Noah unbelievably bad and no redeeming moments!

[moralist]

Bob writes:

So why is there so much evil in the world, if good is winning?

That's because you cannot make others good.

You can only defeat evil within yourself.

Greg

[BaalChatzaf]

Bob writes:

So why is there so much evil in the world, if good is winning?

That's because you cannot make others good.

You can only defeat evil within yourself.

Greg

In short, evil in others cannot be beaten. There are too many others.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[Peter]

Baal Bob wrote:

So why is there so much evil in the world, if good is winning?

end quote

I would say that the good is winning because the human race has been progressing. Certainly there have been setbacks and lulls in progress since the time of the Baalbalonians but we have continued to move forward.

I dont wish to offend Moralist or any other people of faith but there is one religious doctrine I see in Muslims and Christians that should be rethought: the idea of a messiah returning to earth. It is a destructive thought because it advocates the annihilation of most of humanity which is a sick and barbaric idea. It has no place in a civilized nation.

[moralist]

Bob writes:

In short, evil in others cannot be beaten.

That's right. It can only be displaced from the objective reality of your own life. The trick is not to use being fixated on fighting against external evil as a distraction for failing to prevail over the evil in ourselves.

This is why I don't watch television network news. It's all about things over which I have absolutely no control nor for which I have any personal moral responsibility.

Externally, evil can also be beaten back by good in war.

Greg

There are too many others.

It's not about others. It's about us and the evil in us. That's all that matters. Then what's around us within our own personal sphere of influence takes care of itself.

Greg

[dldelancey]

Is there really such a huge imbalance between the amount of good in the world vs the amount of evil? Or is just that evil gets more press?

[moralist]

Peter writes:

I dont wish to offend Moralist or any other people of faith...

Thanks for your concern, Peter... but it's impossible to offend anyone who doesn't choose to become offended... and I choose not to.

but there is one religious doctrine I see in Muslims and Christians that should be rethought: the idea of a messiah returning to earth. It is a destructive thought because it advocates the annihilation of most of humanity which is a sick and barbaric idea.

There is a world of difference between understanding that evil people destroy themselves as they deserve, and acting to indiscriminately destroy others. You're erroneously lumping the religion of Christianity in with the religion of Islam. There is no such thing as a Christian suicide bomber, because it is completely antithetical to the moral values of Christianity. Same with Judaism. No Jewish suicide bombers. That immorally barbaric behavior is owned by the Islamic Fascists.

Concerning the Messiah: And this is just my own individual opinion drawn from my own personal life experience... Christ is already here ruling my world with His perfect moral justice.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Is there really such a huge imbalance between the amount of good in the world vs the amount of evil? Or is just that evil gets more press?

It's not the ratio of good to bad, it's the ratio of constructive to destructive. It's cheaper and easier to be destructive. You can train a non-pilot in a few days to fly a jetliner into a skyscrapper while it takes years of study and experience to be a real pilot or co-pilot. You can shoot a bullet into the chest of a US President with some relative ease, but the surgeon who saves his life has 12 years of college including medical school and advanced training plus years of experience cutting people open and fixing things.

All said, however, there are seven billion people and if they aren't evil how many evil-doers are hiding amongst them? Not relatively many or the world would be a pile of ash. This doesn't gainsay the fact that evil can be defined into and out of existence fluctuating the numbers all over the map.

--Brant

[Brant Gaede]

Peter writes:

I dont wish to offend Moralist or any other people of faith...

Thanks for your concern, Peter... but it's impossible to offend anyone who doesn't choose to become offended... and I choose not to.

but there is one religious doctrine I see in Muslims and Christians that should be rethought: the idea of a messiah returning to earth. It is a destructive thought because it advocates the annihilation of most of humanity which is a sick and barbaric idea.

There is a world of difference between understanding that evil people destroy themselves as they deserve, and acting to indiscriminately destroy others. You're erroneously lumping the religion of Christianity in with the religion of Islam. There is no such thing as a Christian suicide bomber, because it is completely antithetical to the moral values of Christianity. Same with Judaism. No Jewish suicide bombers. That immorally barbaric behavior is owned by the Islamic Fascists.

Concerning the Messiah: And this is just my own individual opinion drawn from my own personal life experience... Christ is already here ruling my world with His perfect moral justice.

Greg

Not literally true but mostly true.

--Brant

time and place play some role and there are nut cases, but the Muslim nut cases are not considered nut cases for they have religious sanction plus the secular sanction from the fascist liberals, ironically some of them Jewish

[anthony]

Is there really such a huge imbalance between the amount of good in the world vs the amount of evil? Or is just that evil gets more press?

Yes, don't you know all those bad things that ~didn't~ happen today...?

