#599 | Is not the question of a God, while claiming to love infants, has infants hacked into pieces a wholly logical question instead of a moral question? Why do some claim this is intrinsically a moral issue? Why need we go further than simply showing this God is logically absurd?
The following argument is strangely considered to be about the problem of evil rather than a logical problem. I suppose a solution is not found in the scripted responses of apologists, so they respond with the next closest response…which is, in essence, not close at all.
Is it logically possible for someone to both 1) never lie and 2) love innocent infants, and 3) command a vicious death for those loved infants? Please elaborate if so.
#560 | It appears that within Christianity everything noble about humans must be attributed to God, and everything ignoble about humans must be attributed to sin entering the world. Considering this is 100% of the logical space, can this be rigorously tested? Or only asserted?
#498 | Predictive power is indicative of truth. With the recent, rapid fall in US religiosity, will there be any correlation in crime, divorce, or in other metrics that might indicate any increase in “godlessness” causes “evil”? What can we now expect?
#435 | An STR rep states, “If you had evolved to kill humans, you would have to say killing humans is not evil.” True! For this reason humans don’t punish a killer tiger & those clinically insane. What then is the issue? And is “evil” anything more than emotional abhorrence?
#367 | Do emotions generate morality? Does extreme emotional outrage over infant-killing render the act “evil”? Is there some threshold at which strong emotional abhorrence renders an act actually evil or renders a loving act righteous? Or are emotions independent of a substantiation of morality?
#357 | Isn’t Jon Noyes’ claims that a) evil is evidenced by humans’ “emotional response to suffering and evil in the world” & b) “we have emotional reactions to these evil things” either 1) only evidence of emotions or 2) circular (evil is confirmed by perceived cases of evil)?
#351 | Is it possible that the doctrine of a deserved eternal torment for a single offense serves as a filter, producing an in-group of arrogant Christians who enjoy throwing around threats of Hell and who do very little of actual compassion for others? How might we test this?
#162 | When a young child beyond the age of innocence chooses Hell by lying to her mother, of what sort are the Hell-deserving and Hell-choosing thoughts going through her little mind?
#158 | I’m with Greg—If there is no actual evil, there is no morality-giving God. I also find no evidence of evil. I see only events that make us emotionally distraught. Therefore there is no God. Right?
#157 | When choosing a depiction of evil acts deserving of severe punishment, Christians often invoked something similar to poking the eyeballs out of someone’s head… Instead of the lie of a little child that is allegedly deserving of eternal damnation. Why is this done?
#154 | Greg claims the problem of evil reflects a “virtually universal understanding of the world.” that reifies what is emotionally abhorrent into objective “evil. What legitimates this move from emotions to an ontologically legitimate “evil”?
#148 | Greg this week again claimed people rarely actually deny the existence of objective evil. How long will he continue in this falsity? Why not actually engage the challenge and extra-biblically demonstrate rather than assume objective evil is actual.
#147 | Few disagree that telling others what they believe is raw arrogance and close-mindedness. Greg: “Everyone believes there is evil in the world!” < Your emotional abhorrence for X does not make X objectively evil. You need an actual argument, an argument I’ve yet to see.
#146 | Religion X claims killing children is objectively evil…unless their god orders it. Religion Y says the same…but invoke their own god for the exceptions. They both claim to unbelievers that killing children is “clearly” objectively evil…yet not in their own god’s case. The act cannot then be clearly evil. Right?
#119 | Does not the parsimonious explanation of human behavior in which human actions and our dispositions toward and reactions to actions are simply based on the same variety of emotions we see in other mammals make spiritual notions of evil and righteousness superfluous?
#114 | Isn’t what some people call “evil” simply an emotional abhorrence? Isn’t evil an improper reification of a common emotional disposition, invoked in an illegitimate and dishonest attempt to move despised behaviors into an alleged, yet unsubstantiated spiritual realm?
#113 | Once scrutinized, it appears the claim there exists actual evil distills to “everyone knows there’s evil“, an incoherent move from a common emotional abhorrence for particular behaviors to the conclusion of objective evil. Can this move be coherently justified?
#091 | If it is immoral to kill a fetus even if one parent is “evil” as in a rape pregnancy, was it the fact that both parents were evil that made killing the Amalekite babies not only fine, but morally necessary? (I don’t believe in morality. This is assessing the coherency of your ideology.)
#062 | Why, when I question the coherency of an allegedly loving God acting in ways we would unequivocally call unloving were a human the actor, do apologists think I’m referencing the Problem of Evil? An unloving loving God is a logical absurdity, not a moral problem, right?