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Originally Posted by Martian
The flaw in the Epicurus argument is that it assumes that a higher power thinks of right and wrong in the same way we do. I understand that this is supported (created man in His own image and all that), but the problem is that if God truly is omniscient than he has access to knowledge that we never will. This is why the 'we aren't meant to understand' argument does have merit; it's a gentler way of saying 'we are ignorant peons.'
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To me this is a more sophisticated version of my old line 'God is a small invisible fish that lives in my anus which can't be detected by any means'. Saying we are too stupid to figure out Gods version of right and wrong is unprovable, and futile to discuss.
My response would be, if we can not understand right and wrong, then we can not do right or wrong. We are but infants to his divine majesty. Sin, punishment, etc all go out the window the same way they do for a 2 year old child.
The response to that is the 'well its wrong for YOU but its right for a god', which reminds me of a famous Ghost Busters line, "When someone asks if you're a god you say YES!" I only have my logic to go on, but if its wrong for me to allow an innocent to be harmed yet perfectly dandy for a God, that makes said god something of an asshole.
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Asaris' point as highlighted by Baraka_Guru is also significant. If God doesn't allow for evil or suffering, free will is effectively negated.
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So the point of free will is to free up gods day planner? Pedophiles to pancreatic cancer explained away as free will needs meaning? This to me is sophistry to find a place for god that doesn't seem to need it. A god that in effect serves no function beyond builder, a theist of the old ilk, once reviled by religious men and now happily lumped with them by the same types in a growing agnostic western world.
And lets not get into the idea of predetermination, well ok lets. How can god be all everything and not know how I would react? My free will is a product of education, instinct, and experience. TFPers know me well enough that if someone posts how raising taxes is good for the economy, I'm going to call them mentally defective in some way. This is just tfpers who don't know much about me beyond what I've written here. God should know how I react to every scenario as free will or not, I'm not going to be changing that like some random number generator. If he/it/she/they are the alpha and the omega, they know what I'm going to do when, and for what. I might change my mind, but god should have known I would change it before I knew I was.
So we seem to dismiss the God of most of the world, the all knowing, all doing, all seeing, all this, and turn God into some weak feel good spirit thats watching over all but doing absolutely nothing worth mentioning, at least not to our puny intelligence.
The whole need for god evaporates and god just becomes an addition to make us feel better about our own ignorance and mortality.