August 25, 2012
-
A thing that people don’t get
I feel there is a fundamental disconnect here when talking of an omnipotent deity who has all the rights where people have none. To wit:
@agnophilo @Somefishytales – So hitler was sent by god to kill 6 million jews? How is god then not evil?
Because it flat-out doesn’t apply to Him. I’m not going to say you have to agree to this worldview, but if you do it, at least try taking it whole hog and not just piecemeal, because that way it’s bound to look incoherent.
Look, I am a writer. In the course of telling a story I may create and dispose of any number of imaginary beings – people who could suffer, be maimed, or die just as easily as they could find redemption, happiness, perfection, success. I have a perfect right to do this because they exist as adjuncts to the story. Their highest purpose, their destiny, is to tell the story they were created to tell. No more, no less. I may feel sympathy for them, and I may even tweak the story to give them a happier ending, but whether I do or don’t, nothing in that says anything about my own goodness or vileness.
If you accept that there is a supreme Creator, we are in some sense the fictional constructs of His mind. He has, therefore, a perfect right to heap any kind of abuse upon us, if such is our reason for existing. That we find life worth living is, then, either evidence of some benevolence, or of our ability to fool ourselves, a delusion which makes us suitable for the roles assigned to us.
Christians (in standard theology) don’t construct evil as “bad things happening to us.” That’s too petty, too shallow, too self-centered. They construct it as “out of accord with divine plan” or “out of accordance with divine will.” That means that if you’ll take what He gives you, and like it, or don’t live under His roof (this reality.) Of course this burns, and most people can’t truly accept it, because how can we accept that we are irrelevant, that at a cosmic level we have no rights, or that we are at the mercies of an intelligence who has a plan in mind that we can’t comprehend? That’s ego speaking, and no matter what we don’t have in common, each of us has an ego.
You may accept or reject this system of thought. But don’t act like the Hitler question is a “gotcha.” It only shows misunderstanding of the system.
Comments (8)
So the jews are fictional and hitler wasn’t evil either, right?
i’m not saying agnophilo’s position phixxes anything. certainly not. but actually, mori, i think you’ll find you’re playing the artful dodger here. maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow…but sooner or later. probably later; getting to that place takes time. and lots of observation, thought, and meditation. you lack none of the above.
No response?
I guess not. Nobody’s responding to me lately…
@agnophilo - That is not really what I was saying. Hitler is evil under a number of interpretations. Most straightforward is if you allow that he had free will to murder or not murder people, and that he chose to murder because it was politically convenient. But even if he was evil, and the Creator allowed it, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the Creator was evil.
Suppose, for instance, that the only consistent way to allow people to have free will at all is to allow the possibility of Hitlers existing? And suppose that the total abrogation of moral choice is the greatest evil? That last part is actually true in certain modes of ethical theory. The first part is unknowable.
@complicatedlight - I’m not sure that it’s a dodge. Say that you believe an omnipotent God exists but you don’t believe he has the right to interfere with peoples’ lives. How would you propose to enact your opposition, anyway?
@moritheil - You get that I was replying to someone who was suggesting that hitler was miraculously protected by god because he was doing god’s will, right? That is what I was arguing against. It would be a negation of free will.
@agnophilo - I hope that you, in turn, get that I am not defending anyone else’s statements, but rather, considering the classic question of “if a Creator can intervene but chooses not to and then horrible things happen, does that make him evil?” Your quote is merely a convenient point of departure.
@moritheil - No, you took my comment out of context and pretended I was saying something I wasn’t. I was arguing with the proposition that hitler was doing god’s will and was under his protection.