Continuing the “evil god” theme… what defines good and evil? Are they “intrinsic” values, or are they something defined arbitrarily by some entity, such as a god, or gods?
For instance, I believe that “good” equals justice, truth, honesty, courage, integrity, protecting the innocent, and such. But I don’t think I’m in the majority.
A lot of people don’t even think in terms of “good and evil”. And, among those who do, a lot seem to define “good” as “doing what God wants”, and “evil” as the opposite of that.
Of course, since God (or gods) don’t usually talk to people, they use the next best thing: priests, religious leaders, “holy books”, and so on.
If I believed in a particular God, and one of the priests came to me and said that God wanted me to sacrifice a child to him, I’d, naturally, doubt that priest - the (supposedly good) God I worshipped couldn’t ask me such a thing. But what if it was God himself telling me to do it (like in the Bible, when he tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac)? What if it wasn’t just a “dream” or a “feeling”, but something really believable to a mostly scientific mind, something that made me be absolutely sure that, no, it wasn’t a priest pretending to speak for a god, nor was it just my hallucination, but it was God himself talking to me? And telling me to do it?
I like to believe that I’d repudiate him then and there, without hesitation. A god who did that, to me, would be evil. A sadistic being.
But many people would say that refusing would be evil; that, as I said, it was God who defined “good” and “evil”…
Related posts:
Subscribe to this blog
Depends on how powerful the god would be. What if (s)he was testing you to see how far you would go?
But yeah, relaying “communication” to officers, instead of speaking to “the troops” him/herself does bring up a load of questions regarding his/her existence.
what defines good and evil? Are they “intrinsic” values, or are they something defined arbitrarily by some entity, such as a god, or gods?
That is, in a nutshell, a version of theEuthyphro Dilemma. Choosing either option would lead to an absurd conclusion. If we say that values are intrinsic, then we don’t need god to tell us what’s good or bad. In fact, it would lead us to believe that values are independent from god. If we say that god chooses what ought to be good, then values are arbitrary and god could choose to make torture or human sacrifice good.
“If I believed in a particular God, and one of the priests came to me and said that God wanted me to sacrifice a child to him, I’d, naturally, doubt that priest - the (supposedly good) God I worshipped couldn’t ask me such a thing. But what if it was God himself telling me to do it?”
Well, we must first check the assumptions. Is god worthy of worship? Should we follow god’s will? Would god always choose the good?
Defining “good” and “evil” would be too much, here.
I *do* believe values are independent from any god, but then again I don’t believe that there is one.
In fact, besides this, one of the problems that I had, during my Christian youth (until I was 26 or so) was that I believed that I followed God not because of “divine authority”, but because he was supremely good. Yet, logic told me that he’d have to be evil, if he existed - in fact, he’d have to be a sadistic monster. So I chose, unconsciously, not to think about the contradiction, until many years later.
In my opinion there’s no such thing as “Intrinsic values”, values are something you build while growing as a human being and they’re based upon your thoughts over the values that grown up try to pass to you. So how can they be defined by any God? Or God’s representative (would he wanted to have one?!?… I don’t think so).
I among those who think that “God is one of Us” (Joan Osborne citation) and you, as a thinkable intelligent person shall be able to evaluate and decide after being told to do something, either by God or his representative (?!?) I also would refuse to do something evil, according to MY values, even if I was told to by any of them. People you refer to on your last paragraph are those who don’t give a thought to things before acting… do they REALLY have any values, do they even ever gave a single thought about what’s good or evil? Or about anything at all…
Good and evil are just labels. They are the illusion that keeps us
separated from the Divine, but Reality is there never was a separation.
It is called dualism.
This is the sort of question I consider often on my site… It is interesting, particularly if you consider the ancient Gods who were morally ambiguous in many cases. Take the Greek and Roman Gods for example. People didn’t always obey them, preferring a different course of action, but usually, in taking the alternative, they were doing the bidding of a different God. In this way these ancient Gods represented not so much ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as ‘free will’…
I’ll track back in my comment here, but really my whole blog is relevant to this question.
Greek Myths