How can God know everything AND be 100% good, and how do we even determine if God is "good"?

Does God know what it feels like to lust? ( lust is going after physical pleasure - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to have hatred in the heart? (hate is absence of love - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to be rich with a lot of money and material goods (putting the body over the flesh - evil)

How can God know what these feel like if these feelings are wicked and God has 0% wickedness in him but only 100% goodness? Either God feels these things and he is not 100% good, or he does not feel these things and he is not 100% knowing.

And if you say "God doesn't have to follow his own rules" , then how can you even know that God is good if your morality comes from him and yet he is beyond his own system of morality?

arpgme
Does God know what it feels like to lust? ( lust is going after physical pleasure - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to have hatred in the heart? (hate is absence of love - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to be rich with a lot of money and material goods (putting the body over the flesh - evil)

How can God know what these feel like if these feelings are wicked and God has 0% wickedness in him but only 100% goodness? Either God feels these things and he is not 100% good, or he does not feel these things and he is not 100% knowing.

And if you say "God doesn't have to follow his own rules" , then how can you even know that God is good if your morality comes from him and yet he is beyond his own system of morality?

Remember in Star Wars when it was prophecied that Anakin would bring balance to the Force? Well, he did by becoming evil (Darth Vader). In order for there to be an all encompassing god, that god would have to be good and evil. Life needs movement, and in order for things to "move" you need positive-negative, good-evil, or in other words two opposite-opposing forces that balance each other out. That's my two cents.

Is electricity good or bad, it kills people everday, and it saves lives every day. Same concept if you ask me.

I'm obviously asking the question to those who believe in an omni-benevolent (100% good) God.
I'm not asking about those who do not.

reply to post by arpgme


If we're talking about the Christian gods, then there's a problem with the definition of "good". In Christianity, "good" is defined by whatever their gods do and are not judged by real moral compasses.

For example, when the OT god of demanded the genocide of men, women, and children, it was considered a "good" and "righteous" act. By no measure of any person's moral compass does that qualify as a "good" thing. Therefore, "good" is a lot like "love" in the Christian bible; it has its own internal jargon definition.

jaws1975
Is electricity good or bad, it kills people everday, and it saves lives every day. Same concept if you ask me.

There are no electricity cults claiming that electricity is wholly 100% morally just when it kills people.

God is good, just and fair. He supersedes time and space, He was before there ever was anything. He knows you better than you know yourself. He created us with free will. Otherwise he would of made robots. To have free will means to know good and evil. If no evil exists then how can we be good? Why did he make us weak and fallible to sin? What is said is an eternal reward awaits us if we follow and serve Him.

You are deflecting the test on God when you are the one who was created with the weaknesses (7 deadly sins). God is good and the most just and righteous. Knowing this we have an advantage to attain this reward (God is fair). If you choose not to ignore it.

Do you have faith?

God is completely good, he knows evil, but does not feel it because he knows better.
He did however create Satan, once his right hand man, fell to his own arrogance towards God and became the embodiment of evil.

bitsforbytes
God is good, just and fair. He supersedes time and space, He was before there ever was anything. He knows you better than you know yourself. He created us with free will. Otherwise he would of made robots. To have free will means to know good and evil. If no evil exists then how can we be good? Why did he make us weak and fallible to sin? What is said is an eternal reward awaits us if we follow and serve Him.

You are deflecting the test on God when you are the one who was created with the weaknesses (7 deadly sins). God is good and the most just and righteous. Knowing this we have an advantage to attain this reward (God is fair). If you choose not to ignore it.

Do you have faith?

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If you took only the actions of the gods of the Christian bible and removed all mystical aspects of them, you would have a mixture of Hitler, Genghis Khan, Mother Theresa, and Che Guevara (genocide, conquest, generosity, and social justice, respectively).

The only way for a person to look at his actions and declare them "good" is to completely ignore the definition of the word "good".

