I am not an atheist, I genuinely believe that God exists and he is evil, like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens.
Yes. It’s Dystheism.
“Dystheism (from Ancient Greek: δυσ-, romanized: dus-, lit. ‘bad’ and θεός theos “god”) is the belief that a god is not wholly good and can even be considered evil, or one and the same with Satan.”
Also noteworthy is misotheism. Seems OP counts as both.
Dystheism
TIL
I’ve always said (jokingly since I’m an atheist) that Christians got it mixed up and thought Satan was God, so they’ve really been worshiping Satan all this time. They don’t want to admit they’re wrong about him being good, so they make up all kinds of excuses for all the horrible things he does. That’s why they were totally conditioned and ready to do the same with trump.
Just a gentle reminder that there are very many more Christians in the world that aren’t American and certainly don’t support Trump. Or even care that much about American politics.
LOL there aren’t people in the rest of the world. America is everything and everything is America. If you don’t agree will bring “Freedom” to you.
And a reminder that the Crusades and Inquisition both happened before USA was a country or even colonies. And Protestantism started because some people thought the Catholic church was too lenient (while trying to avoid being put to death by the Catholic church for saying that publically).
Not to defend American Christianity, but I’m not buying that it’s fine outside of America.
No, Satan is just a being created by God who realized how fucked up God is.
Of course, the issue with God is that its presence equates power with morality, which makes people think Trump is a moral man.
the issue with God is that its presence equates power with morality
I can’t agree with this enough. My sister, a Christian, even agrees. Things are “good” and “bad” because god says they are, and for no other reason. And god is the highest good simply because he said that he is. The reason he gets to make those rules is that he’s the most powerful.
The Christian god is just a spurned lover who wrote in their diary about how stupid and mean their ex is and they should never have dumped him.
Satan is the dumper and has moved on long ago.
100% and they should swap jobs too. You hear from Christians all the time “this is the devils work” or “Satan made me do it.”
Conversely, how often do you hear this?
“What, that place? That one their? Yeah, that place is heaven on earth.”
Never
But “hell on earth” we hear all the time. You know why?
Because Satan is busy.
Imagine how much work hed do, if he got to be in charge. “Wanna know what will really piss yahweh off?”
the term i always heard was maltheism. reading the other comments though, i’m surprised how many other terms there are for this.
fun fact: renowned mathematician Paul Erdős referred to God as the SF, or Supreme Fascist, who kept all the best mathematical proofs to himself.
Hmm. Does God know the largest prime? Does God know the last digit of pi?
The premises of the questions are wrong, hence they do not speak to the knowledge of anyone but yourself unfortunately. There are no last element in an infinite chain, because that is contradictory to the fact that they are infinite. Even questions such as the barber’s paradox, that are not logical fallacies, do not imply the nonexistence of god.
Mathematically speaking, everyone knows the last digit in Pi due to there not being one. We call this concept that something is vacuously true. Similarly a nonsense statement such as “all ants on the moon eat people for breakfast” is also true by default.
so the proof of the irrationality of pi is a bit more than i want to get into here, but there’s a very simple proof that there are infinite prime numbers which i will share here.
suppose that there is a finite number of prime numbers. write out a list of all of these prime numbers, and multiply them together. add one to this product, and you now have a number that is not divisible by any of our list of prime numbers, and thus should be another prime. this contradicts our initial assumption of finite primes, and therefore there are infinite primes.
any god is not above mathematics.
Knowing they don’t exist would count.
Erdos was fucking weird, lol.
Can I interest you in Sithrak, the god who hates you?
The best part is that he’s actually a chill guy.
Man this is fantastic. Can a gentleman pass the sauce?
Oglaf.com, beware, boobs and butts abound, and dongs too
It says right on entry that it started as an attempt at porn. It has all the things.
I typed in the url and… yeah, that was A LOT of boobs and butts.
Came back here to see that I mistyped the url. Doubling the “O” results in many boobs and butts.
So just like normal religion but honest?
