"If you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?"

In the comments section of my article Jesus Appeared To Other People, Why Can't He Appear To Me? Darrin started by asking me "What would YOU do as God?". Goprairie mentioned what she would do if she were God. Then Russ contributed what he would do as God. I thought the interaction was brilliant so I'd like to feature it and request responses from everyone meaning all categories from Believers to Non-Believers, Buddhists to Zoroastrians.

Here are the relevant comments.....

Lee Randolph said...
I would do things according to my values and principles which are...
* scrap it all and start over otherwise, knowing full well that I made the parameters, that unless I want to start over I have to work within the parameters and get down to a level that the human can comprehend
* to nurture
* to follow sound principles of communication, because humans demonstrate every day that their behavior can be changed in a variety of ways by a variety of stimuli, none of them having the potential force of a God.

goprairie said...
1) if you were god, would you reveal yourself? to me this is a big duh. what would the harm be? for god to make him/herself obvious to us would sure stop a lot of arguing and fighting and killing. if i were god as i usually hear god defined, i would want to make myself known and stop that kind of crap. like if my kids came home and didn't know if i was here and were about to do something wrong, i would cough to make myself known and prevent their bad behavior.

2) god used to have personal relationships with people. sure, but now we call those personal relationships forms of mental illness. that he 'appears' so differently to people is reason to beleive it is a product of the person's own mind. i know a man who today believes he is a 'prophet' but oddly, the stuff god says thru him is the widely accepted views of a white male 60-something conservative. if god were really appearing to my friend, would there not be some thing that he would disagree with my friend about and that my friend would find challenging and shocking? yet oddly, each prophesy he 'hears' is spot on with what he knows and believes. dead giveaway to me that it is his own brain playing tricks on him, that he is then trying to pass off on us as the word of god. i am pretty sure if god revealed him/herself to me, there would be some surprises!


Russ said...
goprairie,

Great comment.

Question for you: If you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?

For me, like you, goprairie, I would make sure that, at least occasionally, they knew I was there. That's one mark of a loving father. I most certainly would not single out one of them to be nonsensically chatted up out of an incendiary shrubbery, and then, in a monumental display of omniscient stupidity actually expect that everyone concerned and impacted would get the message. Fact is, I would counsel my children that they would do well to simply ignore any and all claims made by each and every forthright forsythia, sincere salvia, ardent arborvitae, and profoundly philosophical philadelphus. Plants are notorious liars.

If I wrote them a book, say three thousand years ago, I would have told them useful things, remembering that, I am, after all, modeling a loving father. Let's say, that although I am omniscient, omnipotent, and whatever other omni's I want to be, I decided not to disclose too much all at once. While I could have kept nuclear bombs and microelectronics in reserve - they would have been really difficult to implement given the technology of the time - I still could have given them much useful information.

Remembering that I actually do love my children, that is, I love every single one of them, in my book I would not pit them against one another by calling some of them my "chosen people." I would not claim to love my sons and daughters while continually demonstrating that I see my daughters as second rate chattel. I would show them a constancy in love that would allow them go to sleep each night assured that their loving father would never intentionally harm any one of them. If I did indeed have the power to destroy my children, being a loving father, I would make sure they were never aware of that awful terrifying thought.

My book for my children would contain lots of good tips: wash your hands; pork is healthy food, just cook it well; slavery is out, period(don't want to interfere with someone's freewill, now, do we?); health problems are caused by germs or a person's own failing body - not demons or witches - so the proper response to someone's illness is empathy, caring, and compassion, not burning them, torturing them, or chaining them to a wall; here's a simple recipe for soap, and here's how you use it; the earth is not the center of the universe and it is much closer to correct to say that the Earth goes around the Sun; here's how to make a printing press; you are related to every living thing on the planet; enjoy sex; avoid violent conflict as far as possible; don't kill those who disagree with you; and, the world is more comprehensible when you approach it systematically through science.

In the introduction I would point out that this material is the best stuff I had available to me, and that as they learn better ways to do things they should update the book with that new data. Being a loving father know-it-all, I would permit updates that were a closer reflection of reality than were the book's current contents and I would disallow those ideas that went too far afield.

