KNOWING WHAT GOOD IS
Religion says you cannot know that what is morally right is right unless you
believe in a God that morality comes from and is based on. People ask questions.
Are our morals basically uniform all over the world? Are morals innate? Are they
part of what we are? Is a sense of morality necessary to be truly human? The
answer is yes. So there is no need to involve God and it is inhuman to try to.
To say that morals come from God is to create a God of the Gaps. In other words,
"I don't know what makes moral moral therefore it is God." That is not an
argument. The conclusion does not follow. It is a trick. If you base morality on
that the end result will be hypocrisy not morality.
Religion says that "God does not adhere to external ethics. He does not create
ethics arbitrarily. No ethics are an aspect of his very nature. They are
grounded in his character."
But which of these three would be the best if you had to choose one?
Religion says that since God is pure good and is infinitely powerful he does not make evil.
All that happens is that good things aren't as good as they could be. Evil does
not really exist for evil is really just good that is not good enough and falls
short.
The theodicy, defence of God's behaviour, says that because evil is a form of
good, we need an authority to tell us what good and evil are. It would be so
easy to mistake evil for good and they are so close most of the time. The
authority is God and/or his religion. The theodicy instead of doing anything to
make us good, requires us to bend the knee to religious authority and let Bibles
and popes and nuts tell us what to do if we wish to do what is good.
If evil is distorted good and God exists then God is absolute good. Any good
that is not done only - some say primarily - to please God is really evil. It
falls short of the goodness of honouring God the source of all good. Some say we
should do good entirely for the honour of God. Others say that we should do it
mainly for him. That is not an option. If God is really so great and is perfect
good and the source of all things, then to honour anybody else even a little in
addition to him is depriving him of his due. If you advocate a God who wants
merely to come first in your heart then you advocate an idol.
Everything anybody does is evil for nobody loves God with their whole self.
Atheists and Agnostics are evil incarnate despite the good they do for it is
false good. Those are the implications. The theodicy is not out to help us or
console us but to cripple us with self-hatred and disgust and a strangulating
sense of failure.
The theodicy claims that God cannot make a person sick. It explains that he
makes only the goodness that is involved and the sickness is a falling short
that he is not responsible for, for he has not made it. It says it would be
wrong for us to do what he does for we are moral agents and he is not one of us
and owes us nothing. So we cannot give a person sickness and excuse ourselves on
the ground that sickness is a good thing that is in wrong place and the wrong
time. The believers say it would be wrong for us to do that for we would be
responsible for the sickness. So when we do it, we are responsible. And when God
does it he is not responsible. This doctrine makes no sense.
What the doctrine is doing is trying to give us an evil god to worship and to
obscure that evil.
Another way it obscures the evil of belief in God is this. If God can do what
they say he does - eg cause sickness and still be good then clearly he can
exempt us from moral obligations. They say he is not a moral agent and we are.
He is boss so he can exempt us. Christians usually boast about the great example
God incarnate as Jesus Christ set in his "holy" life. They claim that it shows
he was God. Others hold that if Jesus went about decapitating babies he could
still be considered to be God. They could say that since God owes us nothing he
can treat us as he wants and since he makes only the good in evil not the evil
itself he cannot be called evil for doing so! Anybody can claim to be a prophet
who got an exemption. The doctrine implies that you can believe you are not a
moral agent until you get a revelation from God saying you are. You may have a
conscience but conscience doesn't make you a moral agent. Having a good voice
does not mean you are singer or should be one.
The Church cannot tolerate that logic. In that sense, the doctrine puts social
control and ethical boundaries entirely under the jurisdiction of the Church.
The Church must claim that God has given it a Bible or vision saying its
subjects are moral agents. So those outside the Church must be despised and
hated. And if the Church does not command that we can be sure that it doesn't
need to.
Good is stronger than evil if evil is just misplaced good. It would follow then
that we should only see the good not the bad or that if we do see the bad it
hardly registers with us for we must overwhelmingly see the good. And even more
so if God is goodness itself for that makes goodness far more special,
infinitely special. And also more so when all good falls short of what could be
better. The best mathematics course in the world could still be better. Because
it is so hard to know what is really better, it makes it hard to decide between
what is right and wrong. The doctrine that evil is misplaced good makes it so
hard to tell them apart and even at times impossible is a threat to life as we
know it. You have to see the assassin as evil and as to be opposed with violence
if necessary if you are to defend yourself. If you just keep trying to see the
good in him and his gun you will soon have a bullet in your head. One can have
so much positive thinking that one might not see evil looming or fail to
recognise evil anymore.
Jesus told us to hate sin so much that we would rather have an eye gouged out
than use the eye to sin with say by looking lustfully at someone. He makes this
hate good though it is horrible and evil. His teaching that we should not be as
positive about evil as the theodicy would require certainly implies that he
rejects it. To reject the theodicy is to contradict the idea of an all good God.
Jesus believed it was good for God to be an autocrat. His idea of goodness was
dangerous.
Everybody makes mistakes so it is possible for a killer of dangerous people to
think he does right. It is true that an act could be objectively right or wrong.
But that doesn't mean you are morally good or morally evil if you commit the
act. It depends on your perception and intentions. The theodicy is no help in
determining good and evil for it puts them so close together that it is very
hard to tell them apart. It is not intended to help us so it is evil itself.