Maltheism or Dystheism might be your bag. Dystheism is the idea that God(s) are not all good and may be evil and Maltheism is a more recent addition that posits a strong belief that there exists only a categorically evil divinity.
Some forms of Gnosticism assert this.
Gnosticism is a broad group of early Christian cults that are influenced by earlier religions, so it’s not a monolith and I don’t want to paint them with the same brush, but:
Some of them include the idea that our souls (our consciousness) are from a realm or being of light, but the material/physical world was constructed by the demiurge (yahweh of the old testament) and has trapped us here.
According to this idea, Jesus is actually from that divinity beyond Yahweh, and is not the son of God. So Jesus’ sacrifice was not just the crucifixion, but embodiment itself. He brings us knowledge (gnosis, thus gnosticism) of our true divinity and through that knowledge, salvation from this material prison.
There’s an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
There’s an amazing book about all this, called, The Gnostic Religion, by the philosopher Hans Jonas.
People should be aware that this book is severely out of date.
In 1998 the book Rethinking Gnosticism started a process of self-reflection over past work in scholarship and people started to realize they had their head up their asses with tautological thinking around Gnosticism based on significant propaganda from the church.
Here’s Princeton’s Elaine Paigels (author of The Gnostic Gospels) on the subject from an email debate years after this:
The earliest editors of “Gnostic” texts thought that they were dualistic, escapist, nihilistic, involving “esoteric ideas about aeons and demiurges,” as you yourself write. As my former teacher at Harvard, Krister Stendhal, said to me recently about these texts, “we just thought these were weird.” But can you point to any evidence of such “esoteric ideas” in Thomas? Anything about “aeons and demiurges”? Those first editors, not finding such evidence, assumed that this just goes to show how sneaky heretics are-they do not say what they mean. So when they found no evidence for such nihilism or dualism-on the contrary, the Gospel of Thomas speaks continually of God as the One good “Father of all”-they just read these into the text. Some scholars, usually those not very familiar with these sources, still do. So first let’s talk about “Gnosticism”-and what I used to (but no longer) call “Gnostic Gospels.” I have to take responsibility for part of the misunderstanding. Having been taught that these texts were “Gnostic,” I just accepted it, and even coined the term “Gnostic gospels,” which became the title of my book. I agree with you that we have no evidence for what we call “Gnosticism” from the first century, and have learned from our colleagues that what we thought about “Gnosticism” has virtually nothing to do with a text like the Gospel of Thomas-or, for that matter, with the New Testament Gospel of John which our teachers said also showed “Gnostic influences.”
The history of what was actually going on and how the ideas developed is pretty interesting to follow.
The long and short is you had proto-Gnostic ideas like found in Thomas which introduced duality as a solution to the Epicurean argument that naturalist origins of life meant that there was no afterlife. Essentially, even if the world was the product of Lucretius’s evolution and not intelligent design, as long as eventually that physical world would be recreated in non-physical form, the curse of a soul depending on a body would be broken. It suggests that we already are in that copy.
The problem was that by the second century Epicureanism was falling from favor and there was a resurgence of Platonist ideals, where for Plato the perfect form was an immaterial ‘form’ followed by an imperfect physical version and worst of all a copy of the physical. Through that lens, the original proto-Gnostic concept became that we were in the least worthwhile form of existence.
So in parallel to the rise of Neoplatonism you see things like Valentinian Gnosticism emerge which takes the proto-Gnostic recreator of a naturalist original world and flips it to the corrupter of a perfect world of forms. It goes from agent of salvation saving us from death due to dependence on physical bodies to a being that trapped us in physical form.
This debate and conversation goes all the way back to 1 Corinthians 15 where you can see Paul discussing the difference between a physical body and a spiritual one, and the claim that it’s physical first and spiritual second, not the other way around. (And indeed, that was the early heretical point of view, but where it differed from Paul was the idea that we were already in the second version and he was arguing we were still in the first.)
