Is it difficult to believe in a God that is perfectly good?

Which is why i conclude he is neutral.

I dont think God can afford to be neutral. He is a creator representing our universe, way of life and our built in universal standard of morality, if God can get away with being neutral than we all could, being both good and evil, doing what we please at the example of our creator and "Lord"

Try explaining that to any judge, minister or someone who has suffered at the hands of nature...."sorry mr starving african, God is niether good or eveil, he is evil for what he did to you but good to us for the fact that we dont have risk of disease, starvation and drought" its ludicrous

The point is, he may have done the evil deed for the good of more people, but the point still remains he DID do something evil.

Exactly, now what kind of example does the bible set if it contradicts the way we must act? Its 10 commandments for one and another 10 for the rest.

History is littered with people doing the best they can with the tools at hand. Indeed, the major advances in our species are equally marked by major, life-changing inventions.

So do individual ethics mark an evolutionary cycle, from group/social transformation, to its equal and opposite cause? How does self-evaluating technology sequitur from a Bible, Qur'an, Upanishads, etc.?

I believe we can have objectivity and subjectivity at the same time. Actually the only objectivity of which I can conceive - given our size relative to the size of the known universe - is INTER-SUBJECTIVITY. [In a poetic manner of speaking: Everything we (the human race) have ever (so far) perceived would only fit into a single pore in God's nose - assuming God had anything like a human form ... which I don't assume. ]

There has been a slight misunderstanding here......I brought up the SUPREME value and the glory of my God in an effort to persuade others to try it out, to get oriented in that new direction, because I knew it would likely benefit them to do so. I said nothing at all about the proportion to which you allude in your skeptical (or could it be characterized as 'cynical'?) reply. In my previous remarks here in this thread I am not denouncing anything, especially not my God. I am commending it to your (and the other readers') attention !

What it does for me is a measurable fact. To me that makes this 'objective.' Do you have any better way of saying what makes anything, any "x," objective?

I only spoke of self-delusion as a way of empathizing with the atheists amoung our readers. They believe they can claim a negative proposition as if it were provable. E.g., "There are NO black swans.... because all I have ever known are white ones." This does not hold water. And neither does the claim that there is no God. In an effort to find common ground I was willing to harbor, as a thought experiment, that the object of my worship may be a delusion, like a child's imaginary friend. I don't believe this of my God for a moment!!! Yet I played along for the sake of discussion. However, I agree with all the arguments of New Mysterianism and anyone else who write exposing the flaws in the conception of God in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, pointing out how Paul would sanction slavery, how Leviticus endorses stoning of women to death, etc. I trust you would concede that these practices violate Ethics. So do "Islamic honor killings" and the burying of women alive done by Christians in India for many years even after the civil government declared this illegal. All this inspired by and 'justified by' the Abrahamic god of the Bible.

I want no part of such a God who is Omniscient, Omnipotent and yet who permits such evils to occur to decent human beings. Also I can't take seriously any God who gets angry and has other human negative emotions. How absurd! How unworthy of worship is that !!

No there is no way to rationalize that scriptural God , even though many good people have tried, including a Rabbi Kushner, and others too. He wrote a book entitled something to the effect of: Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. from a religious point of view. It was a best-seller some years' back - because millions wanted to know why. But his arguments were not persuasive. And neither are those of the Catholic Church, the Mormons, or any other interpreter of the Bible of which I have heard. (In the course of my 80 years I have heard of more than a few.) The closest to explaining things of that sort is The Unity Church of Christianity of Lee Summit, Missouri, and they are mystical and into spiritual metaphysics.

The only branch of Christianity I can truly respect is the Hickite Quakers, who sit in silence, and where every congregant is a minister. They speak only when the "spirit moves them to speak." And they are - in keeping with the teachings of the wise teacher (the rabbi), Jesus, - pacifists.

Another path you may want to investigate is The Vedanta, which is a world religion, showing respect to a number of scriptures, not just one.

And the followers of Lao Tze and the Tao have a lot to teach us about how to live. And some of Buddhism - which has no god at all - can give us insight about ethics, and teach us how to be gentle and nonoffensive.

A point I've heard alot of Christians make here is that their god is the very definition of good, he is the example of good etc... Which is of course bull crap. They just don't want to admit that their god is just as ruthless as the pagan gods of Rome and Greece. Think about in 1 Samuel he has the Jews commit genocide:

And in Numbers, again:



As Thomas Paine said "It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, under the name of God, that the Bible describes."