4 ms·

The god of the old testament is morally ambiguous too. The christians defined the evil aspects away and made humanity responsible for all evil in the world.

• Andrex 7y ago
  The religion itself presents God as doing good; pagan religions don't have such framing, thus the classification "morally ambiguous."
  • Fjolsvith 7y ago
    And good for the Christian god means anything that benefits that god. Murdering children at the passover. Murdering people at the flood. Ad nauseam...
  • magduf 7y ago
    >The religion itself presents God as doing good Does it? I seem to remember a part in the Old Testament where the Abrahamic god orders his followers to commit genocide against some other tribe. How is that "doing good"?
    • ARandomerDude 7y ago
      According to what standard? Presumably you believe you are an accidental combination of chemicals, here because other chemical mixtures were the "fittest" -- often, the most ruthless. On what basis does a fittest chemical blob say "you ought to..."? You need an objective moral standard for that and you won't find it in your chemistry set.
    • tsimionescu 7y ago
      The point is that those events, in the context of Christian thought, are seen as good - their god is telling his people to clear some unbelievers. Christian dogma maintains that their god and his commandments are fundamentally moral, that they are the very base for objective morality. In Christian thought, by definition, anything that their god wanted to happen is good. Norse religions, on the other hand, make no such claims about their gods. Within the context of Norse beliefs and religious moraloty, Odin has done evil things, Loki has done evil things, etc. That is why, within their own system of beliefs, the gods are morally ambiguous.
    • throw0101a 7y ago
      You are making the same mistake as Bible literalists: * https://brandonvogt.com/did-god-command-genocide/ https://brandonvogt.com/did-god-command-genocide/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXAQzqVv5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXAQzqVv5s
    • roywiggins 7y ago
      God is good, by definition. It's just built into the Christian belief system. Men can do evil, but God can't. The question of how evil can exist at the same time as an all-benevolent God is such a hard problem that it even has a nifty name. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy
• throw0101a 7y ago
  You are making the same mistake as Bible literalists: * https://brandonvogt.com/did-god-command-genocide/ https://brandonvogt.com/did-god-command-genocide/ * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXAQzqVv5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXAQzqVv5s This idea that the OT God was evil dates back millennia, to the point that some early Christians thought that the OT deity was a completely different one than the NT deity: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcionism
• geofft 7y ago
  The God of the Old Testament is not morally ambiguous in the point of view of Christians. That was my claim. This news article is reporting on the beliefs of a Viking-age religion. It is not attempting to say that the actual gods of that religion are actually morally ambiguous.