god's track record, taking into consideration such things as millenia of faminue, plague, war; the holocaust, conditions in africa today, AIDS, and etc, set him apart as the standard bearer of a world class league of screw balls and failures with shrub as a star member. infinite and unknowable indeed.
R
---
| Well, this does imply that human happiness is the highest measure of
"good."
perhaps. to me, it merely looks at that aspect of the whole. the failure regarding human happiness is one of many indications of an overall failure of "creation." doing "good" doesn't even enter the picture. we aren't there yet. we haven't dealt with "bad."
if the most simplistic aspects of human welfare and security fall by the wayside, not to mention human happiness, the rest of creation can't be faring too well either. just as in today's USA, if we can't feed, cloth, house, and assure at least minimum health care for those in their direst time of need, we're not doing something right.
one doesn't even get to the point of considering human happiness before one runs into eons of human misery aplenty. as mae west said in a different context, "goodness has nothing to do with it."
| which neither a Christian nor an ancient Greek for that matter would
| believe.
i'll take your word for it. as a human, human happiness is a meaningful concept to me. guess this is where i part company with a "christian" and an "ancient greek." although i find it hard to believe they didn't find human happiness imporant, particularly for those they loved. i guess i'm going to have to beg off as being one of those "pursuit of happiness" types. ;-)
i tend to relate a bit better to renessaisance notions of humanism emphasizing the key role of humanity in life rather than religious dogma and doctrinaire theological abstractions. while not making human kind the measure of all things myself, i can certainly see a need to reintroduce people into the equation as a meaningful part of the whole on this earth.
| (CF. Aristotle when he says off the cuff that the highest area of
| study cannot be man, as it is obvious that there are things more important
| than human beings).
to aristotle i suppose. i guesss aristotle could afford the luxury of inventing his own intellectual pecking order. when one lived in a world where most human beings were dead before they were 25 or 30 years old, were frought with disease, were uneducated, illiterate and generally immature, lived under dictatorships, at war, enslaved so guys like plato and aristotle could enjoy the luxury of thinking, the human race must not have counted for much or appeared as much of a subject for study. not exactly an even playing field.
| I'm trying to remember -- I think Luther solved the problem of theodicy by
| arguing that since God's goodness is unknowable, obviously our puny human
| understanding of the term what it means when we say that God is "good."
perhaps "solved" from the theological point of view. i don't believe anyone ever solves such hypothetical problems. they're intellectual exercises; and often devolve into intellectual masturbation. they can be "solved" inside their boxes. but beyond that, the solutions usually disintegrate.
it's always a safe bet when one says god is unknowable. god wouldn't be god and be knowable now would he? especially to anything as primitive as people. god isn't the type any of us plan to have over thursday to watch the Rose Bowl and have a few beers with us is he? this really has nothing to do with human happiness except for people who think they must "know" everything to be happy, poor souls.
| I can imagine a race of highly evolved cows would refer to the existence
of
| hamburgers as evidence against God's goodness.
or how people regard the human hamburger on a battlefield as evidence that god's not operating on all eight -- or in his/her/its case 10 to to 1000 power -- cylindars. again, goodness has nothing to do with it. this example is a matter of sanity/insanity. is god so nuts that the alleged creator of the universe -- master entity beyond all human comprehension, alleged christian font of love -- either tolerates, ignores, encourages, fosters, permits, suborns, or causes such wanton psychopathic misery? and rewards the psychopaths who perpetrate it?
there are enough examples of this kind in the history and lives of human beings that one doesn't need to draw allegories about super intelligent beasts when we have our own experience, like the holocaust, like people being tortured to death, dying of starvation, female castration, the war in iraq, etc., to give us example after example people can relate to directly without needing parables as intermediaries.
i'd never say god is good. i can only go by what i know. i can't bring myself to cut any slack for god, not because the issue of human happiness isn't being addressed but because the issue of human and animal, misery so proliferates, wanton destruction of all life, doesn't get any better.
people seem to be the ones uniquely qualified to notice this. god is out to lunch.
| I am not a theist by the way and am neither defending not attacking any of
| these theological positions.
OK, i won't sue you. ;-)
parenthetically, i'd like to mention how our "news" media -- and just about everyone else in society -- is always talking about floods, forest fires and other natural disasters as caused by Mother Nature. while it's good old God who rescues them, saves their homes, saves them from harm, protects them, is looking over them, etc. this knee jerk sexist bias in the judeo/christian/muslim tradition is so deep it's unconscious. wouldn't it be fun to hear someone say once and awhile that god started the forest fire? that god caused the waters to rise, just like in the bible? that god caused the holcaust. and mother nature saved a few of us from destruction.
oh, sure, we have the esoteric legal notion of acts of god which never gets any play in the public mind or on TV. but how about an act of Mother Nature saving our asses?
R
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