God: Benevolent or Malevolent?

Why not? That was the sole basis for the idea of humans being created in the creators image, at all.

In fact, where does that idea come from at all. None of the narrators in the bible (that I can recall) ever claims to have seen God. Yes? Other documents?

 

Life creates itself. Creation isn't a one-time event that happened a very long time ago; it's a process in which every living cell is an active participant.

The 'perfection' idea is entirely subjective. As a random example, being eaten by a shark could be a bad day for you, but a good day for the shark. Success - of any one individual, or even a species or an ecosystem - depends on finding a niche and maintaining a balance.

So, I guess my answer to the question is neither, and both.

 

Depends on What type of Church you attend.
If the preacher lives in a better house than his followers - Your In Trouble.
The preacher runs a business VS a Church.

 

Re: God: Benevolent - Nonevolent - Malevolent?

And another option...

Is Tom Clancy malevolent, non-evolent, or benevolent, if you ask the characters in his books? The question doesn't really make any sense. It could be said that Clancy loves his characters, even the evil ones (or perhaps particularly the evil ones). On the other hand he manipulates fate to ensure that horrible things happen to them. And he certainly understands and cares that horrible things are happening to them.

The relationship of Author to Characters seems to me, far closer to a hypothesized relationship of Creator God to Created Creatures, than any of the other suggested ones.

 

Re: God: Benevolent - Nonevolent - Malevolent?

I believe that the Bible acknowledges other life in the universe . . .

“And take heed, lest you lift your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun, the moon, and the stars, all the host of heaven, you feel driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord your God has given to all the peoples under the whole heaven as a heritage†(Deuteronomy 4:19).

I also don't see why one of the aforementioned hosts couldn't be created, by God, as a non-carbon based life form.

As I've said before until you've come to a decision as to what God's purposes and goals are you can't place His acts on a scale.

It's as wrong as what was done to Zimmerman.

 

Your adherence to political rhetoric is in full force. You're passing judgement over a shooting incident you have no details over, and then you try to relate that towards your stance of one particular version of the Bible.

 

Treb,

"Under heaven" meaning the cosmos?

You're going to have to give me a cite to a reliable source to show that
at the time of the Old and New Testaments virtually every person on
earth didn't think the "heavens" were essentially an overhead inverted
bowl and the "hosts of heaven" merely the uncountable heavenly
bodies, "all the peoples under the whole heavens" being the different
races of humanity.

And just where did I place the acts of a possible divinity on a scale. I
said merely that the proposed either/or choice was false and proposed
a scale. Show me where I made a judgment as to the acts of a possible
godhead.

When you quote my post and say,

the "you" means me. If you wish to make a broader statement,
"someone" or "anyone" followed by "they" would be in order.
You'd still catch me up in the net, but you wouldn't be directly
alleging that I have said or done something that I haven't.

 

Correction: What would happen if we discovered that cats are not the only near-godlike creatures in the universe?

By no imaginable definition could the human race be regarded as near godlike. Unless god is a petty, selfish, cruel creature willing to crawl in the muck and murder his own grandmother for personal gain.

There is actually a historical precedent: The clash of cultures when Europeans arrived in the Americas. There were serious and hard-fought debates over whether the people we now call Indians had souls and whether they were actually "human." Different religious "authorities" came down on different sides of the debate. In the end, with the permission of the church, Indians were robbed, enslaved, and massacred; they were prohibited from using their own language or observing their own culture, on pain of severe punishment. Little children were brutally whipped for speaking their own language. Etc.

Note: The Catholic Church eventually decided that Indians did have souls, and that they should not be enslaved, but that they could be held against their will and forced to work in return for being converted to Catholicism. This system of "encomiendas" was effectively slavery and forced conversion, but was not called slavery. It was quite effective with the people of the South American and Mesoamerican civilizations, though the Indians of North America by and large could never be enslaved because they would refuse, even to the death.

I suspect that if we discovered an alien race, we'd react to them in much the same way if there was physical contact, and either kill them or be killed trying; and that if there was only radio contact, our religious "authorities" would deny that they had souls, regardless of what science could tell us about their intelligence. Religions are not known for accepting the knowledge that science provides us.

 

Let us not forget After every thing that was done to them - They were always given A Good Haircut and a Good Christian Name.

 

After everything was done? No, the haircut and renaming were part of the continuing indignity.

 

Reductio ad Bad Adherents

Reductio ad Bad Adherents

If a n00b said they had a lemon Prius and concluded everything Toyota makes is bad, would you believe it?

Nobody would go for that logical fallicy.

Yet for years non-believers have enjoyed repeating this similar logical fallicy:

Jesus devoted his ministry opposing religious leaders twisting God's message.

Threw money changers out of the temple.

Defended people that like Native Americans and African-Americans did not get full respect - women and Samitarians.

And the rabbis had Jesus killed on trumped up charges.

So both Jesus and many secular people agree self-rightous people have twisted the church.

But their conclusions are completely different.

Secular People: There must be no God.

Jesus: People are inherently bad and struggle to find God.

 

Hey, it is page five... can I bring up Hitler now?

 

^ 8off was the ultimate bad adherent.

Had he won the war, he planned to wipe out Christianity and make the state religion worship of him, as it already was moving towards.

 

There's absolutely no evidence of that viewpoint. 94 percent of German citizens identified themselves as Christian in WWII (either Protestant or Catholic). I don't know of anyone subscribing to a religion where Hitler is worshiped.

 

Check out Religious views of Adolf Hitler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

There are various documents by Gobbels and Bormann that Hitler was not Christian. "Positive Christianity" deleted the Hebrew Bible and attempted to justify anti-semitism.

 

There have been disputes about whether Hitler was Christian, but it's quite a leap to then claim that he intended to "wipe out Christianity".

 

Totally off the subject. The question I was replying to was: Would we regard an alien life form as "persons" or would we find excuses to deny them personhood.

My post was that there is a precedent: We encountered humans with a different culture than ours and we regarded them as non-human, or not fully human. How much more would we regard aliens as non-persons since they would look nothing like us, would probably have an entirely different genetic structure, and might have a wholly different chemistry.

 

^ Check out the links and Google.

Various priests and Dietrich Bonhoeffer died in consecration camps because they would not let their faith be twisted by Nazi ideology (again, [ame=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_Christianity]Positive Christianity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame] ) .... this much is well-known.

What was more covert is Hitler's private conversations to undermine Christianity and eventually all other religions over time.

 

The quote you included is an "alleged document" that surfaced in 1985. No one died at a "consecration camp" because no such thing existed. If you mean concentration camp, it only enforces the conventional belief that Hitler could not alienate Germans and gained popularity with anti-semitic ideology : not anti-Christian ideology. Even the concept "Positive Christianity" or "German Christians" have the word "Christian" in them...how much they reinterpreted Christianity is a seperate topic, but their basis was Christianity.

 

To the contrary, I've lost count years ago of bad adherents being blamed for everything imaginable and some....therefore there must be no God. If this absurdity was deleted over the years, the archive of Fred's House of Pancakes would be significantly smaller.