To the media people it's a dead news day (and a bit of a let down) for which they'll have programme or space 'fillers' in reserve.

The press in considerable part, appeals deliberately to the 'primacy of consciousness'. Strange that, when it's mission is "factual, objective" information - supposedly.

I mean, if a tree falls in the forest - and CNN (et al) hasn't a crew there to record it - does it really happen?

[moralist]

Brant writes:

It's not the ratio of good to bad, it's the ratio of constructive to destructive. It's cheaper and easier to be destructive. You can train a non-pilot in a few days to fly a jetliner into a skyscrapper while it takes years of study and experience to be a real pilot or co-pilot. You can shoot o bullet into the chest of a US President with some relative ease, but the surgeon who saves his life has 12 years of college including medical school and advanced training plus years of experience cutting people open and fixing things.

All said, however, there are seven billion people and if they aren't evil how many evil-doers are hiding amongst them? Not relatively many or the world would be a pile of ash. This doesn't gainsay the fact that evil can be defined into and out of existence fluctuating the numbers all over the map

That is a cogent point. Evil is the norm. Good is the anomaly. America is also an anomaly... a capitalist oasis surrounded by stinking socialist s**tholes.

Greg

[tmj]

Brant writes:It's not the ratio of good to bad, it's the ratio of constructive to destructive. It's cheaper and easier to be destructive. You can train a non-pilot in a few days to fly a jetliner into a skyscrapper while it takes years of study and experience to be a real pilot or co-pilot. You can shoot o bullet into the chest of a US President with some relative ease, but the surgeon who saves his life has 12 years of college including medical school and advanced training plus years of experience cutting people open and fixing things.All said, however, there are seven billion people and if they aren't evil how many evil-doers are hiding amongst them? Not relatively many or the world would be a pile of ash. This doesn't gainsay the fact that evil can be defined into and out of existence fluctuating the numbers all over the map

That is a cogent point. Evil is the norm. Good is the anomaly. America is also an anomaly... a capitalist oaisis surrounded by stinking socialist s**tholes.Greg

Wow, well I guess we all have live by our chosen view. Can't wait for that next toilet flush, eh ?

[moralist]

Tad writes:Wow, well I guess we all have live by our chosen view.

We don't have to. It's a free choice.

Can't wait for that next toilet flush, eh ?

I don't need to wait, because that doesn't matter when you can live a good life in this world just as it is right now. In fact that's a functional definition of liberty... the freedom to enjoy a good life in an evil world.Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Brant writes:

It's not the ratio of good to bad, it's the ratio of constructive to destructive. It's cheaper and easier to be destructive. You can train a non-pilot in a few days to fly a jetliner into a skyscrapper while it takes years of study and experience to be a real pilot or co-pilot. You can shoot o bullet into the chest of a US President with some relative ease, but the surgeon who saves his life has 12 years of college including medical school and advanced training plus years of experience cutting people open and fixing things.

All said, however, there are seven billion people and if they aren't evil how many evil-doers are hiding amongst them? Not relatively many or the world would be a pile of ash. This doesn't gainsay the fact that evil can be defined into and out of existence fluctuating the numbers all over the map

That is a cogent point. Evil is the norm. Good is the anomaly. America is also an anomaly... a capitalist oaisis surrounded by stinking socialist s**tholes.

Greg

I did not say evil is the norm. I said the opposite. True, I could have written a more lucid sentence.

--Brant

[moralist]

Brant writes:

I did not say evil is the norm. I said the opposite. True, I could have written a more lucid sentence.

Ok, you believe that good is the norm and evil is the anomaly. And I disagree, because in my view people are naturally evil and have to learn now to overcome that inherent nature before they can do good. It's interesting to note that I totally agree with your accurate description, and yet arrive at the opposite view.

My disagreeing with you can only add to your credibility.

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Brant writes:

I did not say evil is the norm. I said the opposite. True, I could have written a more lucid sentence.

Ok, you believe that good is the norm and evil is the anomaly. And I disagree, because in my view people are naturally evil and have to learn now to overcome that inherent nature before they can do good. It's interesting to note that I totally agree with your accurate description, and yet arrive at the opposite view.

My disagreeing with you can only add to your credibility.

Greg

I substantiated my view, you didn't yours.

You seem to embrace some determinism as if evil were built into the organism. It isn't built into other animals is it? Why the human? Good and evil derives from free will--choices made of differing moral import. This free will capacity is built in. How it is used is not except perhaps in cases of a gross psyiological disorder resulting in, say, psychopathy.

--Brant

[moralist]

Brant writes:

You seem to embrace some determinism as if evil were built into the organism. It isn't built into other animals is it?

Yes. Human nature left to itself is to do evil not good.

