There are many things God does not want. Rape, murder, atrocities, and abortion are among them all. Yet there are things which he knows must happen, and so lets them happen for the greater good.

In the end, all things come together for the good of those who love God. That doesn't mean that during someone's life that there won't be pain or even great tragedy.

This seems very strange reasoning to me (though I hear it enough that I know it's not that weird to many people).  I don't think anyone would but the argument if it were made about a person: "I didn't want to rape and kill her, but it was for the greater good."  We'd call that person a psycho and throw them in jail.  But if we asked why God would let such a person do such a thing, people will accept that the pain was "for the greater good."  The odd thing about accepting that, is that it makes the killer/rapist's claim that he was doing it for the greater good defensible.  You've already accepted that the rape/murder was 'for the greater good,' so you can't tell them their reasoning is off if the claim that is their motivation.  If you say "well, you didn't know if it would be for the greater good or not,: they could answer "well, I knew if God let me do it, it must be for the greater good," and their case would be as strong as yours, or at least it seems to me.  The only way to condemn the rapist killer seems to be either to 1) say that it's wrong to commit acts of evil for the greater good, or 2) accept that the rape-murder wasn't for the greater good.  If you take case 1, then that would seem to imply that God is wrong to allow evil to occur 'for the greater good.'  If you take case 2, then you'd have to give up the "it's all part of the plan" thinking (or, I suppose, give up the idea that the plan being only for the "greater good").

Letting something happen is different from planning it, I'd say.  Even just allowing evil is an evil act.

If an omnipotent being doesn't want something, it wouldn't plan for it; if an omniscient being didn't plan for something, then it isn't omniscient.



You wouldn't call me good for allowing a child to be molested by his father, would you?  There is no greater good that could possibly be achieved by such an atrocity, because it cannot be good if the atrocity must be committed to attain that "greater good".



Of course, there's the caveat; so we can infer that God allowed for the rape because the rapist loved god and the rape victim did not?  After all, the evil the hypothetical God allowed came together for his good.

So so long as those who love this God benefit, it doesn't matter if others suffer.  If this is the God's plan, how is he then seen as good by anybody other than those who are the benefactors?

Seems as if I'm telling the father "if you love me, I'll let you molest your child".  Sure, I'm allowing for evil, but in the end all things come together for the good of those who love me.  That makes me a good person?

You can't apply strictly human ethical codes to God, because God has a completely different view on the effects of actions. It's like if a kid were running around stabbing people with needles, you'd probably take him to counseling, but if a doctor is giving people injections, you understand that that doctor knows more about how the human body works than you or I do, and that, in the end, the doctor's knowledge will prove out.

The other thing is permitting people the freedom to do bad things is not equivalent to doing the bad thing itself. God has given us free will, and part of that is planning around our doing stupid, destructive things to each other. I don't point at my government and say "YOU MURDERED SO-AND-SO! You didn't put cameras all over his house and watch him every moment of the day!" the government must permit us freedoms, and let us mess up on our own before trying to correct that behavior. God just has the luxury of a longer timeline.



That argument doesn't hold water. We accept that God has planned ahead and that everything will come together. But that does not mean that any individual action (bad or good) directly contributes to God's plan, supports his plan, or is justified. Just like I can make a plan to get from here to Philly and account extra time for traffic in Baltimore, someone running around raping people may be 'in God's plan for the greater good' without actually bringing about greater good.

In a nutshell, God has said 'here is free will. Go, use it, make good of it. I know you'll mess up, so I'll nudge the course here and there, and we'll meet on the other end.' Setting everything on fire isn't following God's directions, isn't supporting that plan, etc. And while God may make plans around it to leverage good out of it that otherwise would not have been there, it's not like God said 'here is free will, go set everything on fire'.

If it is inappropriate to apply human ethical codes to this God, isn't it inappropriate to apply human titles like "Good" to him?  Usually when we call people Good or Evil, it has very much to do with those human ethical codes.