So you are correct that certain later groups previously lumped together as ‘Gnostics’ believed there was a version of Plato’s demiurge that corrupted pure forms into corrupted physical embodiments, and it’s great you are aware it’s not a monolith - but people should have a heads up if they start following up on your source that views on the subject changed dramatically around the start of the 21st century and are still evolving.
I also said that it’s a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
More gnostic texts were discovered since his book, and expanded on our understanding. But it certainly didn’t invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
If you are into gnosticism I strongly suggest you read that book before (incorrectly) calling it out-of-date and discouraging people from reading it.
I also said that it’s a broad group of early Christian cults and that not all of them espouse that idea.
Yes, and I acknowledged that it was good you had a more modern understanding of Gnosticism.
Hans Jonas lovingly elucidates the rich meaning and symbolism of these early beliefs, and their origins. He has great respect and dedicated much of his life specifically to the gnostics.
That may be the case, but no matter how much love one might have for a subject, context is king and if you are operating within an outdated and obsolete academic context it’s going to impact the accuracy and quality of your information.
Someone in 1905 could have great love for Physics but their treatise on the pudding model of the atom isn’t necessarily going to be something people should look at as authoritative just because of the pure motivations that went into its authorship.
But it certainly didn’t invalidate his excellent and beautiful work.
No, the Nag Hammadi collection plus a few decades of reflection pretty much did do that actually. Jonas’s work was the subject of rather extensive discussion in Williams’ work even:
In reaction to this and other such analyses of “gnosticism” that tended to treat it as merely a heretical derivative, Hans Jonas attempted to delineate “gnosticism” ’s special identity, the distinct essence that made it “the Gnostic religion” and not merely a syncretistic mixture of borrowed pieces from other traditions.
- Rethinking Gnosticism p. 80
It was in reaction to this sort of “explanation by motif-derivation” that a generation of scholars rose up in phenomenological revolt. They were essentially saying: “Enough with this endless business of listing ancient ‘parallels’—this ‘parallelamania’! Enough with this endless atomization and deriving of this piece from here and that piece from there! Let’s look at the whole, which is more than the sum of its parts, and talk about what the essence of that whole, that Gnosticism, is!” The well-known work of Hans Jonas, in his unfinished Gnosis und spätantiker Geist, much of which is distilled in the familiar English book The Gnostic Religion, typifies this phenomenological approach.6 Gnosticism has an “essence,” Jonas argued, a spirit of its own, something new that is not “derivable” from Judaism or from anywhere else.
- Rethinking Gnosticism p. 215
There is no “Gnostic religion.” There is no central ‘soul’ of it. Later Gnosticism sects are literally presenting the exact opposite cosmology as the earliest, and with it entirely different theology and philosophy to make sense of it.
James Frazier put a lot of effort and love into The Golden Bough but you’d be hard pressed to find anyone outside of Richard Carrier still working from within the unifying perspective it set forth regarding religions due to improved attention to nuances and differences that invalidated the earlier attempt to clump them all together.
Jonas was effectively a microcosm of this same trend, here exclusive to the claimed cluster of ‘Gnosticism’. I’m not faulting him for it or suggesting this was some personal failing on his part - but he’s a product of an era that was misinformed, and people should very much be aware of that if reading it today.
outdated and obsolete
It wasn’t based on made-up nonsense. His explorations of these early Christian cults remain legit and rewarding to read.
Again, read the actual book.
And to everybody else reading, please don’t be discouraged from reading such a beautiful and powerful depiction of early Christian thought.
It is based on made up nonsense dude.
For example, Jonas - not having the earlier works to consider - tried to reason for the origins of some of the ideas that he’s seeing around duality as having come from contemporary experiences of human alienation.
This is poppycock.
The introduction of the themes of dualism were introduced as an answer to Epicureanism - as Rabbi Elizar reportedly said in the first century CE, “why do we study the Torah? To know how to answer the Epicurean.”
The Epicureans and Sadducees both believed there was nothing after death. The former argued that this was because the soul depended on a physical body.
