacity for doing good for altruistic reasons. Suppose, I am a child and have a brother. Our father is gone and we live alone. However, my brother believes that our dad lives in the attic (locked) and never makes a sound. Everyday, robbers break in, beat us up and steal our stuff. After 10 years, dad comes out of the attic and says to me, "You are both good people. But you did not believe that I existed. I will banish thee to everlasting punishment but your brother will have everlasting joy!" That seems like an evil father!
In short only atheists can do good for good reasons! Even if God does exist!

Just look around, creation is evil. The Demiurge is a rough, vicious place full of suffering and sorrow. The will to life is strong and violent. In order to live another must die. This is the law of the jungle. You must eat and that means consuming something. This in itself is an evil act it involves death even if that death is just a plant. Still you must kill it to consume it.
This is the fundamental great tragedy of life that everyone must face and grapple with. It casts a sorrowful shadow on our existence since we must look around and notice these things everyday with a keen conscience.
Our will is somewhat free but none of us can escape death, ultimately. This is a realization not without pain.
God, in many ways, confronts these dilemmas head on.

Belief in any gods is not necessary to lead a compassionate life; showing kindness to other human beings and animals. If anything organised religions and their associated dogmas tend to promote an institutional hatred or contempt for various groups of people i.e. those with other beliefs or those who are gay or female or contempt towards various animals.

I believe that this hatred towards innocent people is not caused by religion. Rather, it is religion or God's sayings that were changed to fit human needs for cruelty.
Humans changed the sayings of God, to fit its own purpose.

With a 110 % certainty, even if BBC and CNN and various other large television stations, radio companies and billions of humans literally heard and saw God speaking to them,
telling them to be kind to each other and don't do cruel things, they would deliberately change the words so it says:

"And God said to us: Be NOT kind to each other, and please do cruel things!"

Humans have a built-in evilness mechanism, that causes them to do evil stuff.

Last edited by thinkinginpictures on 26 Apr 2014, 11:20 am, edited 1 time in total.

I agree humans will twist things and in gnostic tradition, this is simply part of life in an imperfect world; the Demiurge. Beings like Jesus Christ were divine emissaries sent to guide others through this rough world, not to divide them, that's more like what the Demiurge does.
Christos is part of the divine, supreme light, a sparkling sliver of the Pleroma.

Not NECESSARILY. Throwing something out a window, for instance, doesn't prove gravity nor gravitation. There could be some other force involved that pulls things back down to earth. A low-mass object with a magnetic force could attract other objects in a similar kind of way, so it could be that gravity is just some as-yet undiscovered form of magnetic force rather than a product of mass.

Now, sure, we could test that determine whether gravity really exists, we could define what gravity is, we can even come up with some good theories about gravitation that would establish gravity well within the realm of fact.

However, even if you do that, which I'm sure has been thoroughly done, you CANNOT compel mankind to believe it.

That's the thing with God. If you follow the Bible, then God HAS directly influenced physical events and manifested himself in ways one would think would be undeniable.

IF it is possible to create the human mind in such a way that it can be confronted with absolute truth and STILL somehow manage to deny or disbelieve it, then you STILL have free will to believe or not believe in God even if you met him face-to-face. Paul, for instance, could have dismissed his Damascus road experience as a minor stroke, a seizure, or a hallucination, an temporary momentary episode of delusion or delirium. It's been known to happen. Paul probably already believed in demons and demon possession, so he might have attributed his experience to a demonic force to aid deranged Christians, who would obviously be under some demonic influence themselves (Jews had already accused Jesus of being in league with Satan for His miraculous powers, and the disciples were already performing miracles themselves). Paul CHOSE to believe that his vision was from God and accepted what God told him to do. Paul was never compelled either way.

In short, I think God created us with the ability to doubt, even if appearances seem "undeniable." It is up to us whether we accept our experiences with God as such.

"omnipotent loving and caring being." How loving and caring can an omnipotent being be which threatens to punish human beings to an eternity of suffering merely for not accepting the existence of said "loving and caring" being? And please spare me your biblical and ministerial explanations, excuses and justifications for that one contradiction, let alone the 23,000 other contradictions and hypocritical writings in the Bible. If you want to believe that, good on you. Don't try to rationalize the irrational to others. Again, you seem to be seeking acceptance or confirmation for what you are uncertain of rather than convince others that what you believe is factual.

Who says I believe in the Bible? I don't believe in the Bible.

The Bible is man-made to reflect mankind's sociopathic instincts.
That is why the God of the Bible is so cruel and contradictory.
It is because the God of the Bible is nothing, but explaining how humans are.

Sounds too much like either Christian Gnosticism or Christian Protestantism - both seem to make materiality and humanity an incredibly, incredibly negative thing.

Do you take the notion that God created everything 'Ex Nihilo'? I think that tends to be where mainstream Christianity and Judaism get things bent out of shape - ie. if matter came out of God, matter was his/her/its mind stuff and idea prior to such words - thus creation of matter 'Ex Nihilo' is a bit non-sequitur. The big bang makes eternal nature of matter as separate from God for God as demiurge to have drafted from eternal 'stuff' other than him/her/itself seem a bit loopy which leaves, IMHO, the best option - emanationism.

Wouldn't a being like God, or God as the entire universe, be above petty things like 'good' and 'evil'? I think it's mainly a human distinction, coming from a dualistic background. (manicheism, monotheism etc)

I mean, let's take a look at humanity. Who is evil? Are sociopaths evil? I'd say no. Not for merely being a sociopath. Are selfish people evil? Probably not, it's just that we find the idea unnerving that someone might not be interested in seeming like a 'good' person or might have a different set of morals. Of course people can do horrible things.

But you see, we're all bent on our own survival and well-being, our own interests. If we/you're lucky we also care for our fellow beings. Sure. But when are we evil? Is it the crime of only caring for yourself? Ruining other people's lives? Nobody exists as an evil being. It's not like we wake up and say ''gnagna.... I'm gonna be SO EVIL today!'' If I was to put a name to it, we're stupid, selfish, immature, gullible, violent, etc. But the ''humanity is evil''-thing is imo way too simplistic to even come close to being an accurate description of reality here on earth.

And I don't see anyway why God would be either good or bad (if existent). He/she/it leaves us no proof of good intent. If we were to thank or admire anything, it would be humankind itself, and/or nature and the animals that provide us with everything.

YourMajesty - that's precisely what I see in human behavior. I figure if there was organized evil such as a satanic hierarchy as some dualistic views suggest we'd see such a thing and it would revolve around things that would stick out as being of a different schematic. Similarly most of us are as good or otherwise as our ontology and outlooks on lives allow us to be in our given circumstances. Sociopaths, thieves, and truly violent people seem to be where error coagulates enough to derange any sense of decency out of the picture.