You can't include/exclude something from a category when it does/n't meet the requirements that every other thing inside that category needed to pass.

As for the second half, I don't see how this would negate the application of ethical codes to a God, or to anyone really.  Just because someone thinks that they're acting for "The Greater Good" doesn't mean that we can't apply our ethical codes to them, and usually their actions are quite evil indeed when scrutinized.

We could take, for example and to provide a better idea of what I mean, an Alien spaceship visiting us; we greet them, flash some lights, and in response they open fire and wipe D.C off the map.

EDIT: <.< not that I watched Independence Day recently or anything.

I'm pretty sure that the Alien's view on what their actions are meant to accomplish is pretty much irrelevant.
This message was last edited by the GM at 11:45, Thu 01 July 2010.

I get the feling that we are dealing with conflicting concepts of God here- person A is using model A of God, person B levels criticism of that model by saying 'but if that were true then such and so would be true about God' and then person C using model C of God comes along saying 'that's not right because of model C'. It would be usefull in these discussions to discuss different concepts fo God seperately and acknowledge that a person leveling criticism at a model is not the same thing as a aperson leveling criticism at God.

Because one of teh main distinctions here is level of planning- a God who planned litterally everything- planned teh rapists lousy life so they would rape teh woman so she would concieve he child, is one model which holds more responsibility for that evil than a model which simply allowed lousy things to happen to that rapist and then allowed the rapist to rape the woman, and who may be asking the woman not to have an abortion but will allow it. The second model of God is less dispicable in it's own way, but also less in control, converseley the second model also allows us real free will as opposed to the illusion of it wrapped up in paradox. Theological waffling between models is trying to have your cake (we have free will) and eat it too (and God has a plan which covers every aspect of our lives)

My personal belief is that any God which got mad at Israel for disappointing him as often as the biblical God did had some serious misunderstandings about people and how they thought and any claims to omniscience are him lying through his teeth.

Unfortunately, we are human, and we have no other way to really appreciate these things.

On that note though, I would invite you to consider the word "good", and its myriad of conflicting, poorly-defined meanings. For the most part, as humans, we can't even appreciate what 'good' is!



Ethical codes apply to God. However, for us to apply them properly, we have to have a wider scope of knowledge and understanding than what any human currently has. Again, it's like a toddler trying to appraise the actions of a skilled physician. "You wrapped his arm in plaster for three months so he can't move it at all!?!? That's worse than just having it hurt..."



We always have to act to the best of our knowledge and wisdom. Presumably if God opened up the clouds and said, "I am God. DC, I smiteth thee", then at least many of us would say "Okay, it's God. I have a trust relationship with God. I should strive to understand this before I act out against it." If space aliens do it, we don't have that trust relationship (nor do we have any reason to suppose they have omniscience, rather than just malice), so we would be less obliged to try and understand it.

(Although, I have to admit, if DC got smited, it would eliminate a lot of our highest-profile crooks :P )

It occurs t me that if God is as relgion describes him then teh relationship strongly resembles codependance. "I know he beats me but it's for my own good because he is so smart and I'm so stupid I have to trust him and know that he loves me."

Codependence assumes equals. I do spank my children, and cause them short-term harm, but I'm pretty confident I can show it is for their long-term best interest.

As I do not have reason to believe that Good exists outside the mind, I'd have to conclude that Good couldn't be anything other than what we determine it to be, though.



You imply that there are qualifications for appraising the actions of an individual, and that the actions of god have qualifications to understand that are beyond anyone. This sounds very much like special pleading, but two thoughts on the matter:

1. Since, as above, I consider the concept of good to be a human opinion, I find the argument that I don't have the knowledge and understanding to appraise the actions of someone as good or bad to be as absurd as saying I don't have the knowledge and understanding to appraise a film or meal as good or bad.

2. I do not think that, for the specific god, the argument is sound, at least if the specific god endorses the attached holy text.

 (a) - In Genesis, the fruit that was eaten gave Adam and Eve knowledge of Good and Evil; the serpent claims so, and God confirms this.  It doesn't seem to even be imperfect knowledge, as God says "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil."