You can see the earliest text historically associated with Gnosticism by the heresiologists Jonas liberally pulled from plays with these concepts extensively (again, he did not have access to this text):
29. Jesus said, "If the flesh came into being because of spirit, that is a marvel, but if spirit came into being because of the body, that is a marvel of marvels.
Yet I marvel at how this great wealth has come to dwell in this poverty."
87. Jesus said, “How miserable is the body that depends on a body, and how miserable is the soul that depends on these two.”
- The Gospel of Thomas
(The “body that depends on a body” related to Lucretius’s claim that the cosmos itself was like a body that would one day die, an idea the work directly mentions in sayings 56 and 80).
This text introduces ideas from Plato regarding dualism and eikons to argue for the existence of an afterlife by appealing to being a copy of an original.
This argument only makes sense in the context of Epicurean and Sadduceen beliefs where a soul depending on a physical body will die. The group following Thomas later on have even preserved language from Lucretius’s “seeds of things” regarding atomism and survival of the fittest. These were ideas grounded in an esoteric philosophical and theological debate at the time.
So no, it’s not that some people in the second to fourth century start feeling alienated and develop a dualist perspective in answer.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs (how Gnosticism was primarily considered before him).
But it’s not fully accurate and objectively contains a lot of false speculation and interpretations.
There’s the origins of a belief, and then there’s the conditions to make it popular.
His book may be a good summary of what was known about the Valentinians and Mani in the first half of the 20th century, and it’s noteworthy for having moved the conversation forward for looking at specific beliefs over genealogies of beliefs
His book depicts real beliefs that people held, often drawn from primary texts, which resonate with what OP was looking for. You haven’t offered anything in service to OP’s question. Just scattered the conversation with pedantry.
It’s an excellent book, 100% worth reading. If you want to offer some follow-up texts to expand on it, that would be more useful than pretending that it’s a falsehood and out-of-date.
I did offer William’s Rethinking Gnosticism. Another is Karen King’s What is Gnosticism? (which has an entire subchapter addressing Jonas).
And I wasn’t directing any of my comments at OP’s question (largely because the later beliefs around the demiurge were a confused mishmash of trying to make sense of earlier ideas in a new philosophical context). I was cautioning anyone who read your comment and specifically the book recommendation that it reflects an out of date and inaccurate perspective.
As for his accuracy in the actual beliefs of the people in question, I’ll leave you with a passage from Karen King’s aforementioned work on the topic:
The second dominant approach, typology, uses phenomenological method based on inductive reasoning from a literary analysis of the primary materials. Gnosticism is defined by listing the essential characteristics common to all the phenomena classified as Gnostic. The most accomplished practitioner of this method was Hans Jonas. His greatest contribution was to shift the discussion of Gnosticism away from genealogy to typology. Rather than define Gnosticism by locating precisely where and how heretics deviated from true original Christianity, Jonas defined the essence of Gnosticism by listing a discrete set of defining characteristics.
Unfortunately, detailed study of the texts has led scholars to question every element ofthe standard typologies constructed by Jonas and others. In particular, specialists have challenged the cliché of Gnosticism as a radically dualistic, anticosmic tradition capable of producing only two extreme ethical possibilities: either an ascetic avoidance of any fleshly and worldly contamination (often caricatured as hatred of the body and the world) or a depraved libertinism that mocks any standards of moral behavior. In fact, the texts show a variety of cosmological positions, not only the presence of anticosmic dualism, but also milder forms of dualism, transcendentalism, and, most surprisingly, both radical and moderate forms of monism. The majority of the texts show a tendency toward ascetic values much in line with the broad currents of second- to fifth-century piety, and some argue for the validity of marriage, attack the human vices of greed and sexual immorality, and promote virtues such as self-control and justice—also ethical themes common in their day. That no treatises supporting libertinism have been found may of course be simply a matter of chance; it is nonetheless telling.
- What is Gnosticism? p. 12-13
You can’t just take the heresiologists at face value, and Jonas was writing at a time where many key texts had no discovered primary sources to contradict what the heresiologists were claiming about them and their traditions. So he erred on the side of taking them at their word. Criticisms about libertinism by ancient Christian authors towards their ideological opponents (present as early as Revelations) were taken for granted and incorporated into the speculation, and yet there’s been no evidence of such attitudes in a trove of primary sources discovered since.