I'm guessing I could get all I want to say to them into a 100 page trade paperback in 12 point type, including indexes and appendices (Hey, it's some handy tips from a loving father, not Encyclopedia Britannica). Then, being omnipotent and all, I would drop one copy into the lap of every person on the planet each of whom would be able to read it in their native tongue regardless of age, literate or not(all that omni has to be put to work somehow). Periodic updates would be similarly dispersed.

So, goprairie, if you were a god, how would you treat the children you created?
1:33 PM, January 28, 2009

goprairie said...
russ - not sure what you are asking, but i will toss a couple things out -
i have never tried to write a book for them with all my knowledge, cuz i am here for them. i don't hide in a closet but let it be known that if they have a question or issue or idea, we can talk and we have for their whole lives talked about what is current with them and what they need to know now. i make myself known and available.
if i had written them a book 3K years ago and i had put errors in it, like to hate gay people, i would certainly write them a note now saying hey, i was wrong on that one or hey, i changed my mind or hey, you are misinterpreting that one.
that god does such a poor job of this brings his/her existence into question. anything that tries to make excuses for god not being present to us is making more problems. it is more likely there is not god and when i look, i find alternate answers that make more sense for every single thing ever attributed to god.
9:58 PM, January 28, 2009

16 comments:

Jay said...

I'm not sure what I would do if I were God. If I were God I would be all-knowing and I would have a different perspective on things.

God is all-knowing and I'm not
God is self-sufficient and I'm not
God is all-powerful and I'm not
God is perfect and I'm not
God is the Creator and I'm not

There's a God and I'm not it. His ways are higher than my ways and His thoughts are higher than my thoughts. I can't fully comprehend the infinite.

Anonymous said...

Hi Robin,
so the fact that you don't know or have experience with any of that stuff prevents you from saying what you would do if it were possible?

When you were a kid didn't you ever think about what you would do if you had all the money you wanted?

Or what three wishes you would make if you could have them?

I suspect you did, and I suspect you didn't have any experience with that and I suspect it didn't keep you from coming up with a few things.

Anonymous said...

Hi Robin,
Do you have children?
How about an ostrich?

If you were robin and you had an ostrich, how would you treat your ostrich?

Anonymous said...

I wonder,
are there different rules for how a god treats his children and how we treat our children or ostriches?

in a sphere containing god and his children and a separate sphere containing people and there children, How much over lap would there be?

imagine one sphere overlaped by a small percentage on another like an ice cream cone.....

{PEOPLE AND THEIR CHILDREN
- stroke their hair
- answer the "why" question over and over again
- wipe their tears
- bandage their scrapes
- give them a big hug
- play games with them
- general nurturing
(AREA OF OVERLAP BETWEEN PEOPLE AND GOD
- fill in the blanks with something
- fill in the blanks...
- fill in the blanks...)}
GOD AND HIS CHILDREN
- remain silent when they ask the why question
- Don't touch them
- Don't talk to them
- Don't play games with them}

Anonymous said...

Hi all,
just thought I'd throw this out there for discussion

can we define how god should treat his children?

If we can't, then how can we say we are his children?

If children have a definition, then so does how he treats them, and we can compare that to other definitions of children and other definitions of "how children get treated".

We have a method to observe how God treats his children. The Bible tells us how he treats his children, but outside of the bible we can only speculate by empirical observation.

Anonymous said...

ooh, ooh,
here's another one,
if Love was a sphere containing properties,
and the Problem of Evil was a sphere containing properties, how much overlap would their be?

Doesn't suffering build character?

Doesn't God wan't our character to be sufficient to get into heaven?

Can a person with poor character that believes in Jesus get into heaven?

Can a camel go through the eye of a needle?

What would the scope of the overlap between love and the problem of evil be?

Gandolf said...

Robin said..."I can't fully comprehend the infinite."

Personally it seems to me that faithful folk comprehend the infinite quite well .