Human behaviour and doing right is more important than defending a God people
make up.
A baby girl dies at seven months of meningitis. Was this bad? Yes. Was God bad
for letting this happen? The theodicy says no. It would say, "The baby existed
and had seven months. That was good. The child's death strictly speaking was
just a form of good that did harm. There was no real evil in it. The child and
its parents should be grateful it had existence at all for God is not bound to
keep it alive or even make a child in the first place". How could you know what
moral or any good is with a doctrine of savagery, with a doctrine as cold and
harsh as that? People have been manipulated to feeling warm with God. The God
belief is unfriendly and nasty. A person who lives to adulthood saying a child
should be grateful for what time it got is certainly arrogant and nasty
considering they didn't live just seven months. The church pews should be empty.
The theodicy implies that good is real and that it is a power. Some say, "But
good is merely a judgement we make on things. When we see two items we judge
that as two. But two as two doesn't exist. Good exists only in our heads." Good
intent only exists in us. But it does not follow that good is nothing more than
an idea. If pink exists only in our imagination it remains true that pink
exists. We make it real in our heads.
Anyway the theodicy says that good is a real power and that evil is not a power
but just a falling short of good. Now if good is a power, it is only a pile of
powers put together under the one heading. Each act we do is done for complex
reasons and some of these are better than others. Good is not one power. Love, a
form of good, is better than kindness which is a form of good as well. It is not
love to be kind to a tyrant in saving his life so he can torment his nation. So
you have good that isn't as good as other good. So kindness is regarded as fully
good despite being inferior to the good of love. Evil then must be a form of
good as well. Powers that are meant to be good but which are really evil are
still powers.
Even those who say evil is nothing but good in the wrong place or not real still
insist that it must be eradicated. They still say it is abhorrent. They make a
fuss about evil not being a power and stress that it's not a power. But who
cares? Evil whether a power or not is still as bad as ever. When we do something
very evil we are doing our best to bring about evil the power. If we can't bring
about evil the power, that doesn't stop us wishing we could or doing the nearest
we can get to making it. We would bring about evil the power as long as we
didn't have to endure it. That would is an evil power in itself and to deny that
is to deny that evil exists at all or that anything should be classed as evil.
It is to deny that there is a difference between good and evil. It is hypocrisy
to say a good God can't create evil power but that he can allow good to fall
short of what it ought to be so that evil is not a power but a non-power, an
abstract. It solves nothing. It's a scheme to hide how evil evil is. The God
concept is evil for requiring that.
Evil the power can serve no purpose for God for evil is by definition opposition
to good and is useless. Some religion says that if God brings good out of evil,
he is only using existing evil that should not be and is not inferring we should
do evil so that he or we may bring good out of it. To them, God is not inferring
that evil has a purpose - it does not. But God gives evil a purpose when he
starts trying to make it a force for good. God knew that the evil would take
place and as creator enabled it to take place through his creatures so he must
have had some purpose for it. The notion that there is no honesty or compassion
unless there is dishonesty and callousness so evil is necessary for good
certainly does say evil has a purpose. And if God brings good out of evil, it
does not matter if evil has a purpose or not.
If God's purpose is good and if evil is just good in the wrong place then it
follows that in so far as it is good then it is the divine purpose. Suppose it
was good for Jack the Ripper to kill syphilitic prostitutes for it saved married
men catching diseases from them. Then that was God's purpose.
If God cannot use evil as a power to bring good out of it, that is because he
cannot bring good out of it but only in spite of it for it is total evil and
blackness. But if he cannot use it then he cannot use evil as a negation to do
this either. Why? Because even if evil were not a power, evil is still as much
to be opposed as if it were a power. If the theodicy is saying evil isn't so bad
because it isn't a power then it shows callous disregard for human suffering and
degradation. And it is saying that. It even makes out that evil is merely
misplaced good so a good God can't have a problem with allowing it to happen!
Evil is not a power they say. Well true evil has to use good and corrupt it to
be truly evil. If evil was just evil and didn't try to warp good, it would not
be very successful evil. It would be like an evil ant trying to kill an elephant
by beating it with its feet instead of trying to poison something the elephant
would eat. It would be stupid rather than evil.
If evil is not a power but a lack then it follows that it is better to think
like the Christian Science cult that evil is not there at all and is only an
illusion than to think it's a power. Christian Science prevents compassion
because if you don't believe suffering people really suffer, as the cult
commands, then you are hard-hearted. The view that leads to the best and
strongest compassion is the notion that evil is concretely there and is a power.
To suggest that evil is not a power but a lack is to imply that Christian
Science is not as bad as thinking evil is a power. It is to give a cautious
welcome to lack of compassion. The lack of compassion is there at the back of
the mind of the believer that evil is not a power but a lack. It is there by
implication.
Evil is a power. To deny that is to deny that we should have the concept of evil
at all. And any concept of good either! When you are in the depths of depression
you experience evil as a power. For religion to say it is not, is only going to
stunt your efforts at recovery.
Conclusion
Religionists want people to be obligated to love and worship God and the less
religious of them want people obligated to love others. This shows that their
ultimate motive is to use religion to achieve power. The doctrine of God has bad
implications. Do we want that doctrine to maybe inspire atrocities? It can and
does happen. Abandon faith in God.