It is obsolete and outdated, even if it was among the better texts in its time and place.
Anyways, this conversation is now going in circles. Take from our exchange what you will. I’m glad you enjoy the book, and I’m not trying to take away from your enjoyment of it.
But if you really care about the topic of Gnosticism, I’d suggest looking a bit more into recent work on the topic, and the two books I mentioned would be a good place to start.
Misotheism.
Miso as in misogyny, misandry, etc. Not as in the delicious fermented paste that makes a lovely soup.
Its ‘god(s) exist(s) and can absolutely go fuck itself/themselves, possibly for the following reasons…’
I worship the lovely soup.
Tofu
Tofu is just cheese but like if you took away everything that’s nice about cheese
And cheese is just tofu with animal abuse.
More flavorful, doesn’t crisp as well, can’t really be structural.
All hail!
As should we all.
Somewhat pedantically speaking, the belief that an evil god exists (exclusively or otherwise) is dystheism. Misotheism is the hatred of a god or gods. Dystheism implies misotheism, but they’re not exactly the same.
Valid. Though misotheism at least implies the person being identified as such thinks god(s) (is/are) morally fuckex
I genuinely believe that God exists and he is evil, like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens.
That could describe the Demiurge in Gnosticism.
Yes, it is called Heresy.
For there is but one god and he is mighty.
IN HIS NAME WE SHALL PURGE THE UNCLEAN.
ALL HAIL THE MIGHTY GOD-EMPEROR
FOR GLORY AND FOR TERRA
Same thing.
?
He is just another god of chaos. Evil in his own ways.
Well, he also specifically says the Chaos Gods are dicks.
But he also says they aren’t gods, and he isn’t a god.
Dicks everywhere!
Yes, Inquisition? This one right here. ಠ_ಠ
Some of the Gnostics reckoned that El/Yaweh was an evil demiurge. There are some that believe that El/Yaweh is actually Loki and that we are on the verge or Ragnarok.
Shit, now there’s a religion I could get behind!
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God is unreasonable and scary when you are a Christian, at least for me when I grew up. You’re basically told he can read your mind so you pretend he’s a great guy, but to me an evil God is just Christianity.
How does it help to pretend anything if he can read your mind?
You have to learn to fool yourself and to not ask such questions
He can only read surface level thoughts. Any deeper and we’d be able to tell, proving his existence, which would make faith irrelevant and lead him to disappear in a puff of logic.
Nah, he disappeared in a puff of logic because of the babel fish.
How would we be able to tell?
The philosophers religion.
This is definitely some shit Nietzsche would crack up high as fuck on opium. Hell im pretty sure he did.
also, if we’re going by traditional religious figures. Satanism. Though modern satanism is very different. I would argue that this is more accurately described as “christian satanism” or “christo-satanism”
This is definitely some shit Nietzsche would crack up high as fuck on opium. Hell im pretty sure he did
He said the opposite and very clearly mourns the decline in religion throughout his works. You should probably read the material before making wacko statements like this.
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” -Friedrich Nietzsche
You suggested them to read Nietzsche and from it you got he mourns the decline of religion through all of his works? Maybe you should also get a re-read.
The decline of religion is stated as a fact, killed by men’s rationality and evolution. As any evolution it has opportunities and risks, in this case the bigger risk is the loss of morality.
But the only thing he clearly advocates for is overcoming religion and God because they are not needed anymore. The new Man should make its own meaning and rules.
It’s the whole concept of the übermensch which is the single central point of his all system.
The quote is not supposed to be his opinion (not directly at least), it’s a character in a story.
It’s like taking the stance of Cephalus in the Plato’s Republic and say it’s Plato’s opinion, while it’s clearly just a tool to let Socrates speak.