They just have trouble with the evidence and proof of it.

Anonymous said...

God gives us, his children, every opportunity to know Him.

Yet He might reveal Himself even more clearly if we weren't so depraved.

Every single one of us is horribly depraved with a sinful nature as a consequence of what 2 of us did in Eden.

Our Father decided that this was the correct consequence, and was perfectly just.

It seems as though our Father overlooked the fact that having depraved sinful natures might interfere with the free will He values so much.

It should be clear from the foregoing how abundantly God loves us.

Greg Mills said...

I would be one of 12,000,000 designers (I believe in intelligent design, only with 12,000,001 designers. It's a committee system and it can complicated. Fjords are a headache. They involve all sorts of crazy paperwork.)

I would do a better job of cleaning the cosmic coffee pot and I'd get to meetings on time. And I'd be a better advocate for the leviathan, the ziz, the behemoth, and the Bar Juchne. They were fine animals that deserved a better shot that the speciazation committee gave them.

Russ said...

My point in asking the question was to emphasize that even though humans are quite fallible we can provide more sound counsel for our children than did that thing worshipped by Christians which they hold to be all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful.

I think that the meanings of those three hyphenated adjectives "all-knowing," "all-loving," and "all-powerful" are lost on believers. These descriptors are to the Christian God what the drone is to the bagpipes. The drone supplies an essential character of the bagpipes, and the three "all" adjectives supply some essential traits that Christians demand of their god. For the bagpipe listener the drone fades as he is captured by the rhythm and melody of, say, Amazing Grace, and for the theistic Christian the full meanings and implications of those adjectives disappear as they abandon themselves to the emotions accompanying worship and reverence and awe of that which they see as having constructed an entire cosmos with them at the center of it. As much as Christians might want to protest to the contrary, if their god truly was all-knowing, all-loving, and all-powerful, it would, without a doubt, have conducted itself rather differently from how it has been depicted in holy books.

Realize that being all-powerful means, among infinitely many other things, that the Christian god could make the universe comply with any rules, laws, or state of the cosmos any of us might dream up. All powerful means there are no limits whatsoever to what it could do. So when I suggest that the conquest of the Promised Land by the chosen ones could have been accomplished without genocide, without rape, in fact no violence at all, I know that any all-powerful being could surely have pulled that off. All-powerful means that it could have simply emptied the land of all its current human inhabitants: Poof! They're Gone! Then, the Israelites could have moved in hassle-free. Instead, this all-powerful thing chooses to massacre every part of every human being present: sperm, egg, zygote, blastula, gastrula, pharyngula, embryo, fetus, newborn, infant, toddler, child, juvenile, teen, adult, and elderly. All-powerful means that the Isaelites could have arrived in the Promised Land in peace, but their god chose violence which is their legacy to this day. (Sadly, as real estate goes the Promised Land of the Bible is actually quite a dump, so their god could have done better there, too.)

All-powerful means that the Noah's Ark story was completely unnecessary. The god could simply have said: "Hey, Noah. I've killed everybody on the planet except your immediate family and their spouses. Now, begat like rabbits. The world population needs to go from 8 persons to 6 billion persons by the year 2000." Instead, that all-powerful and all-loving god chose to keep rattlesnakes, cockroaches and naked mole rats high and dry while infants, toddlers, pregnant women and all the rest struggled without hope til the waters overtook them. Is it really the case that not one single human infant on the entire planet was worthy of safekeeping, but tarantulas and sloths were? Virtually anyone a hair's breadth shy of psychopath could do better, and none of us has the benefit of being all-powerful. All-powerful, all-loving fathers do not harm their children. All-powerful means that each and every end can be achieved by an infinite number of means, including non-violent means.

Characterizing their god as all-powerful provides comforting but unsubstantiated premises which theistic Christians then employ to justify the claim that their god, among others things, created the universe, but it destroys their claim that the world is as an all-powerful, all-loving being would want it. Any sane, moral person could have done better than the barbarous Christian god. It is the models and examples of the behaviors of sane, moral people on which we should nurture our children, yet, time after time the Bible lauds some psychotic act as an act of love and Christians urge their young to embrace it.

Our children should learn that love is not expressed through the Biblically-modelled genocide, rape, incest, or morally reprehensible blind obedience to auditory hallucinations. If Noah existed, he was insane. If Abraham existed, he was insane. For that matter, if the Christian god exists, it, too, is insane. From a modern informed perspective, we can forgive someone's psychoses, but it is itself a much deeper moral failing on our part to suggest that their behaviors merit anything from us but ridicule and contempt.

Although I am not all-powerful, I certainly could have authored a book which would have been far more beneficial to its readers than the Bible has been for its. It obviously would not have everything they need to know, and I'm sure it would not lead them to Utopia, but it also would not corrupt the idea of love by treating it as a synonymous with crass heartless inhumanity as does the Bible.

Unknown said...

The first task of anyone postulating a GOD is to define it. Unless a non-contradictory definition can be offered, its irrational to even think along these lines. Since God as imagined by theism is self-contradictory, it cannot exist and is impossible. Consider this excellent argument.

God's Spatial Unlocatedness Prevents Him from Being the Creator of the Universe: A New Argument for the Nonexistence of God by Jeffrey Grupp, 2006.

(I've posted this one before, but nobody writes anything about it. Grupp's work deserves attention.)

But even if it turns out that God is possible, I and all other people still possess superior morality to the monster imagined by Christianity as God, so whatever I or anybody else did would be better than what the "Holy Bible" depicts Yahweh or Jesus as doing.

Anonymous said...

Hi Robert B.,
thanks
I'll check it out.

Scott said...

Interesting question Lee.

If we look at human beings as state machines, Christians claim God created us in one state, but really wants us to exist in some other state. If this is true then, despite being all powerful, God is incapable of causing us to reach this desired state on his own. It's something he cannot do. Only each individual can reach this state on their own.

God can only try to lead us there by interacting with us, which would in turn influence how he treated us. However, this seems to conflict with the idea of an all powerful God. Specifically, God has a goal that he cannot reach and needs the help of human beings to complete.

Otherwise, how he treats us is ultimately irrelevant as he could move us from one state to another regardless of what we experience.

Also, if God is incapable of "promoting" us from one state to another without tainting the end state with his influence (God couldn't have created us to love him, as this kind of "Love" would be inferior to us deciding to love God on our own), this calls into question the idea that God created human beings, from nothing, that exist in a state where they can make choice which are free from God's influence (beings with free will).

Take the following thought experiment. If someone truly loved God was completely destroyed, could God bring that person back in a state where he still truly loved God? Or would this person have to grow to truly love God all over again? If God could restore this person's love, would it be any less "real"?

This leads me to the obvious flaws in plot lines that we see on TV and in the movies. Sure, the hero could have just [insert some obvious action that would solve the problem], but who want's to watch that? if God could have just created us in the state he really desired then, based on the situation we current find ourselves in, he wouldn't exist. And if God doesn't exist, then who's going to dish out ultimate justice, save us from death, etc?

So we end up with Christians claiming that God needs to nurture us, just like our human parents nurture us, or we need to suffer to reach the goal that God has for us. But, as most of you have noticed, it appears that even finite and flawed human beings do a better job nurturing their children than God.

However, this really isn't a surprise. As John has pointed out, most Christians start "from above" and try to rationalize God's actions toward us in based on our current form and our current situation. They assume that, since God exists, is all powerful and all knowing, that his actions must be correct.

Unknown said...

Hello Mr Randolph: Thank you for taking time to respond to my brief message and posting of Link to Grupp's essay. I read his stuff a couple of years ago and was then struck by the cogency of his argument. Although his prose is a bit cumbersome, the logic makes sense.

The essential section of Grupp's argument is in part 2 where he wrote:

" I do not know of any explanation of how, exactly, a wholly spatially located entity and a wholly spatially unlocated entity can be involved in an unmediated attachment. An unmediated attachment between a wholly spatially located entity and a wholly spatially unlocated entity appears impossible for the following reasons. An unmediated attachment between a wholly spatially located and a wholly spatially unlocated item would require either that the wholly spatially unlocated entity ‘reach across’ the realms in order to be at a place and to thus involve an unmediated attachment to the wholly spatially located entity, or vice versa. Since a wholly spatially located entity cannot fail to be at a place, a wholly spatially unlocated entity then must indeed ‘reach across’ to the wholly spatially located entity, in order to involve an unmediated attachment to the wholly spatially located entity. Since the wholly spatially located entity can only be at a place, the wholly spatially unlocated entity must become wholly spatially located, and must somehow be at a spatial place, if it is to involve an unmediated attachment to the wholly spatially located entity. Similarly, a wholly spatially located entity would have to ‘reach across’ the realms in order to become spatially unlocated, if they are to involve an unmediated attachment to a wholly spatially unlocated entity. However, how this occurs is not only unexplained, it is also apparently self-contradictory (impossible): in order that such an unmediated attachment occur between a wholly spatially located entity and a spatially unlocated entity, either a wholly spatially located entity must not be spatially located (not be at a spatial place), or a wholly spatially unlocated entity must be spatially located (be at a spatial place). But by the definition of ‘spatially unlocated,’ what is wholly spatially unlocated cannot be at a spatial place lest it be spatially located; and by the definition of ‘spatially located,’ what is wholly spatially located cannot fail to be at a place lest it be spatially unlocated. If the realm crossing intermediary (the relation, causes) is indeed a connection between God and the entities of the universe, the realm crossing intermediary apparently involves such impossible features. " p.14-15

What Grupp seems to be saying is that a transcendent being not located in a space-time Universe or not located in any sort of spatial space-time realm cannot communicate or interact with anything that actually exists in a spatial space-time Universe because a relation between a state of nothingness in some other realm an a state of somethingness in this realm cannot possibly obtain, for exemplification of the relation in either realm would require not only some conveniently (but unwarranted) presumed boundary crossing action but that the relation's complementary other exemplification would have to be of the same nature. But this is impossible, for nothingness cannot be somethingness and somethingness cannot be nothingness. Grupp's argument is very strong it seems to me because all the theist can do in response is to whine something about magic or mystery. But when we consider the total lack of valid evidence for the supernatural it becomes apparent Grupp's argument explains why nowhere and no place throughout human history is there a valid instance of the supernatural. This explanatory power and the conservative nature (no ad hoc assumptions) of Grupp makes his argument effective in refuting the notion of a God. But the god of classical theism is necessarily defined as the one and only possible creator of any possible universe in any possible world. Hence, if it is not impossible for a universe in some possible world to come about by natural causes or uncaused at all, then GCT does not exist. Grupp's effort is to show why (based on the impossibility of a "Being" located in a non-space-time transcendent non-location interacting or communicating or relating to anything that does exist and is located in a space-time spacial universe) GCT can fail to be the creator of a space-time (spacial) universe since a transcendent GCT must be able to relate in an unmediated attachment to some existent in a spacial space-time universe. Since it is not impossible for GCT to fail to be the creator of all possible universes in all possible worlds, then GCT as defined by classical theism does not exist.

Anonymous said...

Hi Scott, Robert,
thanks for dropping by! Its good to see you again scott!

And robert_b,
I saw you post something else somewhere that correlates to something I read recently in "how to measure anything".

you said something like anything that can't be defined can't exist.
I agree, anything that exists has to have parameters, or else it is everything including me.

If nothing else, my boundaries delineate at least one boundary for God.

I think Christianies staying power lies in its ambiguity, and a smart guy once said
"defining the problem is half the solution" so if we can get them to define what it is they think they know, my guess is they will realize they don't really know anything and must necessarily be agnostic.

My attack on the quality of information in the bible is one way to do that.

Unknown said...

Mr. Randolph

Thank you for your kind and cogent reply. Your blog posts are a joy to read. Your mind is keen, and I look forward to reading your posts in greater detail.

Best Regards and Wishes

Robert Bumbalough aka Robert_B