If I were to put this in political terms... Everyone starts out life as liberals, and only some grow to maturity as Conservatives. Take a baby for example. It's the quintessential liberal. It's completely self absorbed with a built in the sense of entitlement. It's gimee gimee gimee, and if it doesn't get what it wants, it becomes emotionally offended and angrily raises a ruckus. Like liberals, babies are totally oblivious to what it takes to provide for them because they cannot provide for themselves, and so, like liberals, babies are total ingrates.

Now this does not make a baby evil. It's still innocent and is completely subject to the consequences of the morality of its parents. But when it grows to become morally conscious, it begins by making all the wrong moves to discover how to learn to overcome their nature so as to make the right ones.

And it's by the awareness of Conscience that we see ourselves for what we are and strive to rise above our inherent nature.

We have the unique ability to choose to act CONTRARY to our thoughts and emotions.

Why the human?

Animals are amoral. They can't be good or evil. A dog cannot choose to behave as a cat. I live adjacent to thousands of acres of open raw uninhabited land where nature rules totally unchecked by man. And let me tell you... everything is tearing everything else to shreds and eating it. But it's not wrong, because nature is amoral. If people tore each other to shreds and ate the pieces, it would be morally wrong, because, unlike animals, we humans are unique in our personal moral accountability for our actions.

Good and evil derives from free will...

Yes. We can choose to behave like animals.

Animals cannot choose to behave like humans.

Greg

[BaalChatzaf]

Yes. We can choose to behave like animals.

Animals cannot choose to behave like humans.

Greg

Look at human physiology and anatomy. No doubt about it. We are animals. We are members of a hominid species.

we have a 95 percent genetic resemblance to chimps.

Ba'al Chafatz

[BaalChatzaf]

Is there really such a huge imbalance between the amount of good in the world vs the amount of evil? Or is just that evil gets more press?

If it bleeds it leads. A newspaper that printed only Good News would go belly up inside of a week.

Ba'al Chatzaf

[moralist]

Look at human physiology and anatomy. No doubt about it. We are animals.

...with a Conscience. And that makes us uniquely human, and so uniquely morally accountable for our actions.

You're free to deny the existence of moral accountability for your own actions and to model your behavior after monkeys. Such a noble aspiration. It fits you.

We are members of a hominid species.

Homo Sapiens to be precise. Translated: Wise Man

we have a 95 percent genetic resemblance to chimps

The way so many people behave today, you'd think it was 100%!

Greg

[Brant Gaede]

Brant writes:

You seem to embrace some determinism as if evil were built into the organism. It isn't built into other animals is it?

Yes. Human nature left to itself is to do evil not good.

If I were to put this in political terms... Everyone starts out life as liberals, and only some grow to maturity as Conservatives. Take a baby for example. It's the quintessential liberal. It's completely self absorbed with a built in the sense of entitlement. It's gimee gimee gimee, and if it doesn't get what it wants, it becomes emotionally offended and angrily raises a ruckus. Like liberals, babies are totally oblivious to what it takes to provide for them because they cannot provide for themselves, and so, like liberals, babies are total ingrates.

Now this does not make a baby evil. It's still innocent and is completely subject to the consequences of the morality of its parents. But when it grows to become morally conscious, it begins by making all the wrong moves to discover how to learn to overcome their nature so as to make the right ones.

And it's by the awareness of Conscience that we see ourselves for what we are and strive to rise above our inherent nature.

We have the unique ability to choose to act CONTRARY to our thoughts and emotions.

Why the human?

Animals are amoral. They can't be good or evil. A dog cannot choose to behave as a cat. I live adjacent to thousands of acres of open raw uninhabited land where nature rules totally unchecked by man. And let me tell you... everything is tearing everything else to shreds and eating it. But it's not wrong, because nature is amoral. If people tore each other to shreds and ate the pieces, it would be morally wrong, because, unlike animals, we humans are unique in our personal moral accountability for our actions.

Good and evil derives from free will...

Yes. We can choose to behave like animals.

Animals cannot choose to behave like humans.

Greg

__________________________________________________________________

I remember my first evil--the first of many. It was the night before Hollowean and my sister took me out to do mischief. All up the street we lived on we switched the garbage pails. Heh, heh. I was just over 2 1/2 years old. I didn't do heh, heh then. I didn't like it. Some years later in Columbus the night before Hollowean was "penny night." You'd go knocking on all the doors you were going to knock on the next night for candy (or tricks) and the poor homeowner would give you pennies. I thought I was being bribed not to damage the property. Columbus is the only place I've ever heard of penny night and have no way to know if they still do it. There are many fewer children those days. Then the damn kids were all over the place. Some of them formming up into little gangs.