 (b) - In Job, God argues that because he is mightier than man and knows things which man does not know, we are not allowed to judge him for his actions.  This would seem to imply that we don't have the right to apply our ethical codes to him, even with perfect knowledge of what he has done.

--------------------
Like things we eat and movies we watch, however, there are things which almost all humans find repulsive, and there are things which in ethics we consider unjustifiable.  People tend to underplay this by using unpleasant feelings or slight pain as a comparison.  But there are things which are always wrong, no matter the context or amount of knowledge we have of the situation.

Example: There can be no context, no end result so desirable, that rape would be in context a justifiable means.



And how would you view people who reacted that way to the God/Alien if you were not among them; depending on the God or belief of the people in question, they might even be celebrating.  Is their support or tolerance of the actions committed by non-human evil?

Well, that leads down and interesting course.  Anytime a concept invoked "infinities", things get weird.

Let's assume God is Ethical.  That means, God behaves ethically.  That means, given a choice in the matter, God will choose the more ethical course of action.

One of two things is true.

1)  Ethics are within God's ability to create and control; therefore, "Ethics" and "God's Will" is a tautology.  Things are only Ethical because God declares them to be so.  Hence, Ethics do not truly exist, they are only the arbitrary choices of the supreme being. It all devolves to "Because I said so, that's why".

2) Ethics are not within the ability of God to create or control.  If so, we are fortunate when He chooses to act Ethically.**  In this case, where did Ethics come from?  Are they some artifact of existence on a scale beyond God?  Illusions?

Both choices lead to paradox, hence, if "Ethics" exists, then an Omnipotent Omniscient Creator God cannot, and vice versa.

**Does he?  In a remote galaxy, a Gamma Ray Burst is sterilizing ten million star systems.  None of them had life?

You spank your children, and it is for their own good. Another person beats his children half to death and claims it is for their own good, may even believe it. The question is are the children able to tell the two apart?

from http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Codependency

Co-dependency is a condition in which someone exhibits too much, and often inappropriate, caring for a person who is suffering from addiction to drugs or alcohol or from other addictive behavior. The co-dependent person often makes excuses for their partner's self-destructive behavior.

Co-dependency can be a set of maladaptive, compulsive behaviors learned by family members in order to survive in a family which is experiencing great emotional pain and stress.


Nothing about equality of relationship there. In fact many times children may well be in a codependant relationship with their parents. I know I have seen it- teenagers throwing away their futures to protect a mother with addiction or psychological problems from themselves, justifying that their parent doesn't need help and they need their mommy even though mommy put them in the hospital when she was angry.

On of the first signs of such a controling relationship is cutting off bonds with other people- the controlling person not allowing outside relationships, or not talking to other people because they 'won't understand' the unique situation. in theological terms "thou shalt have no other gods before me"...

I assume you mean that 'good' is an abstract concept, which is true. However, so are numbers, and we can do fantastic things with numbers (including clearly defining them).

The idea though that a concept may only apply to what we are capable of defining is false, however. Again, using mathematics as an example, there are many things that happen in the world which we cannot, or have not defined under our understanding of mathematics. That does not mean that those things do not exist or cannot be translated into mathematics - just that we are grappling with abstract concepts of such great magnitude that they overwhelm the mind.



I'm not sure why it sounds like special pleading. It's built on a few basic assumptions:
1) Ethics is a field of study that can be applied to the actions of intelligent beings.
2) Like most fields of study, our understanding of it is naturally limited.
3) God exceeds our understandings of the universe and so naturally carries an 'X' factor we cannot properly account for.



Is mathematics a human opinion?



Not sure how this is relevant, except through an extremely limited, literal reading of the text (i.e., assuming that Adam actually lived and was given the full knowledge of good and evil, and sufficient understanding of the universe to apply it infalliably, rather than just a very limited aspect.)



