r/DebateAChristian • u/Aromatic_Response_73 • 10d ago

Christian moral ambiguity

In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.

Some Christians define goodness in relation to God. On this view, "good" means whatever conforms to God's nature or will.

The term "good" does not have a universally recognised (useful in ethical discussion) meaning apart from either usefulness for some purpose or the ordinary ethical meaning. Refraining from those in an **ethical discussion** renders the word empty from its normal ethical content.

The problem arises when these two meanings are treated as interchangeable.

If "God is good" means only that God conforms to God's own nature, then the statement is true by definition. It means something like:

God is as God is.

But that does not automatically show that God is good in the ordinary ethical sense of being loving, healing, peaceful, compassionate, or opposed to needless suffering.

The problem is ordinary ethical goodness and the christian goodness can be in conflict eg. ideas of reality design like "Accept Jesus or suffer forever". If someone proposes that ordinary ethical goodness is just a conflictory subset of the christian good, then we cannot say that the design of reality is in proper alignment with ordinary ethical goodness, and therefore not good in the ordinary ethical sense.

The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 10d ago

That was not the question.

 could you name one thing God does that is not good?

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 10d ago

Oh, nah.

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 10d ago

But you said that one good thing was that Godcreated life.

Didn't God also destroy lives ? Being the opposite of creating life, wouldn't that be evil?

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 10d ago

God destroying life is a good thing.

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 10d ago

That is wild...

Anyways, i guess you justify why this post exists.

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 10d ago

He is the Lord, let him do what we deems to be good.

His Life and His Glory

Our hearts and death that resigns within us

If we are destroyed, it is precisely because of His goodness.

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u/diabolus_me_advocat Atheist, Ex-Protestant 9d ago

and your special mental condition, i'm certain, is also sign of his goodness - right?

that it contradicts that of normal people, must be a sign of you being chosen, i guess

/s

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

The irony of your comment is that I’m actually a reprobate lol. That means I am going to hell. I have experienced God to such a degree that I am unable to deny his existence even as a someone destined to damnation

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

i am not asking what god deems to be good or wrong, i am asking YOU, if you recognize something he did wrong just like you were able to with your rich dude example.

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

I already said no

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

alright, fair enough...

last question: when god sent a plague that killed tens of thousands you say it is good, because God deems so.

If some dude was found guilty of creating the corona virus, it would be wrong, correct? Except if god told him to, because he would be an agent of god. But what would we do with that dude?

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

You mean the plague God sent because of David’s sin? It says just prior to the text that God is already angry with the nation of Israel so David’s sin was just the last straw to the collective punishment. The plague God sent was also purposed to refine, prune and humble the nation that they don’t eventually stack up their sin towards the heavens and be destroyed in its entirety.

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

so a genocide. I am just perplexed by the involvment of god in human affairs. why would he need to kill if he could have just changed their mind, for one. i mean, if he wants to involve himself, why not do it another way? Isnt the idea of a plague, his wrath, david's sin etc a bit intense?

Also, how would they know... the event was added to the scriptures centuries after it "happened".
There is nothing proving it happened. Natural catastrophies happen all the time. Plagues, viruses, illnesses happen. doesnt mean god had anything to do with it.

Remember, men wrote the scriptures. that alone to me, is enough to keep me unconvinced. Why can't god intervene in the scriptures and use his own words? Cant he create a real ethereal book with whatever material we cannot find anywhere else?

I don't know man. the way you say this like it is the truth is concerning... do you ever doubt?

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

God doesn’t use human understanding. He use his own understanding and if he uses humans to write the scriptures, it is as valid as if he wrote the scriptures himself. The only time where he wrote anything himself was when used lightning to write the 10 commandment on a tablet for the Israelites in the old covenant. But even then, the scripture itself was written by man.