A more realistic and honest label for the Christian gods would be "balanced" or "dynamic". The OT god obviously demonstrates evil over and over again and then shows goodness in the NT. To me, this shows a pantheon (or aspects of one god, if you prefer) that understands the entire scope of good vs evil. There is nothing wrong with revering gods that you can relate to but to call them "wholly good" is simply unrealistic and denial.

reply to post by Cuervo


I see what you mean. However, to remove all the mystical things as you call them, doesn't make him God anymore.

You can't remove the stripes from a zebra and then say see it is a horse.

God is what he is. The actions we perceive from God's hand as evil is like when my father use to discipline me when I was a child. I thought he was mean to me, but later I realized he did it out of love.

Does that make sense?

bitsforbytes
reply to post by Cuervo

 

God is what he is. The actions we perceive from God's hand as evil is like when my father use to discipline me when I was a child. I thought he was mean to me, but later I realized he did it out of love.

Does that make sense?

No. Because the analogy does not completely fit. If your god only spanked a few towns, that would be different. A more accurate analogy would be that all those neighbor kids your father murdered actually were fed to you so it was out of love.

The actions taken from your bible are static and do not change, no matter what labels you put on the gods in it. That's what I mean when I say that Christians have their own definition of "good" when justifying the evil acts that are in the stories.

It's not like there was an alien force on its way to wipe out the world and god saved it by killing a couple of cities. No, he did it because he didn't agree with them. Again, I'm not saying he's not worth worshiping; I'm just saying that actions speak louder than words, even for gods.

What I find interesting is the Christian dogma that Jesus was fully man and fully God. If Jesus was without sin how could he have been fully man? Aren't all men under the curse of sin? If so, Jesus could not have been fully man because he was free from sin from birth.

Christian doctrine fails on so many levels it's almost comical.

reply to post by arpgme


The contradictions about Gods nature an all be solved when realising there in NO God. God is made up by the human imagination.

AthlonSavage
reply to post by arpgme

 

The contradictions about Gods nature an all be solved when realising there in NO God. God is made up by the human imagination.

How does that clear anything up? Made up or not, the argument is still the same. If it helps you, just pretend that we all agree with you and we are just debating a good fiction.

reply to post by Cuervo


The problem is that you are looking at the Christian God as filtered through his interpreters who are always human. Humans will always have a flawed understanding of God while we are here on this earth because we are necessarily limited in our comprehension of Him just by virtue of what He is.

And understand, even if you do not believe, consider what kind of a being you would have to be dealing with in order to be what God would have to be ... an entity powerful enough to exist before the universe existed, to potentially be the impetus for the creation of the universe (set off the Big Bang if you will), to be wise enough to set all the universal constants under which everything in this universe as we know it developed as it did, including us ... and you want to think you can comprehend thought for this kind of entity as we are now?

reply to post by arpgme


Isaiah 55:8-11 pretty much sums it up as far as I'm concerned...

8 “For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways,”
declares the Lord.
9 “As the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.
10 As the rain and the snow
come down from heaven,
and do not return to it
without watering the earth
and making it bud and flourish,
so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater,
11 so is my word that goes out from my mouth:
It will not return to me empty,
but will accomplish what I desire
and achieve the purpose for which I sent it.

I mentioned something in a thread yesterday that I will go ahead and reiterate, although apparently some people simply refuse to think such an idea is feasible. I propose that there are many things that exceed human understanding. Stated simply, we as humans cannot fathom what omnipotence, omniscience, or any other such concept truly means. Well we can grasp the meaning, more or less, but we cannot truly understand what such a property would be like. Our brains are in no way sophisticated enough for such endeavours.

So I don't think you can attempt to boil everything down to "good" or "evil," when talking about God making decisions, and something that might seem like a good or an evil to us, might truly be the opposite, or mean something totally different, in the grand scheme of things. But of course we wouldn't really know either way. I just think it is a mistake to think that we can understand what such concepts would truly be like.