You defeated your own argument. God says He knows things man does not know, therefore we cannot judge Him. How can you draw the conclusion then that what He said was that we cannot judge Him if we DID know?




I would be interested to see how you justify this, especially given that you base it on the concept of permanent harm, which can be trivially undone by an omnipotent God.

Imagine this as an example. We consider murder to always be wrong - it is the ending of an intelligent life.

God kills Jim. We arrest God. God makes Jim come back to life. Wait a second... Now God hasn't murdered anyone, as Jim is not dead. We let God go. God kills Jim again for fun. We arrest God. God makes Jim into a perfect, immortal, incorporal being who exists for all time in a state of extreme pleasure and delight.

I mean... what can you say to that? For you or me I'd say there is no context or end result where murder is desirable, but when you bring God in, the rules of the game literally change.



That's a hugely complex question I couldn't answer without much more information.

I fail to see the paradoxes. In 1, it's a tautology. A tautology is never a paradox. In 2, it's just a question of physical laws. You may as well say "well, where did the universe come from? Does the seed of the big bang come from a scale beyond God? PARADOX!" Obviously it's not a paradox - the universe exists, and we are led to understand that at one point it didn't. If it were a paradox, that couldn't have happened. So clearly we just lack understanding and have to work harder to find the answer.

Katisara, the paradox exists because the ethics, in any sense beyond "arbitrary choice made someone more powerful than me" does not exist in case one, and god is not omnipotent in case two.

Ergo, the paradox is: Ethics and an Omnipotent God cannot co-exist, for any meaningful definition of ethics.

The existence of the Universe would not create the paradox, because its meaning would not be changed by being redefined as "just some stuff a powerful being created."

To see why, imagine an extremely powerful but not omnipotent/omniscient being, some future super-scientist, using his phase-quantum-space-modulator, creates a new "micro-universe" complete with all the conditions for the development of intelligent life.

And you can examine it with the super-advanced scientific instruments- yes, there it is, a universe, with stars, galaxies, and planets, maturing quite nicely because time passes at a much faster rate in the micro-universe, relative to ours.  And clearly, the scientist created it.

Now imagine same scientist saying "And I will create new ethics for this Universe.  In this universe, it's ethical to make others suffer as much as possible!  So let it be done!"

Would you consider that the scientist has actually created a new form of Morality?  Or that he/she is missing a few cards from the deck?

Let us say it goes further.  This potent but not omnipotent scientist actually has an invention which will seed the minds of the intelligent organism with instincts, supporting these new Ethics.  Great philosophers will emerge, who will theorize that the reason it feels so "right" and so spiritually rewarding to torture each other is that it God, who is infinitely wise, wants it that way.

Are they right?  Has the scientist really created new ethics?

If yes, then this begs a question:  Why did God choose His particular set of Ethics for His Universe?  He could have had any system of Ethics imaginable, right?  So he made an Arbitrary choice.  Nothing more.  He picked some stuff, and said, this is Good, that is Evil, and so neither have any  meaningfully existence apart from them being so designated.**  If no, then you believe that ethics is something beyond the power of the creator to create.

And it works the same way scaled up.

** Why wouldn't they meaningfully exist?  Because if the creator makes a rule "Doing X is Good" then either "Good" has some prior meaning, or the sentence is meaningless.  It would be as if I said, all of morality is divided into vlurb, and gweeble.  Everything that I say is vlurb, is vlurb, and all else is gweeble.  You'd say, "who cares?"  Neither term is defined except by my choice, and so it's irrelevant.  Terms must have a non-arbitrary definition to have any true meaning.  "Up" for example, is "away from the center of the planet".  In space, there is no universal up.*** But we can say, "God created 'Up' and 'Down'" because they are descriptions that are based on other defined elements of the system- Good and Evil are not.

***And in every sci-fi film ever made, only 2001 and 2010 ever got this right.  In all other movies, whenever two spaceships meet, even if they are from species that have never encountered each other before, they are always, miraculously, oriented to the same "up".  The only exceptions are when one spaceship is badly damaged- obviously, that universal "up detector" has broken down.

