I would argue that if God exists, they aren’t intentionally being an asshole. They are being completely hands off so as not to corrupt the experiment, or override free will. After all, the only reason any god would need a prime material plane of existence is to see if they can create a peer of themselves, and at least as far as most of the major religions seem to be concerned, if someone created this universe, they decided that we have free will, so it’s kinda hard to directly intervene. They could send avatars from time to time to attempt to intervene, but they kinda tied their hands in the act of creation.
You can absolutely intervene without affecting free will and that is assuming we even have free will. I am not convinced that we do.
Also why would you presume to know what a being (that as we imagine it) with unlimited power and knowledge would want or even need?
If you are a god and you see 25,000 people (10,000 of which are children) starving to death every single day and you have the power to stop that and you don’t then you are an immortal monster.
I was a real piece of shit for a good handful of years when I was a kid because I believed I was destined for hell. I figured if I’m going to spend eternity being tortured I may as well enjoy life to the max, even at the expense of others. Because I’m already going to hell, so why not, right?
Religion is fucking toxic, man. I hurt a lot of people and made a lot of decisions I can’t recover from.
That there’s a loving God.
Now it seems clear that even if he did exist, he’s just above average asshole
I would argue that they would be fully evil depending on your definition of god.
In my case, the abrahamic one. Narcissistic asshole
Ya that one is evil.
I would argue that if God exists, they aren’t intentionally being an asshole. They are being completely hands off so as not to corrupt the experiment, or override free will. After all, the only reason any god would need a prime material plane of existence is to see if they can create a peer of themselves, and at least as far as most of the major religions seem to be concerned, if someone created this universe, they decided that we have free will, so it’s kinda hard to directly intervene. They could send avatars from time to time to attempt to intervene, but they kinda tied their hands in the act of creation.
You can absolutely intervene without affecting free will and that is assuming we even have free will. I am not convinced that we do.
Also why would you presume to know what a being (that as we imagine it) with unlimited power and knowledge would want or even need?
If you are a god and you see 25,000 people (10,000 of which are children) starving to death every single day and you have the power to stop that and you don’t then you are an immortal monster.
I was a real piece of shit for a good handful of years when I was a kid because I believed I was destined for hell. I figured if I’m going to spend eternity being tortured I may as well enjoy life to the max, even at the expense of others. Because I’m already going to hell, so why not, right?
Religion is fucking toxic, man. I hurt a lot of people and made a lot of decisions I can’t recover from.
See also, Just World Fallacy