What can God be held accountable for?
- Thread starter water
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The person "GOD" does not influence your life 100%. (As he/she/they doesn't/don't exist)
When will you theists realize the obvious truth. If you really want to go to heaven (which doesnt exist), start praying when you are really, really old.
When will you theists realize the obvious truth. If you really want to go to heaven (which doesnt exist), start praying when you are really, really old.
water said:
As the first cause, it is impossible for God not to be responsible. For good. For evil. For joy. For pain. For the fall in the Garden. And for the coming of Jesus.
But of course, responsibility is a human notion and therefore is not necessarily one shared by Divinity. So God might not be responsible in the first place.
God is accountable only to himself, not to people. People resent that because we expect such power to be abused. We're used to a world of sin. But for the clay to question its maker it has to have some authoritive standard of its own. Do we? Or do we expect God to answer to the shifting moral arrogance of every individual? Because what is experienced as good for one person might be experienced as evil by another. God simply does not sit in the seat of the accused: it's the morality He gave us that makes us sense injustice, but the injustice itself does not come from Him.
Micah 6:8
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
§outh§tar said:
But what does this responsibility imply -- "God is responsible for good/evil/joy/pain"?
Can I say, "Oh God, one day you will pay for my good/evil/joy/pain!"? And what happens then?
Well, which is it then? Is God responsible, or is God not responsible?
As with any being possessing free will, god would be responsible for his actions.water said:
If god is indeed omni-benevolent then he will be able to explain the world and our lives to us so that we can understand and accept the necessity for the suffering that occurs. Like a doctor giving you a vaccine. I also expect that a benevolent god would understand and forgive the anger or disbelief of an individual based upon their experiences. You don't punish a child for not understanding something beyond its ken.water said:
This amounts to "might makes right". Are we merely sycophants to god's power or do we have our own value? If we have no inherent value then there is no purpose to our existence. No point to "free-will". Creation becomes masturbation, nothing more than god making himself feel good for no intent or purpose. It is only when we have inherent value that our choices matter.Jenyar said:
~Raithere
Raithere said:
But which actions are God's actions?
I've started a thread on this:
Of course.
I see your point. But it seems to me that the implication is that God and we are something completely separate, as if we are so special that we exist outside of His creation.
Combine:
If we have no inherent value then there is no purpose to our existence. No point to "free-will". Creation becomes masturbation, nothing more than god making himself feel good for no intent or purpose. It is only when we have inherent value that our choices matter.
and:
If god is indeed omni-benevolent then he will be able to explain the world and our lives to us so that we can understand and accept the necessity for the suffering that occurs. Like a doctor giving you a vaccine. I also expect that a benevolent god would understand and forgive the anger or disbelief of an individual based upon their experiences. You don't punish a child for not understanding something beyond its ken.
In short, what you are saying is that if God is indeed omnibenevolent, then things will certainly make sense to you when your time comes and you get to ask God whatever you have ever wanted to ask, and God will be able to explain all that to you and you will understand.
You may not understand it right now, but you are leaving the option open that maybe one day you will, by God's explanation.
This also means that even though now you may think -- Are we merely sycophants to god's power or do we have our own value? If we have no inherent value then there is no purpose to our existence. No point to "free-will". Creation becomes masturbation, nothing more than god making himself feel good for no intent or purpose. It is only when we have inherent value that our choices matter. -- this could be cleared up that day too.
If you are leaving the option open that one day God will explain these things to you -- then how can you now seriously doubt anything? Because of the fear that God may not be omni-benevolent?
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itopal said:
And where are you and your own will and responsibility in this?
yorda:exactly no sentient corporeal being is responsible, only a omniscience, omnipresent, and omnipotent, supernatural god is accountable for everthing.
itopal said:
This is a non sequitur. That is, it is a non sequitur from the position that God exists and has certain qualities, like being loving.
Otherwise, your argument holds for a god that is merely a placeholder, a name, and there would be no difference whether he exists or not.
But since you do not know what God knows, since you are limited, you have what is to you free will.
This is a negativistic anthropomorphization, born out of the general human proclivity to view his own non-omnipotence as a drawback to his humanity.
Explain. Which abstraction do I hold in mind?
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Yorda said:
mustafhakofi said:
So when you brush your teeth in the morning, you think it is not you who is doing it?
Saying, "No one is responsible for anything" is like saying no-one is doing anything, all things just happen, and individuals have no power whatsoever over it.
