Well, is there any way to "refute" Epicurus Riddle...

muh plan

/aylmaoo

There's the question of what is evil? Do we as people really know what evil is? Could God be preventing evil and what we see as evil is just neutral on the good-evil scale? Additionally, wouldn't evil and harm be a learning experience, just like parents let children get hurt playing to teach them? Finally, what is good without evil? Why would an omniscient omnipotent God prevent evil, knowing that it would dull what good is? Just as hard times create strong men, evil times create good men. The alternative is man degenerating to a hedonistic state of perpetual goodness.

/BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP

the torah was never meant to be a new agey progressive free will inspiring saga of people making their own choices and God emphasizing how important it is that they have free will, none of that is there.

It's a bunch of scare tactics designed to take away as much freedom as possible.
>don't do that, this guy in the torah did that and God made him and everyone like him die a horrible death!
>don't you eat that Apple adam, don't you dare!
>YOU FUCKER I PUNISH YOU I PUNISH YOU HOW DARE YOU HAVE FREE WILL
>HOW DARE YOU WORSHIP THAT IDOL *kills half the population*
>YOU HAVE 400 YEARS TO BECOME JEWS AND WORSHIP THE JEWISH GOD EGYPT OR I WILL FUCK YOUR SHIT UP

ol' Yahweh sure was big on free will and all that jazz. That's why he wrote a big book telling you exactly how to live so you don't anger the temperamental man in the sky that tends to genocide things he doesn't like

/sniifffffffff

Doesn't that tone change with the new testament?

/[Shirt Tugging Intensifies]

I'm thinking this, what is evil?

Call me Ishmael.

>not able

not willing

>malevolent because not willing

Proving his point, he is not intentionally leading people to evil he is intentionally testing people to be worthy of something greater. You are no a priori a good person who deserves to be helped.

>where does evil come from

pride and Satan

>why call him God

because you've literally said nothing to refute his existence or power. Not even a Christian but this riddle is the most retarded thing if you knew anything about Christianity or Abrahamic religions in general.

>It's a bunch of scare tactics designed to take away as much freedom as possible.
>>don't do that, this guy in the torah did that and God made him and everyone like him die a horrible death!
>>don't you eat that Apple adam, don't you dare!
>>YOU FUCKER I PUNISH YOU I PUNISH YOU HOW DARE YOU HAVE FREE WILL
>>HOW DARE YOU WORSHIP THAT IDOL *kills half the population*
>>YOU HAVE 400 YEARS TO BECOME JEWS AND WORSHIP THE JEWISH GOD EGYPT OR I WILL FUCK YOUR SHIT UP
>people who never read the Bible actually believe this

If you talk to cultural Christians they basically go through each story as teachings meant to represent unhealthy behavior that destroyed a society from within. Sodom and Gomorrah were actually forewarned to leave the city or else they would find their destruction, which is a metaphor for the fact that engaging in excessive hedonism leads to cruelty and disease, especially in those days before modern medicine. So then the Sodomites brought their own fate upon themselves. Imagine if before a 9.0 earthquake an angel came down from heaven and said

>hey bro this city is going to get fucked soon, get out of here

and they responded with

>nah I'd rather just stay here and fuck my lady boys tight boi pucci, I'd rather die desu

Almost all of the stories are like that. Why do athiests pretend to know what they read and why do they pretend to have read something at all?

/resumes speech [Slovenian accent]

>testing people to see if they are worthy of something greater and discarding the rest

so your God is like the mad scientist in your archetypical transhuman Frankenstein horror getting all insane about the evolution of humanity and becoming cold and emotionless as every imperfect creation disappoints him, while the audience looks on with horror at his utter lack of empathy for those he has deemed unworthy.

I've read the bible, went to church for 20 years, go fuck yourself with your confirmation bias and your desperate justifications

>t-they had it coming
>it's metaphor when it's convenient but it's DA FACTs when it's not

go to bed christcuck

t. ex-christian that has read the Bible not just once but many times. I particularly enjoyed the old testament stories for all the death, punishment, supernatural destructions and other fun intrigue that the new testament lacked until revelations

>so your God is like the mad scientist in your archetypical transhuman Frankenstein horror getting all insane about the evolution of humanity and becoming cold and emotionless as every imperfect creation disappoints him, while the audience looks on with horror at his utter lack of empathy for those he has deemed unworthy.

Here is how to shorten your posts

>God doesn't believe everyone is equally good when they make bad decisions

And he doesn't.

>cold and emotionless

topkek wtf are you talking about, when you're cold and emotionless you stray from God's path, people who disappoint him are those who lack self control and hurt others directly or indirectly.

You have some major issues with your parents don't you kiddo?