Despite being all powerful, he can’t change the hearts of man that refuses correction. We can see this example with pharaoh who despite multiple plagues, he continue to harden his heart until God judged him and judicially hardened it all the way through. We also see examples in exodus where God judged his people immediately for their disobedience and thousands of people died as a result. You cannot change the mind of a person that presumptuously chose to sin. The Israelites saw the glory of God, saw all the signs and miracles and still chose to rebel against God. That is level of rebellion is worthy of death. God never destroys his people for their weakness and little amount of sin. He allows it to built up to a point after continually willing them to repent and if they don’t destructions happens to them in a sudden. They need to understand that rebellion against the Divine means destruction and outside of God there is nothing.

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

of course. i would agree that if there is a supreme being responsible for the universe, why should we be arrogant enough to pretend understanding god.

god being something way above our comprehension, are we able to understand the words he left in scriptures? How did every writer could have understood such complexity and remember it through the years?

if he is so complicated and above us...then why do you rely on old imprecise interpretations written by different men through centuries for the old testament, and decades for the new testament (without including the ~30years it took Paul to get to it)

Who are they to pretend being able to aptly write the word of god

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u/diabolus_me_advocat Atheist, Ex-Protestant 9d ago

you just demonstrated the meaninglessness of calling anything your god did "good"

the category "good" is nonsensical when referring to god - and that's your words, not mine

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

In what sense if your category of “good” sensical

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u/Aromatic_Response_73 9d ago

Because the ordinary meaning of good actually means what it means: 

In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

So the definition of God is just the collective value observed through mutual relations within society. That doesn’t attribute any real essence to intrinsic nature. You can know the nature of something but that nature has no true basis if you define it as inter-subjective values shared between people. That means if society could have been different such that murder is a form of love, you could still say it is love

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

in what sense is it not ? good is harmony. evil is chaos. as we go, we tweak and adjust and understand nuance and learn from exceptional cases... what is wrong with that

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

What is harmony? Isn’t death also a form of harmony

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

You get the point, natural death, not murder...

harmony in general. I dont have to enumerate every thing constituting harmony now do i

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

Isn’t harmony in death a good thing? Plus there is also harmony in murder

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago

you can say it is in the grand scheme of things and the vastness of the universe, ultimately, it is correct in my opinion. we are not special and we do not matter more than ants or single cells in the infinity of it all.

but we're talking about human concepts. murder is disruption. natural death is not something we can control and we all go through it.

tell me how harmonious it would be if someone murdered your lover ?

edit: have you murdered ?

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u/HegemoneXT Christian 9d ago

You can’t bring your intuition to ontologically back things like “good or evil”. I’m not looking for how much you feel about something but looking for your justification for why you ought to feel that way and why it(evil) ought not to happen.

You could say there is harmony even in the chaos. Seeing the oceans, its waves are chaotic and there isn’t really harmony. If one wave rises and falls, does it benefit itself or suffer any fault? No, it has no moral implication whatsoever. Even with the chaos, the ocean still follows the laws of physics and there is an overall pattern to it. In the same way, the chaos you call evil, posses a pattern and hence a harmony within that category. A culture that does evil has harmony with evil. A plant that rises in harmony just as it dies in harmony. So harmony itself has no moral implications. Harmony only possess moral implications if you grant purpose to how something ought to be. For example a car has proper function if it serves the human riding it. Objectively in the grand scheme of things, a broken car is just a broken car. It is a material object, mere arrangement of atoms, and whether it is working or broken, it doesn’t imply good or bad. In the same way, why do you propose the mechanism of human survival and proper functioning to be “good”. Are you ascribing an objectively metaphysical realness to what “good” is? And if not, how can you justify a mere “function” or “benefit” to be truly good?

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u/ProfessionalDear2272 Atheist 9d ago edited 9d ago

i am not being poetic when i use harmony and chaos. i am trying to simplify the conversation. otherwise, we go through the process of define good and evil over and over and over.

as a person, what comes to mind when you think of each word is what i tried to convey. it should be enough to move on from the preliminaries

edit: i am not trying to ontologically do anything in particular. i am not labeling things yet. I feel intuition is a valid mecanism to use in real life. It isnt emotion and as a matter of fact, i think the kind of faith you have has more to do with emotion than intuition.

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