The decline of religion is stated as a fact
And nowhere was that said that wasn’t the case. Reading comprehension isn’t that hard.
Stated as a fact with no emotion or judgment related to it. So that excludes mourning for it, which was the point I was making in my reply which was more than clear enough.
And I’m sorry, but I find it incredibly ironic how you’re the one saying reading comprehension isn’t that hard after failing to understand both Nietzsche and my comment.
That’s it?
Nietzsche is a character. Man has done a lot of things in his life. You can basically interpret everything he said in numerous ways. I was mostly pointing out that Nietzsche was probably the most apt example given this scenario. op literally said “like a toddler who fries little ants with a lens”
Anyway, i found the philosopher in the comments, my point was made.
I read his material for a class in high school over 10 years ago. His material is hardly up to interpretation, as are most philosophical works, as he had very specific ideas about the world. That argument ends up becoming a slippery slope to “anything can be misconstrued.” And if that’s the case, it doesn’t mean writers don’t have a specific intent behind their words. The main point is that Nietzsche was a religious man and anti-nihilist which a lot of people seem to conveniently gloss over as a result of not actually reading anything he’s said.
dude even the fucking nazis used nietzsches shit. To argue that it “CANNOT” be misconstrued is probably one of the fucking statements of all time.
I disagree, the post doesn’t ask if there is a religion where there is a god who is good, with a fallen angel who is evil. Neither are they asking for one where you pray to the evil fallen angel who opposes a good principal god. They’re asking for one where the principal god is evil.
I think, more specifically they’re asking for the name to a belief system in which we observe the actions of the Abrahamic god and judge it to be evil.
well no see you misunderstand, this is satanism from the view of classical christianity (i’m definitely using this term wrong, i just think it’s funny lol, don’t read into it). I.E. satan is “an evil god” which even through classical christianity, is not accurate. But i would really recommend you see what certain christians think of satanism lol.
They lack the mental capacity to properly formulate any other religion, so they just replace jesus/god with satan/devil and call it a day at it’s simplest.
I don’t think Christianity ever saw Satan as a god, though. Angels are creatures like humans except created to serve.
no, they don’t, but like i said, this is what they think satanism is to them.
It’s not about the fundamentals of religion, it’s about how they perceive what they believe to be the “anti religion” think about it. If you’re a christian, and you’ve told your entire life that god is good, and satan is evil, and that christianity is about christ and about what he does. When presented with the concept of satanism, doesn’t it seem apt that it would essentially be christianity, but loosely applied to what christianities concept of satan is?
It’s less about how religion works, and more about a perverted concept of religion.
In Christian Satanism is Jesus evil?
In Christian Satanism the Devil exists and is being worshipped. This is “classical” or “theist” Satanism where there is a belief in the existence of Satan.
Contrast that with modern atheist Satanism, where the Devil is merely a psychological symbol of rebellion, independence and freedom that serves to trigger theists while also being a representation of revolting against christan authoritarianism and, through the exploitation of rules stemming from theist-political decisionmaking, as a counter to the blatantly unconstitutional abuse of religious freedom laws for the benefit of a single religion.
You’re mixing things up. Satanism never believed in literal Satan, that’d be Satan’s /Devil’s Worshippers, a completely different group of people. “Satanism” was the word used by the ignorant western (mostly US) media during the “Satanic panic” during the '80s-'90s, and it stuck. The Satanic Bible, to which your “modern atheist Satanism” refers to, was written in '69. Nothing to do with literal Satan.
Theistic Satanism, otherwise referred to as religious Satanism, spiritual Satanism, or traditional Satanism,[2] is an umbrella term for religious groups that consider Satan, the Devil, to objectively exist as a deity, supernatural entity, or spiritual being worthy of worship or reverence, whom individuals may contact and convene with, in contrast to the atheistic archetype, metaphor, or symbol found in LaVeyan Satanism.
The Satanic Bible is LaVeyan Satanism and as a product of the 20th century very much more modern than the “traditional Satanism” of de Sade and Huysman in the 19th century.