The problem with your hypothetical scenario is that God has a standard of morality that is apart from ours. It's not new. Our sense of morality from a human stand point is the new one. God would, for example, flood the world, kill babies, etcetera in the global catastrophe of the Old Testament, however, the Bible plainly points out that God let's the righteous die (That's letting something evil happen by omission) in order that something WORSE doesn't happen to them.

In the first case that's not a paradox, it's a redefinition or clarification, specifically redefining ethics as not being unchanging. There's nothing bad about ethics changing over time and being defined by an outside source, and certainly not paradoxical.

In the second one, well that's not paradoxical for a few reasons. First, unless your base assumption is God is omnipotent (which you didn't state as such), it doesn't come into play. Next we have to ask about what is 'omnipotent'. When I play Sim City, I'm pretty close to omnipotent; ultimately, I can destroy the entire game or directly modify it (using a hex editor). However, while acting within the game, I follow the rules of the game. There's no reason why God can't create a universe which results in certain physical and ethical laws, then operate within the universe and, while doing so, obey those laws. This doesn't make God less than omnipotent, because He has the option of stepping out of the universe again and changing those laws. But while He's playing 'in the game', the laws of the game apply.



Redefining words does not create paradoxes.



This is a difficult question to answer. I think the underlying assumption in your example is that, specifically, he has created a universe like ours.

Orson Scott Card wrote a book (Xenosomething) about a race of aliens which reproduce by dying and laying their seeds into the ground to create the next generation, which consists of strands of the original creature's consciousness. In this situation, murder is not a crime (unless it prevents reproduction). To the contrary, murder is NECESSARY and good. Human ethics do not apply, because the subject is not human.

The same is true of our scientist. If the universe our scientist created contains intelligent life, and the intelligent life found deep spiritual awareness, growth or completion through the exploration of physical suffering, causing as much suffering as possible would seem to be, ethically, an extremely valuable thing. However, that doesn't mean that when the scientist steps away from his universe that he should apply that same suffering to his fellow humans - we do not operate that way, this is a different universe.


Now, let us make the assumption that this is a universe like ours, supporting human-analogs. Human morality does apply, because the scientist has made it so. However, he intentionally tortures this humans, for no appreciable gain to them.

Is that creating a new morality? In that case, no, because he has intentionally prevented such. He has created a world with a morality as close to ours as possible, in order to intentionally violate it.



Strictly speaking, they are. The individual they call god does want it that way. And they likely will create a new ethical code (based on a false premise, but nonetheless...)



I don't know how you can possibly know the choice is 'arbitrary'. You don't know what factors God may have considered. You don't know what exists beyond this tiny aspect of the world that we recognize. Guessing as to the motivations of God, that smacks of hubris. You assume God exists in a vacuum, which seems as blind a guess as any.

Ah, that's where we differ, then.  To me, if there is no objective good or evil, just "stuff I happen to want, currently" then I reject it as morality.  If morality is nothing more than what you, or something higher up, says it is, then, it does not exist.  It has no meaning.

To me, there is something bad about morality changing.  Interpretations of morality might change, but if what is good or evil is subject to the whim of the week, it really doesn't matter, does it?  And of course, since history (and morality) gets written by the victors, it's pretty much a recipe for "last man standing gets to say who was right".

Which then lapses back to the thread title:  Genocide, for example.  What's really wrong with it, then?  Assuming someone does it correctly, there will be no one left to dispute the wonderful ethical rightness of it all.

No, I must reject a Morality-of-the-Month.



Well, it is what most religions assume.  But if God exists as an element of his own meta-universe, with its own unchanging reality, then we can take statements like "omnipotent" to mean "with respect to our reality, not God's" and it does offer a way out of the paradox.
This message was last edited by the player at 18:11, Thu 01 July 2010.

