CALLING GOD MORALITY IS DISINGENUOUS WHEN NOBODY CLEARLY PERCEIVES OR UNDERSTANDS EITHER

To dissuade people from thinking morality is just opinion or feeling, some say that when you talk about justice and love and kindness you are talking about God for God is these things. These values are a person and that person is God.

This is an attempt to get away from fears that love and fairness may be too vague for comfort.  But the idea of a person being compassion literally is as crazy as a person being the story of Cinderella.  It adds to the confusion.  If morality were clear or clear-ish that would muddy it horribly.
 
There are as many ideas of morality and its wide range as there are Gods.  And there as many ideas of God as there are worshippers.
 
It is nonsense to fuse God and morality in any way for morality is not as clear to the moraliser and she or he wants you to think.  If you are unclear on good then you are unclear on evil.  If you are unclear on evil you are unclear on good.  And you can be unclear on both.
 
Whether or not morality is objective, eg a fact that does not care what anybody thinks or is about it, nobody understands how it can be a person.
 
Using God to plug a gap full of holes and vagueness cannot be called moral and if you do that you add to the vagueness.
 
Vagueness means all that is trickery and arrogance. The vagueness creates a loophole in which the religious person can work to harm others. Catholics and many religionists believe in probabilism - you can do the harmful thing as long as you mean well. It is not a sin to do a if you see that b looks safer. You take a chance that b may be the best after all.

Religion changes the definition of evil to suit itself.  It calls it good or okay when God does it when the point is how harmful it is to us.  It calls it clear in one breath and calls it vague in the next.  When you do evil you are told that you are doing something that God would never create.  Even if there was a good reason God will not commit adultery if he turns into a man.  This suggests evil does not fit God.  Yet with earthquakes and suffering - cancer is worse than adultery - they say this not evil in the moral sense even if God is responsible.  None of this worries about people being hurt as much as it does about salvaging God.  If I could have Godlike powers for an hour the Church would say I am evil if I launch a plague by making a virus.  So why is God exempt?   These ideas clearly show that religion is treating evil as something vague.  It denies that it is obvious though it says it is obvious.  That is where the notion that evil and God are not obviously inconsistent comes from.  It is only something you can say if you call all evil vague.  An ideology that does this is no more interested in really identifying evil and dealing with it than a shooter who turns the lights off is in shooting somebody.

The hiding God
 
If belief in moral value goes with belief in God then the following will make for interesting reading.

God in some sense is considered by believers to be in some sense the virtues of compassion and love and kindness and justice etc that he wants us to have. If so then the more proof that he exists the better. To hide himself would be to hide virtue and to want us to fall more into confusion about morality and also vice. The more hiding God does the less sure we must be of our moral values being correct. And if morality is a person and that person is God then it follows that if he hides too much a real relationship is impossible. Morality will suffer. Given the human tendency to love how people are perceived instead of what they are it is only going to lead to people worshipping a mental image of God not God. No decent God would want such a state of affairs.
 
If you need God in order to accept objective morality, then God is not helping by hiding. He is leaving us at huge risk of basing objective morality not on him but on a version of him that we have created for ourselves in our heads. That is us basing objective morality on ourselves.
 
So we conclude that as Christians claim that God is the reason morality is real and objective and binding God has no right to hide. It only makes us less sure that kindness to a baby really is objectively good. By praising the hiding God, Christians only prove their own hypocrisy.
 
A God of the Gap?
 
If you believe morality has no foundation unless there is a God you are creating a God of the Gap. He is just there to fill a vacuum that is there or that you think is there.
 
Christians use God to explain the start of the universe, how the universe continues to exist, how evil is really a blessing when the full picture is completed, how morality can be justified. But which of these gaps is the most important to them? It will be the morality one. They admit that. They argue that God is to be promoted for the sake of having a relationship with him and not just as a theory or doctrine or explanation for the universe. God being love means that it is more important to know that than to think or know he created all things. It is the essential if there is a choice.
 
The Christians usually say that the question "Why is there something rather than nothing? The answer is God" is the only one that matters but they don't really think that at all. The question does not look so good when you realise that the God of the Morality gap is the real question and makes no sense.  So it is, "Why is there morality rather than no morality?"  Plus by the way when you put it like that you see that "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is a scientific as opposed to moral and therefore religious question.  Religion tries to make out it is not a scientific question but it is if you separate it from the "why morality?" question.
 
Finally
 
You cannot really know God that well for you are only a creature and your ideas of love and compassion and justice will only be broadly accurate. You have no right to try and use God to be firm about values that you cannot be firm about. Do not judge then when the standard suffers from lack of clarity and even vagueness. No religion claims we really know God and it is like looking through smoky glass. Atheism: The Case Against God. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books 1989 by George Smith tells us that God cannot really understand the nature of God and the qualities essential to God. Christians however say a working definition of these things will do. It will not. They then say that God showed us what he was like when he became Jesus. This teaching accuses anybody who does not know the Jesus story correctly and in a spiritual manner of following their own ideas of God but not God. The Jesus stuff is hearsay so it does not help. If you cannot know the essential nature of God, the moral nature of God, then how do you know if you really have a working definition or an approximate understanding? The idea that love and justice are what God is rather than what he does is untenable and is not good for us even if it is tenable.



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