LaVeyan Satanism is still much more on the “spiritual” side of things than, for example the explicitly atheistic, sceptic and rational Satanic Temple, but both fall under the umbrella of the more modern, non-theistic understanding of Satanism. While a more historical form definetly existed, even if it wasn’t widely practiced.
Holy hell, I learned something today. Might be a matter of a language barrier, since in my native language the word “Satanism” by definition refers to LaVeyan Satanism, and there’s a distinct word for Satan’s/Devil’s worshippers. No idea how that happened.
“Christian Satanism” isn’t a thing
i suppose the concept would be that from the view of christianity, that jesus would be the same, and that satanists would worship the devil, as depicted in christianity.
No
Some forms of gnosticism say this
Isn’t the god supposed to define what good and evil even is, and wouldn’t therefore any monotheistic god be “good” by definition?!
Socrates answered this. If morality is objective or has an objective basis then it is necessarily independent from any God or god’s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euthyphro_dilemma
Edit to add: If you’re interested in the concept of an evil God in the context of Christian beliefs I recommend reading “Answer to Job” by Carl Jung. He doesn’t exactly make the Christian God evil but ascribes moral failings to God and frames Jesus as the redemption of God instead of the redemption of man.
Neither of those are necessarily true. For an Abrahamic god, sure, but one can certainly conceive of a god that doesn’t define good and evil, and a god that defines good and evil and doesn’t define itself as good.
I don’t think I would even call a being like that “god”, more like “evil spirit” or something.
These things aren’t well-defined, so you’re certainly welcome to, but I think most people would consider an omniscient, omnipotent creator of the universe to be a god and not a spirit.
That’s what people say, but in practice people have their own ideas and just project them on to god.
That’s only one (narrow) definition of a god.
To take a well known example, is Loki “good”?
It’s the definition monotheism employs though, and Loki is from a polytheistic pantheon.
All good, The comment I replied to has been edited to specify monotheism after I wrote my reply.
Yea sorry for that, I had the same thought as you right after I posted my comment.
Somewhat off-topic, but there’s this line of thought, which multiple Christian thinkers have come up with throughout the centuries, called the Ontological Argument. It basically tries to prove the existence of the Christian God with only pure logic, no axioms involved.
Proofs without axioms don’t exist elsewhere, so take the following with a massive grain of salt, but basically it goes:
God is a maximally good being. Existence of a maximally good being is itself good. Therefore, God must exist.
Aside from this being circular reasoning, it also involves a massive axiom: The existence and definition of good vs. bad.
But with your point, we can advance the argument even further:
Defining what’s good is good.
That way, we get twice the circular reasoning, but no axioms anymore. 🙃
Philosophical, not logical. The actual axiom is still 'god exists."
Defining what god must be, rather than defining what would qualify as a god, assumes there is such a thing as god.
Example: The cat god is a being that is a better cat than any other imaginable cat.
Compared to: A god would be all-powerful. This being, x, is all-powerful. Therefore, x is a god.
Compared to: There exists a cat better than any other cat. This cat, being greater than all others must be the god of cats. (Does this qualify as an omnipotent ‘god’? No, but at least the cat is provable.
Defining what’s good is good.
Adam and Eve were canonically cast from heaven for being able to define good and evil.
Philosophy needs to be logical, in my opinion. Otherwise, you’re just making up bullshit with no connection to reality.
Which, yeah, not wanting to have any axioms, does lead to that. It’s just reasoning around in a circle, but there’s no logical path to get into that circle.
Adam and Eve were canonically cast from heaven for being able to define good and evil.
I mean, sure, but then we just need to give a slightly different wonk to our circular argument:
As a maximally good being, only you know what's good, so defining what's good is in itself a good deed.But yeah, obviously this is just nonsense. I just find it hilarious, how much argumentation you can layer on top of itself, without actually providing a logical statement.
There is no reason to believe that a higher power cares about the concepts of good and evil to begin with. Taking a walk through the woods seems like a morally neutral activity, but all of the insects you crush along the way might view you as evil for what you do to them.