I feel like this is the argument about the Speed of Light being constant. Practically speaking, it is constant, and so life can continue on as normal. But if we look over the history of the entire universe, to which human life is but a speck, it is not, and if we move outside of the universe, there's no saying what the speed of light is (or if that concept even makes sense).

I do believe in objective morality from the perspective of humans on Earth. But that doesn't mean that, when we zoom out to scopes too large for us to reasonably imagine, that that rule continues to hold exactly the same.



</quote>

I think it's what most religious people assume (because it's the easiest scenario to imagine - just like most people assume this is the only universe). I've never read anything in my bible, or any other religious document, which says definitively that God was all alone prior to the creation of the universe, or that there was not another universe that preceded ours. But I've also never really seen the question grappled with by any Christian denomination, except for the LDS Church.

Just curious, if someone were to force you to make a decision somehow, between cutting someone's balls off and horribly torturing and disfiguring them, and then delimbing them, etcetera, or just shooting them in the head and killing them, what would you choose?

God could be just allowing things to happen to some people so things worse won't.

Except it's god we're talking about, and people normally assume "Omnipotent".  And the benefit to being Omnipotent is that you are never forced into "One or the Other."  God could arrange things to happen so bad doesn't happen AND worse doesn't happen.

Cake AND ice cream.

Let's take Darfur, for example, probably the most horrific current ongoing genocide in the world.  (Back, Godwin, back I say!)

God is trapped into letting it happen, because if it doesn't, something worse will, which God will be completely unable to stop despite having All the Power in the Universe?  I don't buy it.  Somewhere out there, a Sudanese Arab Militia gang has just dragged a nine year old girl away from her mother, and they intend to rape and kill her, and you're saying there is absolutely no way God could prevent this and also simultaneously prevent something worse?  Color me skeptical.

Perhaps, but if so, we're not qualified to call him good either.  We can't really have it both ways.  Either we know enough to say He's good or evil, or we don't.  It doesn't seem like we can say we know enough to say if he's good, but not if he's evil.  If we're qualified to say He looks like he's good, then we're qualified to say that He looks like He's evil.  Or, we can be qualified to say neither. I haven't heard any argument for the case that we could do one but not the other, with the possible exception of "well, He says He's good, and we have to believe Him."



But with the government, you don't want them putting cameras in your house and keeping tabs on you all the time.  You're willing to accept them not helping out in return for your privacy.  But God is already keeping an eye on you.  You don't have any privacy from Him.  God doesn't really permit freedoms (very short term ones, perhaps, but it's basically a follow the rules or suffer eternity in torment, which is far more of a coercion than any government uses).

If you're arguing that God is looking at a bigger picture, so that individuals don't matter next to the good of humankind, say, that might be reasonable.  Though, it does sort of imply a limitation on God (though perhaps a self-imposed limitation) or what He cares about.



Yeah, that's more or less what I was saying.  The "everything is part of His plan" view doesn't seem to add up.  Bad things happen, not because they're part of His plan, but because stopping them wasn't necessary for His plan (and He didn't feel like stopping it just to be a nice guy).


I'd agree (well, at least as far as an atheist can agree with a view on God), and this seems to imply that the "it's all for the best" or "its all part of His plan" explanation for unpleasant events doesn't hold water.  Really, even if you think there's a plan, you have to accept that most things just happen and don't have anything to do with the plan.  And you have to accept that God does indeed let bad things happen.  Not because it's "for the greater good" but because it's a cost He's willing to accept (put another way--the event wasn't sufficiently important in His view to warrant Him doing something to stop it).

It sort of seems like there's a few options, which have implications which some might not like:

1.  micromanaging God--In this case, it's ALL part of the plan, every bit of it.  All the good, bad, and the ugly are planned out, and intended.  The upside is that you can tell yourself that the bad stuff is for a reason.  The down side is that it means God uses evil to get what He wants, and that anything everyone does is "for the greater good" (if God lets it happen, it's part of the plan, and thus for the greater good).

