I'm Nicer than God

Not everybody accepts that any such thing ever took place. Anybody can write anything in a book.

I can't think of any sins that I want or need to be "saved" from. I do some things that christian society doesn't accept, but I don't think those things are wrong and I don't plan to stop doing them. They don't hurt anyone.

If you could stop wars, murder, torture, abuse of children, starvation, etc. throughout the world, would you do it right now? If your answer is no, then I don't see how you can justify calling yourself a good person on any level. Don't give me any bullshit about free will. I say fuck violent people's freedom of choice to be evil in the extreme. Their victims are more important. Teaching mankind "lessons" of various sorts is not worth the cost. Life is not a morality play. This is the real deal.

This kind of thing is why I can't find a rational definition of god that I can understand or relate to anymore.

Are you mentally and emotionally prepared to face reality? Then do some historical research on torture. Find out what unspeakably cruel things have been done to hundreds of thousands if not millions, often for no good reason. Dare to learn the details of their intense physical and emotional pain. You're not too good to know what they went through. Then be honest with yourself about how you feel about a higher power, if one actually exists, that has failed to intervene on behalf of these victims so many times. Don't rationalize.

If you are anywhere close to being a reasonably normal and rational human being, you wouldn't treat a rabid dog that way, and most likely, neither would anyone you have ever known personally. It is sick to think that it's okay for people to suffer in such extreme ways, sometimes for very long periods, with no real hope for relief, except for death.

If there is any good in this world, it is inside us, which is why we need to stand up for innocent victims and stop waiting for any kind of a god to do it for us.

 

If innocence is real, then there are no victims.

 

Neither of these 3 statemenst are necessarily true. Some people believe in something not by choice, religious faith has served many people well and some people come by with little or no faith at all. Yes, I'm nitpicking on the last statement a bit. Of course it's better to have some kind of faith, faith can be very vague and broad at times.

 

I'm defining an innocent victim in a practical way; as someone whose suffering is not directly linked to any action that they took or failed to take.

If you want to dissect words in a way that is useful to the thread and relevant to its purpose, try starting with the word "compassion".

 

Com-passion, to suffer with.

I prefer to dissect things in a way that is useful to everyone in every instance.

Are you saying your capacity to suffer makes you nicer? I think it only makes us an ally to some and not to others. Misery loves company but allegiances change as one finds a thing acceptable where another does not. Compassion is a fickle metric that does not lend itself to standard comparisons.

 

There's no way in hell I'm going to try to explain to you why caring about people who are in great distress, through no fault of their own, is better than not caring. Anybody who doesn't get this has personal issues that I can't fix.

 

Indeed, dope. And I thought I was nitpicking

 

I do not suggest that not caring is better than caring or vice versa. What I do suggest is everybody cares. I do suggest that there is no fault period, that suffering is endemic to the condition of embodiment. That you may not understand this does not represent a personal issue and you can change your mind. You just made, anybody guilty of something to support the idea that you are nicer than god.

My perception of god or good is, it is where you find it and to find it, if indeed you perceive it absent, you look for it.

 

I think this is where you're losing us, man. It's not about the capacity to suffer of the person who cares or sympathize with people in misery. And not that you did of course, but just felt like adding that there seems to be no point at all in comparing this capability with God's. Not that God is so much nicer (or not) but more so because we can't measure it's niceness. God may be good or love but is love always nice? Oh yeah, let's go dissecting words in different abstract terms again!

 

My point about compassion is that it represents in a sense, crocodile tears
. We all lick our wounds, but when we are threatened with injury, we would wound instead.

I agree that to be aware in total is to be empathetic as reality is seamless in truth.

As far as niceness goes, the measure we give, the degree of niceness we assign to any person or event, is the measure we receive. The problem with this arbitration is that it is indeed arbitrary and perpetually so. It gives us no objective information but it certainly hones our perception to the point that we find cause to kill each other over abstractions.

Nothing real can be threatened.

 

I don't like that idea. I'm not trying to support it. I would love for somebody to prove me wrong. I'm just not willing to rationalize as much as it takes to convince myself that God is what I want him/her/it to be.

 

It doesn't take a lot of rationalization to recognize that god, in practice, is what we invoke as good cause.

 

Can't wait til I can recognize that! Shouldn't be long since I rationalize the shit out of everything..

 

Every word we speak has at it's inception an experiential conjugation. We are devotional by nature, devoted to our good. The word god is an english variant of the word good. Your good is your god.

 

I know good (and evil) seem to be universal, they also remain subjective in the end. God may be a variant of good in the linguistic sense but I'm not convinced It is limited to 'goodness' at all. I love dissecting words to unravel their origin and nuancated meaning but it rarely gives insight in divine matters unfortunately.

 

I am not claiming the phenomena of god to be a divine matter but a distinctly human one, that is the word god represents some aspect of human experience.
Your thrust in life is always toward your own good depending on what that model is to you in any situation. In this way we are devotional by nature, devoted to our own good. This good that we invoke then is the practical nature of the concept of god.

The word god, < Indo-European, meaning, "that which is invoked"]

 

when we are not distinctly human , we intersect . the trouble is
a distinctly human social language can be insufficient , even reluctant ,
to accomodate this occasional reality . moo .

 

Moo--omm.

 

well my feeling is this. just because the way christianity describes god is patently psychopathic, doesn't mean a god who isn't, can't or doesn't exist. it just means christianity is full of shit

 

the higher-power for an atheist is the human collective . this shall be
all that their story allows them to intersect with . yes , they do have a
story to live by - and like anybody who lives literally by a story they
manage to muddle by and at least not die from it .

now it may well be i've met an atheist who has even rejected
the human collective - oo , a grumpy soul , a rational drunkard .