DaveC426913 (what do all those numbers mean at the end of your name?):
I think you misunderstand what I was trying to do there. I wasn't trying to prove that God doesn't exist. I was working on the assumption that kx000's god
does exist, and questioning what the nature of that god is like, based on what kx000 tells me the god does to skeptics - i.e. he creates them, knowing all along that he will send them to hell.
In my opinion, any God that would do that is unworthy of our respect. We might worship it out of fear, perhaps, but not because "God is love", which is what kx000 claims.
God created humans and gave them free will. He wanted them to have faith in him, because he felt that ineffable belief without evidence would make them better people, as opposed to, say better cynics.
Does this God want people to know him, or does he want to hide himself away? If he wants people to know him, then why rely on something like "faith" - belief in the absence of evidence? How does it make us all better people being either unsure that God is even real (skeptics) or believing that God is real for no good reason (religious people)?
Example: having faith in God can translate into having faith in other people - especially those outside our tribe who are, similar to God, inscrutable to us. That would be a big step toward a peaceful loving existence on Earth.
That argument threatens to mix together the two different usages of the word "faith" that I have discussed before. If you have "faith" in some other person, you usually mean that you trust them, and that trust is usually based on evidence - e.g. your own history of interactions with them, or the reputation they have that you're aware of, or whatever. If you believe, with no evidence at all, that some other person is trustworthy, say, then that's more akin to the religious kind of faith, being belief without good evidence.
By "having faith in other people" you
might just mean that your default position is to trust people until they show themselves to be untrustworthy. But that's not really faith. It's just a pro-social attitude you take and it is quite rational.
Here's a parent-child example.
I go out at night to a film and leave my preteen son home under his own recognizance.
He gets into the booze and destroys the place.
Do I love him and console myself that I gave him that freedom?
Or do I punish him because he should have known better? Because I raised him right?
Am I evil or manipulative for setting him up to fail?
No. I set him up with an opportunity to succeed.
Clearly there is some logic at least in exacting punishment on someone for doing something you actually gave them the freedom to do.
That's what's important about humanity: using our free will to make the right decisions.
Here's a similar example, for your consideration:
A pre-teen boy has no idea who his parents are. They have never been a part of his life. During his childhood, his carers gave him a book and told him it contained all his parents' rules - i.e. the rules that set out how his parents expect him to behave. Rule no. 217 says "When you're at home on your own, don't drink the alcohol and destroy the place." Elsewhere in the rule book, it says "Rule 2001. If you disobey any of the rules in this book, your parents will punish you. The punishment will be life in prison." The book also says things like "Rule 1. Your parents love you" and "Rule 13. It is wrong to disobey your parents' rules."
Over time, as he grows up, the boy starts to wonder about the book. He starts to question whether his parents are alive, and whether they really wrote the book at all. He has met people who assure him that, yes, the book was written by his parents. Some of them even claim to have met his parents, themselves, perhaps even receiving private communications from them. On the other hand, he has met other people who tell him the book is a lie: his parents died when he was a baby, and the book contains words of others that are merely attributed to his parents.
That he can't verify the writers of the book is one problem. Another is that after reading it many times, talking to other people and educating himself independently, the boy starts to think that maybe some of the rules aren't very good. For instance, Rule no. 31 says "All homosexual people are evil and must be killed by stoning" and Rule no. 87 says "Some people are meant to be slaves. If you want to take and keep slaves, there's no problem with that."
One night, when his guardians have gone to a film, the boy drinks the alcohol from the booze cabinet and destroys the house.
One year later, there is a knock on the door. The boy opens it. Standing there are a man and a woman, carrying handcuffs, which they slap on the boy. "We are your parents!" they tell him. "We are arresting you for breaking the rules in the Parent Rule Book. You will spend the rest of your life in prison!" The boy is dragged away and lives out the rest of his days in a concrete cell.
---
Wasn't that a nice story?
Now, let us consider. Suppose that the man and the woman who turned up out of the blue at the end of the story really
were the boy's parents. The parents were real all along. The Book of Rules really was written by them, and all the people who had told the boy both the facts about the parents and the book were right all along.
While presenting a broadly analogous scenario, here's what you, DaveC, had to say:
Am I evil or manipulative for setting him up to fail?
No. I set him up with an opportunity to succeed.
Clearly there is some logic at least in exacting punishment on someone for doing something you actually gave them the freedom to do.
That's what's important about humanity: using our free will to make the right decisions
In light of this, I ask you:
Were the parents in my little story evil or manipulative for setting the boy up to fail? Or did they set him up with an opportunity to succeed?
Were the parents justified in exacting punishment on the boy for doing something that they gave him the freedom to do? It's not like they didn't warn him what the consequences would be. It's right there in Rule 2001. The boy, having read the book many times, and having been assured it was all genuine, could hardly plead ignorance.
And the moral of this story, you tell us, is that what is important in it was that the boy was given the freedom to make the
right decisions. It certainly wasn't the
parents' fault that he chose to drink and trash the house. They weren't even there at the time.
Now the most important question of all: is there anything wrong about any of this? Are the parents at all at fault in my scenario? If so, what did they do that was morally wrong? And how, if at all, can the same reasoning be applied to the God of the bible?