>i went to church for 20 years

And payed attention for 0 apparently. Go to bed dumbass and learn how to read. They were told that in a few days they ought to flee the city because it was going to be destroyed, then chose to stay to be destroyed to have one last night of partying rather than take on responsibilities and leave.

>i enjoyed the old testament because of the violence like lol its totally like one of my fav comic books

An hero immediately.

We're a fallen species in a fallen world.
That's the Truth, but it's not the "truth" you're looking for. The alternative is we live in a cold, pointless world where such "injustices" happen regardless- which I'm sure you wouldn't disagree with. So it seems to me that your main contention is with the idea that there's a creative intelligence behind all of this. Doesn't the latter seem better and more reasonable than the former? If you do believe that there's no God, then why consider the fact that babies die from diseases an injustice in the first place, since there's no objective standard for natural phenomena to abide by?

The issue you and Epicurus make is that you attribute God with the cognition and will of a human being.

Epicurus believed that there were actually Gods, but they were utterly unconcerned about human activity, so the criterion of Omnibenevolence is dropped

are you imaging that you could be responsible for the suffering of billions for eternity in hell and be a well adjusted personality? Are you implying a man that deals in death like you deal with toilet paper is going to cry a river about every broken egg?

No, they'd be like you, labeling everything you don't like as "degenerate" and saying "to hell with them" which ironically is the opposite of how Jesus would have wanted you to treat the downtrodden and lost, but who am I to judge your aggressive, pompous version of christianity, seeing as how I'm just some guy that has read your book probably more times than you have. Remember that God is king in hell, not satan. God sends people to Hell, this delusional world you live in where judge jury and executioner is going to be a fun afternoon with the kids at the picnic is some pipe dream delusional nonsense. I bet stalin, mao, ol' adolf, and the rest of history's great genociders were crying at every lost soul, seeing as how they're the closest examples to your God that we have.

Keep on believing he's some happy go lucky guy up there that's a real fun presence at parties, it doesn't line up at all with the psychology of what that position does to whoever has it, but I suppose it's nicer to think about when you're dedicating your life to this psychopath

I'm not the one the ideologically masturbates to the b-movie torture porn known as the bible, you're the one that worships this violent, archaic nonsense. I just realize that chaotic, unreasonable insanity makes for good drama. Imagine if people in power today dealt down punishment like ol Yahweh, we'd be in an autocratic genocidal dictatorship. That's apparently what you're all waiting so eagerly for, for this genocidal fuck to come back and genocide all the people you happen to not like.

>muh degeneracy strawman

Actions have consequences , negative liberty is a must for any civilized society, tolerance is not inherently good.

>God sends people to hell

People send themselves to hell, i don't know why kind of sect you belonged to but Hell is just separation from God, and God doesn't force you to separate yourself from him.

>psychopath

If that were true then there would be no concept of heaven

>he's a happy go lucky guy who is fun at parties

??? never did if you really got that impression of him you obviously weren't paying attention very hard when you were young.

>psychopath

careful with that edge, son, you might cut yourself with it

Several things that come off the top of my head. (These are terrible answers)

Existence is a test by God to prove ones worthiness.

Somehow all the evils in the world are actually for the greater good in the end.

God is both malevolent and benevolent because he encompasses the whole of existence.

God wants to make more gods so he created humans with free will.

>I'm not the one the ideologically masturbates to the b-movie torture porn known as the bible

ooh that edge

>violent archaic nonsense

even edgier

>good drama

actually if you read into it there is a moral dilemma of self control and justice but i guess you just want the bible to be like your capeshit comics like the dumbass you are

>genocidal

??? Are you talking about the kingdom of david or the invasion of caanan? Because the Christian God punishes the jews for their behavior later on, in case you didn't read all they way onto the New Testament where the New Covenant is made and the Christian God no longer allows for such behavior.

I guess you belong to one of the more Zionist sects of Christianity.

Well, for starters, there's a grey area between "malevolence" and omnibenevolence.

Always found this a bit odd, given that none of the Athenian gods Epicurus were omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and certainly not omnibenevolent. (Hell, they were assholes most of the time.)

Sure, a god might get the title "all knowing" or "all powerful", but even minor gods, like Pan or Argus, would get that title as part of their offerings. All the stories surrounding them prove time and again they are anything but. Powerful and wise beyond mortal men, but that's about it (and even the latter part of that is largely debatable).

...And frankly, so do the tales surrounding the Abrahamic god. He's regularly caught off guard, testing things, and regularly depending on humans to get His will done all throughout the Bible.

Very few, if any, gods are portrayed as constantly omniscient, omnipotent, and omni benign. I suspect some folks just decided to inflate some titles and make them into a paradox that otherwise wouldn't exist.

God represents the sum total of logos , and to find the truth things need to be tested, that is why our concept of God or "gods" or any other form of spirituality is always changing, the representations of the sum total of a given thing changes over time.