Someone can take any situation, and if God truly had a hand in the situation to some extent, the person can say "why did God do this, or not do that," but honestly, if God can see the larger picture, everything makes sense. And not only that, but take an instance like that of death. There are so many people who think death is this horrible thing, because all they can comprehend is a physical life on earth. They fail to realize that God might "let" someone die, although it depends on your perception of God, and although that seems bad to many on earth, it could be the exact opposite in the grand scheme of existence. And I mean both physical and spiritual existence, although spiritual existence could very well be some quasi-physical form of life for all we know.

arpgme
Does God know what it feels like to lust? ( lust is going after physical pleasure - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to have hatred in the heart? (hate is absence of love - evil)

Does God know what it feels like to be rich with a lot of money and material goods (putting the body over the flesh - evil)

How can God know what these feel like if these feelings are wicked and God has 0% wickedness in him but only 100% goodness? Either God feels these things and he is not 100% good, or he does not feel these things and he is not 100% knowing.

And if you say "God doesn't have to follow his own rules" , then how can you even know that God is good if your morality comes from him and yet he is beyond his own system of morality?

God is absolute neutral. That means God know exactly what we feel. Because to God everything we feel is different than he's feeling.

-Because God is absolute neutral does not mean that God will not pick sides. It means that God will never Change.

God is not a being. God is infinite, God always was and always is. God takes up all space there is. If people just understood this bit. Some would know why God wont change things.

The expansion of our universe proves a very spacific thing about Gods creation. And that is that Gods creation was pre planned. God created the singularity with its property to expand and form life through a time line. Everything that have been and will be is fallowing this time line. "The expanding singularity"

Life on earth is pre planned. But we dont have to suffer. And we dont need Gods help to be free and to live a good life. We have that choice. But the big problem is that eveyone must make the same commitment.

ketsuko
reply to post by Cuervo

 

The problem is that you are looking at the Christian God as filtered through his interpreters who are always human. Humans will always have a flawed understanding of God while we are here on this earth because we are necessarily limited in our comprehension of Him just by virtue of what He is.

And understand, even if you do not believe, consider what kind of a being you would have to be dealing with in order to be what God would have to be ... an entity powerful enough to exist before the universe existed, to potentially be the impetus for the creation of the universe (set off the Big Bang if you will), to be wise enough to set all the universal constants under which everything in this universe as we know it developed as it did, including us ... and you want to think you can comprehend thought for this kind of entity as we are now?

But you are proving my point. You are judging morality for your god by different standards than what we reserve for the basic definition. This can only mean you have a separate definition for "good" when speaking about your god than you do when speaking about everything else. That's why I think "wholly good" is not the right term for the Christian gods but "dynamic" would be.

By your rationale, the more powerful a person is, the more that person should be able to justify actions that are evil. To be fair, we practice this concept in our law and it's wrong. When a rich kid runs over a family while drunk, he gets probation as opposed to a poor 20-something who may end up spending the rest of his years getting raped by prison guards. Or just look at theft in Wallstreet vs stealing a stereo at Wallmart. I bet you can guess who we hold accountable. You can also see why the majority of Americans (who are mostly Christian) may think that this is rational since it's also how they judge their god.

God knows everything?
I think if there is a God or Afterlife then God knows that.
That would be the only thing he could be sure of, everything else is up to the physical world as he possibly created it.
He made the choice that existence is Good and our choice is if we agree that God or existence is Good.


The rest we decide ourselves, we have been following good path, even if we see the bad. We see we don't do everything good, we are no jesus but accepting God is Good will help you unimaginably. We have more chance of passing good on such as God did than we have of being good ourselves. Jesus is told to have managed good but accepted no one else can.

Finding a way to pass on good is possibly neglected for fear of having to give up the bad we enjoy.
There is only one bad and that is not being choosing God as Good. Our vices are societies problems and dealt with by us.

Society can either think god is good and make it laws on the right path or fight out its own created problems.