Being responsible does not only mean that you will be judged and sentenced for what you do. Being responsible entails more: it is admitting that it is you who are doing it, whatever it is you are doing, good or bad. Being responsible for an action is about attributing an action to the doer, and the doer taking a cognitive, an ethical and an emotional relation to the action.
If you agree that actions happen, but claim that nobody is responsible for them, you are actively cutting off the connection between the doer and the action.
So who is brushing your teeth?
water said:
Well that's tough to answer because God. Doesn't...
If we are to take the argument to its full, normal, and natural conclusion, God Himself cannot be responsible for His actions since He has predetermined them. He has also predetermined that He will predetermine them. Ad nauseam.
Causality issues.
God. Doesn't play dice.
What is this who you're talking about? There is only one being which expresses itself through all things. The same self speaks through me as it speaks through you. How many who's would there be? There are no individuals, there is only me, inside all people.
At the moment, people don't know themselves, so they think they exist and that they are the doers. The self merely watches what the body is doing. How can I be sure that something is my doing if I don't even know what this self is?
No one chose to be born, and no one chose the circumstances. No human being wants evil. Everyone wants perfection. People can't help what their body does, they are controlled by their emotions.
At the moment, people don't know themselves, so they think they exist and that they are the doers. The self merely watches what the body is doing. How can I be sure that something is my doing if I don't even know what this self is?
No one chose to be born, and no one chose the circumstances. No human being wants evil. Everyone wants perfection. People can't help what their body does, they are controlled by their emotions.
I think it would be fair to say to God, "you are responsible for all this".
It would also be fair for God to say, "you are responsible for that which I gave you to control."
Nobody can hold god accountable unless it is for allowing them to exist. If a person is at the point where they wish they had never been born, I think they have legitimate issues, but saying, "I don't like how this place works, but I'm in acceptance of being alive", although i feel that way all the time, isn't worth much. How does anyone know which "negative" circumstances are necessary, and which are superfluous? I'll still complain about it though...
It is valid to call things as you see them, and then when we see them differently, someday, if that happens, we may not feel it necessary to complain. After all your, existence goes by, this eighty years is just a long moment in time, a very long string of moments. When it is over what will it have meant? If there is meaning in it, is it better or worse than being a human-animal? To know that things suck takes the same brain as knowing something is beautiful.
It would also be fair for God to say, "you are responsible for that which I gave you to control."
Nobody can hold god accountable unless it is for allowing them to exist. If a person is at the point where they wish they had never been born, I think they have legitimate issues, but saying, "I don't like how this place works, but I'm in acceptance of being alive", although i feel that way all the time, isn't worth much. How does anyone know which "negative" circumstances are necessary, and which are superfluous? I'll still complain about it though...
It is valid to call things as you see them, and then when we see them differently, someday, if that happens, we may not feel it necessary to complain. After all your, existence goes by, this eighty years is just a long moment in time, a very long string of moments. When it is over what will it have meant? If there is meaning in it, is it better or worse than being a human-animal? To know that things suck takes the same brain as knowing something is beautiful.
cole grey said:
Exactly. Exactly!
Namely, if we look into the stance that produced the statement "God is responsible for everything", we can conclude that the person making such a statement is either voluntarily placing their full trust in God; or they have given in to "deistic determinism" where they consider themselves to be without any will of their own whatsoever.
Yes! This stance has many important consequences. One of them being the evaluation of this life in regards to God being the one who brought it about. The question of, "Does my life belong to me?" arises.
If god is omnipotent, then he would be responsible for everything almost by definition. If you can cause anything to happen or prevent anything from happening, then by simple inaction you implicitly consent to everything that happens, or doesn’t happen. The responsibility goes along with the power, whether you like it or not.water said:
If I see a man drowning and have the power to easily save him by throwing him a life preserver, then I am responsible for whether or not he drowns. If I do nothing, I implicitly consent to his drowning through inaction and am at least partly responsible for his death. If I throw him the life preserver, then I am responsible for saving him. It’s the same with god, but on a much larger scale.
So, if god is omniscient and omnipotent than he would be responsible for (for example) a child burning to death in a fiery car wreck, since he could have stopped it but chose to do nothing.
How do you define omnipotent? Many seem to think; "the ability to do anything". Yet I fail to see this in any respected dictionary. In fact does "the ability to do anything" make sense? Is anything possible? Can God both 'be' and 'not be' at the same time? Omnipotence must then be the ability to do all that is possible given one's nature. Since we sit here and don't know what is indeed possible or not we must do as Raithere stated (as revealed by water). Sit (in faith or out of it) and wait our turn to learn. If we then say; "God created so He's ultimately responsible" we should look to cole grey's post.Nasor said: