21 replies to this topic

[rain]

quote" Dystheism is the theological belief that the God of the Hebrew Bible is not fully good and is in fact evil. We believe the God of Israel is a tyrannical dictator who demands submission from all of humanity." unquote

I came across this you tube channel this evening and have to say that I agree 100% what this guy says about god of the hebrew bible, although I do not share his beleif that god exists.

Have a L@@K !

here is his You Tube channel

http://www.youtube.c...d?feature=watch

[rain]

I agree with what you say valk, this guy beleives in GOD and is afraid of him. ha ha ha

[rain]

funny you mention stalin, he talks about that too.

[lunaticheathen]

I refuse to worship out of fear.

I'm agnostic when it comes to Abraham's god. I believe in many gods, so that one god existing isn't totally out of the question - I've just never encountered him, and the stories don't speak well of him. If he is as evil as he is in scripture, he's not worthy of my worship.

Therefore, I do not worship Abraham's god.

[rain]

god is only a memory for me, from when i was under the age of ten. no worship from me.

[mcdaddy]

Why some people just blindly believe in One ancient book as truth and disregard other ancient religious books, is beyond me. Oh, my daddy said this one is true, so this one must be true.

Jews are idiots.

Just like xians.

[Babylonian Dream]

The Dear Leader is always right, and can never be wrong. If I say otherwise, I'll disappear away into the fires. That's the story of the Bible and every personality cult dictatorship.

[rain]

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.c...bed/vM5O1xV0GlU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

oop's trying to embed a video

Edited by rain, 08 July 2012 - 01:41 AM.

[Eugene39]

I find this guy's perspective very interesting. I certainly don't believe in Yahweh, and have pretty good reason to believe that there isn't a God at all, at least anything that fits the definition that God is described by, especially by the Christians. Having said that, it does seem to me at times that there is Mystery, Fate, etc., that we have no control over, and that both good and bad come from It.

[Kaiser01]

When i tried God for a second time this idea creeped into my head. I believed God existed but i also though so much of what he did was evil, i came to hate the god i thought i was supposed to worship.

[WMDKitty]

I refuse to worship out of fear.

I'm agnostic when it comes to Abraham's god. I believe in many gods, so that one god existing isn't totally out of the question - I've just never encountered him, and the stories don't speak well of him. If he is as evil as he is in scripture, he's not worthy of my worship.

Therefore, I do not worship Abraham's god.

Makes sense to me.

I've experienced Bast. I've been poked at by Freya. But I have never encountered BibleGod, and given what I've heard about him, I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

[mcdaddy]

I refuse to worship out of fear.

I'm agnostic when it comes to Abraham's god. I believe in many gods, so that one god existing isn't totally out of the question - I've just never encountered him, and the stories don't speak well of him. If he is as evil as he is in scripture, he's not worthy of my worship.

Therefore, I do not worship Abraham's god.

Makes sense to me.

I've experienced Bast. I've been poked at by Freya. But I have never encountered BibleGod, and given what I've heard about him, I'm pretty sure I don't want to.

Would you elaborate on these experiences?

[WMDKitty]

Kinda hard to elaborate on -- I'm mostly just running on sense-impressions and feelings.

For Bast it was an overwhelming sensation of "warm" and "safe" and "feline". Later encounters have been more specific and symbolic as I grow in understanding, but as a very small child, symbolic shit is just... shit.

As for Freya, -that- was a distinct impression of having been poked at with the non-pointy end of a spear. I assume that was a one-off, as I haven't seen her since.

[Eugene39]

Reviving this from the other thread: Eugene said

As far as a God-concept, this probably won't make any sense. Should there be God, It is transcendent. I do not believe in God because God does not follow through on what the religious say that God should be doing. Then, there is the problem of infinite regress. Having said all that, a God-concept that makes some sense is what I recently found out was called dystheism, - a God who is both good and evil, such as is described in Isaiah 45:7. However the problem I have with dystheism is it is connected to the Abrahamic God and I do not believe the Abrahamic God exists.

Valk said:

If god is a dystheist, then there is no way he could create ethics. Ethics become nonsense. He can't be good and say murder is evil, and bad and say murder is okay and be one in the same being. If he is good at all, then he would automatically avoid the evil part of his nature. Just as say, a good person would want to avoid taking the life of another. So lets assume then, that evil existed in theory pre creation. If god is good at all then, he would want to reduce the existence of evil. That is a situation as in much as the same as we want to prevent evil if we can help it. That would mean not creating the world, because if he had no other option but to create more evil then he can't be good at all. And failing that creating the world would increase the evil in existence which would be against the concept of gods nature being partially good. If he had no choice in creating us he is not god.

So if the god of the old testament is totally evil, as I understand the term dystheism, then the laws of the old testament become a matter of evil telling us not do good because, so following the ten commandments would then be following evil if that god is evil. That would means things like murder would be a good. Of course this is a nonsense position because are moral sense if this god actually exist would be attuned at least generally to doing his actions. It also would mean that we would see a reason to murder on a whole rather then only reasons to not murder. It also says in the bible we are like gods, so if that god is evil and we are not evil, we are then not like god. And it isn't so that god can't exist. The god of the bible can't exist with those contradictions being the case cause the god is supposedly logical since logic couldn't be created by illogic. A evil god by this couldn't be abrahamic.

Here's a couple of definitions that I'm finding: Dystheism is the belief that a god is not wholly good, and is possibly evil. Maltheism is the belief that God is wholly evil.

On to your thoughts on ethics. People who say that God (in particular the Bible God) is necessary for ethics haven't thought it through very well. It is really unnecessary to say that the Bible God is completely unethical. If Abraham had been a moral, ethical person, he would have told God "No" when God asked him to sacrifice Isaac. Some of the later Jewish thinking on this event and others where God asks / is involved in killings is quite interesting. Supposedly God did this and intervened on Isaac's behalf in order to show mankind that the true God does not want fathers to kill their children to appease a god, because that was commonplace at that time in history. Then I have read that God wept as He killed the Egyptians in the Red Sea, because He was forced to kill part of His creation. All this later Jewish thinking is quite foreign to me, given the Christian background I have.

What if nature is "God's personality" revealed to us. For example, Jesus said that rain falls on the just and the unjust, which does harmonize with the world I live in. The God which is talked about in Ecclesiastes 8: 14 that "...righteous men who get what the wicked deserve, and wicked men who get what the righeous deserve" also harmonizes with the world I live in. However, the Abrahamic God promises destruction to anyone who doesn't follow His rules, and peace and prosperity to those who do follow His rules, as is laid out in Leviticus 26, just to name one passage. So, whenever Abraham's God steps in and stops allowing bad things to happen to good people, then I will spend some time rethinking this issue.

I believe that God could be both good and evil. We as people are that way. Back to the idea for a moment that what if nature is "God's personality" revealed. I have seen pictures of a tornado with a clear sky just behind it. In contrast, in Matthew 7: 17 & 18, Jesus says, "So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit." I completely disagree with Jesus' statement. We all have times where our good side shines through and then times when we act completely selfishly, maybe even in the same hour! Even Jesus doesn't agree with his own statement. He told Peter at one point that he was the rock upon which he was going to build his church (if you buy the Catholic intrepretation of the passage), yet another time he tells Peter to "get behind me, Satan".

I think Christianity does a huge disservice to mankind with its belief that we are all born completely corrupt. I find it completely repulsive to teach children that they are born so flawed that God will ultimately reject them for eternity, unless they engage in following their church's religious teachings.

Maybe dystheism isn't the word I'm looking for to describe my thoughts on what character God might have, based on what I see. It's just the closest thing I have found so far.

[Deva]

Rain, interesting video. I like this guy because he actually doesn't sugar coat the Bible. Biblegod is obviously not "love" or "all good". Where I cannot agree with him is his choice to still worship or venerate such a god. Giving a god worship purely because he demands it.

Biblegod to me is purely a human creation. He acts like a dictator. Also, why the heck would an all powerful, good and evil god care if humans worshiped him? It must be a huge ego problem.

I think there probably are gods, but much more mysterious. Most of us, most of the time, cannot discern their motives or their character. What is most true to me now is the Roman idea of gods or guardian spirits tied to places http://en.wikipedia....iki/Genius_loci

This idea of gods attached to different places is probably universal and very old. I think in Tibet every mountain had a god, and there are some mountains still considered specially sacred.

Some of these gods are malevolent and some are not. Even 3 years ago I would not have said this - I was more or less a pantheist, but I go with my gut impression and my own perceptions as they have developed over the years.

[Eugene39]

Sure there could be a dystheist or even a maltheistic god, but it would make any form of christianity or judaism I know of, nonsense. And the making sense of the bible is like making sense of a 2000 year old acid trip.

Exactly. I was thinking about what I'd written after I posted it, and by all means, it destroys the Christian view of God. Reform Judaism is a little harder to pin down because they do not dictate what view of God that a person must follow, unlike Christianity. After all, the Jews have always been taught that they are the chosen race, but cannot "fit" that idea against what happened with the holocaust. You might enjoy reading some of the Jewish "holocaust theology" as it tries to deal with the evil that happened to the Jewish people.