>Very few, if any, gods are portrayed as constantly omniscient, omnipotent, and omni benign.
Indian Brahman or the ultimate consciousness

I'd rather suffer as a consequence of the behavior of a "cold, pointless world," than as a consequence of the behavior of a world with some agency behind it; complacent in the suffering this agency is responsible for, especially an agency which is touted as loving.

Not omni benign, just the source of everything.

It's refuted by the fact that suffering is necessary for greatness.

Epicurus seems to treat suffering as something exclusively bad, when you could argue that our sufferings made us who we are today

Essentially means omni benign is a pointless term as inexistence of a thing without good and bad factors and influence can be considered omni benign.

>they don't realize that God should be able to create a world with free will, but without evil, assuming he's omnipotent
>they don't realize that he can and would destroy Satan, if he's omnipotent and omnibenevolent
>they don't realize that God is omniscient, so He knows beforehand how we would react

god is dead

read nietzsche and stop holding onto your jewish myths

the bible is too inaccurate to be considered the word of god

The general concept is that is that he's playing some kind of long game we don't understand and earthly suffering doesn't hold much weight in it.

Without the opportunity for evil, good has no merit or use.

Good and evil are subjective fictions invented as rhetorical devices to justify or demonize one's respective actions, they have no basis in real life.

How could man choose between good and evil if he doesn't know what they are? Man needs guidence.

Or something. I dunno. I'm atheist as fuck but I think people discard the free will biz too easily. A world where you can't choose evil sounds kinda shit to me.

The Old Testament itself takes issue with the idea that God is either omnibenevolent or omniscient; he apologizes for flooding the world and says he won't do it again. If he can have a temper tantrum like that, or if it was him reacting to how himanoty had fucked up, there's clearly a lack of perfection somewhere in there.

Correct.

Sure. But that's useless information. Everything is a nebulous mental construct and nothing in the world is absolutely true as we percieve it. We make up these constructs as a way of describing reality as we experience it, and discussions like this tend to use that kind of shorthand in order to make discussion possible in the first place.

I'm all for constructs to describe our experiences

however the notions of good and evil are so hopelessly subjective that they have no value. It's often just used as a form of moralism and bandwagon propagandizing.

It's fuzzy around the edges they're not inherently different than any other construct like a vacation or a class or a sport, and to handwave discussion of it just because it's subjective and hard to pin down comes off as kind of lazy to me.

I mean people spend their whole careers analyzing this shit, and there are some pretty solid agreement among human beings about certain things being evil, even if it's not 100%.

I don't think you understood Nietzsche's point with that quote

That the industrialization of society killed the spirituality that served as the glue for a cohesive society?

I'm aware.

So the western God is dead

And the counter-counterargument is that it's the best of all possible worlds.

>Is he able, but not willing?
>Then he is malevolent

Nope. Malevolent literally means to will evil, which is not the same as not willing the prevention of evil.

Technically God has intervened with Christ. Now the whole point is so alleviate suffering by giving your yoke to him.

Can't stand when people look at the bible through a reductivist humanist lens.

>the suffering of billions for eternity

These people have their chance. God has done his part.

DUDE

ANALOGIES

LMAO

>Pop theology: the thread

>I am going to qualify an object under my own arbitrary, subjective judgment and profess it to be objective

Without evil, good doesnt exist.

Lets take for example, sun and rain. When its sunny, we consider it as a nice weather, when its rainy, it isnt.
If it never rained, we cant consider a sunny day as a nice weather, its just the regular state of affairs, simply because we dont know what rain or a bad weather is.

Because it's the best of all possible worlds

What a bullshit analogy. I'm pretty sure people who live in the Mediterranean are actually quite glad that it's nice weather 99% of the year.

Im from Spain, you mong.
It rains and snow here

>best of all possible worlds
So AIDS, ebola, earwigs, mosquitoes and the literal existence of evil, malevolent humans are absolutely unequivocally intrinsically necessary for the best possible world?

The best possible world example is fucking retarded, because the existence of heaven or even fucking EDEN WITHOUT ADAM AND EVE is the best possible world, so why not keep it at that?
Fuck off

Gnostics would say that this world is ruled by the evil demiurge and his archons. We are prisoners in this place due to his meddling but we can escape through gnosis.

You could also apply the riddle in reverse. Why would an evil god allow goodness in the universe?

Why would anybody follow a divinity who threatens to torture humanity forever if they don't do EXACTLY what was written by third hand accounts of people that lived thousands of years ago about some other people who MAY OR MAY NOT have communicated with it?

Even if I were to believe in this divinity it seems to me that the odds of winning religious lottery by picking gods favorite religion and somehow managing to do everything it entails perfectly seem to be astronomical. How do theists justify this?