2.  mostly-hands off God--In this case God has a plan, but mostly leaves us to our own devices, only getting involved when things go so far out of wack that the plan is in danger.  The upside is that we have free will, God doesn't commit acts of evil (well, ignoring the OT stuff for just now), and there's a plan that everything will end up okay in the end.  The downside is that God is largely apathetic (or at least acts as such) to the day to day events of our lives, and bad things can happen for no reason at all.

3.  Deist God--God doesn't get involved anymore, and there's not really a plan.  We're on our own, for better or worse.  the upside is that our hands our completely untied, the world is our oyster, etc.  The downside is that our hands our completely untied, and the world is our oyster.  Bad things will happen, and there's no guarantee of a good ending.

Is there another option I'm missing?  Do we all more or less agree that those are basically the options (along with "god doesn't exist", of course, but you can throw that in with option 3 pretty easily)?  From what I've read here, it sounds like pretty much everyone here agrees that option 1 is out (even if Sharon Angle doesn't), some think option 2 is right, others option 3.

There is a 3.5 in a way- we have completely free will, God has a plan but that pan is so far beyond our scope that our efforts to affect teh world are insignifigant in comparison- sort of the Norse Giants approach. In this for example God planned hurricain Katrina perhaps millions of years ago and simply didn't care that some silly humans built a city where he planned for it to land.

That's true, but God has an absurdly long time of reference in mind, and there is some evidence to suggest in scripture that God exists in the future as well as the past and present. If he knows that everything in the far future will be complete and utter happiness compared to what's going on now, he can always just make things better for us in the future, rather than just letting us escape torment. If we suffer so much now, imagine how much we are going to enjoy ourselves in the future, for Believers, at least.
This message was last edited by the player at 21:51, Thu 01 July 2010.

To a degree, you're right. Assuming, of course, that 'what is good' is not simply defined as 'what God says to do'.

It's interesting that if you look in the Bible, God's claim to goodness is primarily four-pronged:
1) He created the whole thing. If you like being alive, God is good (because the life and the universe is good). This isn't a statement on ethical behavior, as much as giving credit to the guy.

2) He does a lot of personal favors. You believe in God? Well now you're free from Egypt. Say thanks, guys! This is sort of counterbalanced by the fact that He tends to poop on the people who fight against him in extremely unethical ways (by human standpoints). This is sort of quasi-ethical as an argument though.

3) He (according to Jesus) has stored up a great reward for some number of people (counterbalanced by some sort of not-great-reward place for the remainder). How 'good' this is is difficult to quantify. God could have set it up so everyone would just happen to choose the best things  and happen to go to heaven, even with free will, perhaps through an amusing series of coincidences. But we can't measure heaven or hell either, so we can't really say how good or bad they are, or how they compare to each other, etc. I'd argue that the Southern Baptist version (Hell is very painful, and more than 50% of the people are going there) would paint God as unethical, but the LDS version (99% of people are going to an afterlife which ranges from enjoyable to orgtastic) as being indicative of a very kind God.

4) God said so. And he's God. This is a tough position to argue with because hey, it's God, and even if we accept that God is not unethical, he's still God and he makes all the rules, so it's probably in your best interest to give him the benefit of the doubt.



No, I put some very thick curtains up on my house.

No, the 'limitation' I'm implying is that God is putting us through an exercise routine, for whatever reason. That's the trade-off. We put off 'fantastic goodness' for what is, relatively speaking, a heartbeat, in order to have experiences and freedoms.



I think there's a difference between 'plan' and 'ruleset'. God seems to have set up a ruleset that He generally obeys while operating around here. The reason for setting up the ruleset is in the plan, surely, but that doesn't mean that individual behaviors within the ruleset are specifically contributing or detracting from that plan.



I don't exactly like how that's phrased, though. Things operate within the plan, but the lynchpin of the plan is, humans take responsibility for their own actions. So you can't ever throw up your hands and say "I won't do X because it's contrary to the Great Plan" (unless the plan has been revealed to you personally). We always must understand that God has planned for whatever our particular action is, but it is our responsibility to choose the action.