--Brant

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen writes:

I think the "jealous god" quoted in the passage you provided from the Bible is an ugly sort of person.

The Person who blesses a thousand generations of those who love goodness could only be ugly in your eyes... but that's only because of your own attitude. The irony is that you're only damning yourself just as you deserve.

Greg

You're right if there is a God. She's right if there isn't. Note she thinks "God" is a "person" and you don't. I'm not talking about your estimation of her, but your estimation of God.

--Brant

I prefer beer

I haven't had time to look at OL the last couple days. Trying to catch up a bit, I want to return to the quoted post by Brant.

Repeating to emphasize something I've already said. I don't think that God exists. However, what this discussion started out being about was the character of God specifically as displayed in certain Old Testament stories. The "God" of those stories isn't a synonym for "reality." The "God" described is said to have done things of a sort which require conscious intention to do.

Including God's reported behavior in the Exodus story. "Reality" isn't capable of sending an angel of death selectively into homes without lamb's blood on the lintel selectively to kill the first-born sons in those homes.

And Greg, in defending the reported behavior of God in that story, talks of God as a person acting justly.

Likewise, neither could one substitute "reality" in the "jealous god" statement and have that statement make any sense. God says in the statement - which Greg quoted approvingly -

"[....] I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate Me, but showing mercy and steadfast love to a THOUSAND generations of those who love Me and keep My commandments."

The emphasis is Greg's.

Reality can't visit iniquity "to the third and fourth generation" of descendants due to the emotional attitude of an ancestor. Nor can reality show "mercy and steadfast love" to a thousand generations of descendants of an ancestor due to that ancestor's attitude and behavior.

Descendants might have some advantages or disadvantages or a mixture of both because of an ancestor's physical characteristics, behavior, material possessions, societal status, or some combination of factors, but would even the strictest of strict materialist determinists ever claim such sweepingly determinist effects on descendants as are claimed in the threat/boast of the "jealous God"? No.

For Greg to take this quote as something "God" can actually do means that Greg credits God with being able and willing entirely to ignore the choices of a person's descendants and to afflict or bless those descendants because of an ancestor's choices. Yet elsewhere Greg says that each person becomes a volitional moral agent upon attaining adulthood and that each person's own choices determine the good or ill consequences that person reaps.

Thus in quoting the "jealous God" threat/boast approvingly, Greg both contradicts himself and applauds what would be an extreme injustice on God's part were God actually to do what the words say He'll do.

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

Ellen writes:

What the parents might or might not have deserved isn't the point.

It most certainly is, Ellen.

What parents deserve is the sole determinant in the lives of their children until they grow to become responsible for themselves.

The children did not deserve to be punished for their parents' actions

You cannot just cut the causal bond between children and their parents. It's as damaging as chopping off your own arm. For better or worse, children are "collateral damage" of the morality of their parents.

Your "sole determinant" claim is too dopey to bother with, and it's very obviously false in the Passover story.

and a just God wouldn't have killed the children to get at the parents.

You're not the final judge of what's just. Only objective reality has that power to do that, and you know in no uncertain terms when it renders the final verdict on your life, by the undeniable consequences of your own actions.

I make no claims of being "the final judge of what's just." However, one thing which I know isn't just is punishing one person for another's wrongdoing.

Btw, you make God sound awfully helpless in his omniscient omnipotence.

Exactly right. He is.

Because God is good, He is true to His love for us... so he never forces us to love Him.

This in a post directly after one #137 in which you stated that you don't know God directly and don't personify God.

What's the poor guy to do with those stubborn Egyptians except kill their first-born sons?

The Egyptians were the sole determinant of the consequences they deserved to get... and so are you.

I.e., God wasn't and isn't in the picture?

Ellen

[Ellen Stuttle]

The Passover story could be seen as a moral lesson , if the deck wasn't stacked and had the endgame not be predetermined, but since it contains those elements, I think the take away should be that it was an obstensive lesson to the Hewbrews of God's power. Examples that show his power through and over any other god ie those of water, crops , insects and the like.

That's a significant point, since the God of the Jews didn't start out being claimed to be the only god. Instead, Yahweh, in an early stage of Judaism's development , was a god among other gods, and made a special deal with the Jews whereby they were to worship only him in return for his special protection. Thus the Jews became "the chosen people."

Ellen

[anthony]

A cronyist God? His Special Interest group? Favoritism for voting for (um - worshipping) - only Him?

Why does this ring a bell?

We have a government in power over here that is as jealous and wrathful.

("Chosen", I need not point out, hasn't done the Jews any favors-rather (as is my concern for any "special interest group") painted a target on their backs.)

[Brant Gaede]

Ellen,

Nice points about the Old Testament God. I got some education.

--Brant

I bet Greg didn't