No. They're not fair. There I said it. They're not. The ones at a disadvantage pray to them for help, the ones doing well pray for more.

As Stephen Fry put it “bone cancer in children?”

A "god"which

i. created nature that is wastefully indifferent and ravaged by gratuitous suffering
and/or
ii. created us sick but commands us to be well
and/or
iii. eternally punishes us for our temporal crimes

is certainly not "fair" (just).

Fairness? I was under the impression that everybody knew life isn't fair. A few ideas that seem to be relevant:

1. Deservingness

2. Equality

We seem to have fixated on equality; hence, to some, life isn't fair.

Deservingness is a double-edged sword: sometimes it seems to misfire so to speak (bad things happen to good people, that sort of thing), other times, it works perfectly (some do get their just deserts, what goes around comes around, karma).

The long and short of it, fairness needs to be labeled FRAGILE. This side up $\uparrow$

You speak of some religious references. We don't know if there is a hell. Buddhists believe in a temporary hell and Jews don't believe in a hell at all. I am only asking about all that exists that we can observe.

Why are gods always connected with morality and ethics? Isn't it enough they just created the universes and the lives in it? And Isn't it clear that we shouldn't mess with their creation? Well, we can, obviously, and replace it by an artificial, unnatural world filled with hot technology and reconfigurated life with rearranged faces, but why should we? Don't we get out of touch with paradise more and more?

Okay, so my third point doesn't interest you. What about the other two? Surely not the handiwork of a fair-minded creator deity. :chin:

But assuming there was an all knowing and all powerful god that created us and wants the best for us. Are they fair? — TiredThinker

If what is best for us is fair then god, as stipulated, must be fair. If what is best for us is not what is fair, then, for our own good, god is not fair.

You are doing things the wrong way around.

Suppose God - an omnipotent, omniscient, omnibenevolent person - exists.

Well, by hypothesis, they are fair in their dealings, for they're morally perfect.

Thus they are fair in their dealings with us.

If that seems inconsistent with what you think is happening to you and to others, then you have faulty beliefs about what is happening to you and others.

Or, the gods are just not omnibenevolent.

If you believe the universe was created by God, then I think it is pretty easy to believe It/He/They are fair. In particular, the same causal, natural laws that God created, described, or “is” apply to everyone. As a result, I think my construction a Deistic God would be “fair” in that sense.

I think most theists don’t see the world itself as fair (some people are born into poverty, some die early or in childbirth, etc) but if they believe in judgement would believe such judgement to be “fair.”

Often times, by definition, God is ascribed the virtues of fairness or justice (perhaps by nature of omniscience) so in that case it is sort of a tautology.

Fairness is valued by us, and if it comes about, that is as a result of our efforts.

But assuming there was an all knowing and all powerful god that created us and wants the best for us. Are they fair? It is easy to imagine how we'd do things differently, but can we determine if such a god is fair — TiredThinker

Assuming they made us in their image we could say they are not fair. So unfairness as well as fairness are part of creation. There will be no judgment day. Maybe an occasional slap in the face to show mankind the roads that have been chosen lead us astray and nature into misery. Preventing species to exist or showing them an eviction warrant from paradise is not exactly how they planned it.

Fairness is valued by us, and if it comes about, that is as a result of our efforts. — Banno

So cute! Did you try to hide this? :snicker: :flower:

Fairness is valued by us, and if it comes about, that is as a result of our efforts. — Banno

And since we are made in God's image, God must be fair....

Sorry, just thought I'd offer a glib and bullshit argument to fit in with some of the others. :yikes: :razz:

i. created nature wastefully indifferent and ravaged by gratuitous suffering
and/or
ii. created us sick but commands us to be well
and/or
iii. eternally punishes us for our temporal crimes — 180 Proof

iiii. proffers us his will obliquely via oral traditions written down by men, which are copied and translated and copied and translated and peddled by gatekeeping preachers who interpret God's will in contradictory ways, so we are left to work out what He actually wants without Him as much as showing up to say hi.

Yeah, God's a fuckin' righteous peach.

I find it hard to identify what fair means in general. But assuming there was an all knowing and all powerful god that created us and wants the best for us. Are they fair? It is easy to imagine how we'd do things differently, but can we determine if such a god is fair? — TiredThinker

No. Wanting the best for us includes wanting us to be our best morally. In all fairness, the good deserve rewards and the bad deserve penalties. but if it were the case that good deeds were always rewarded and bad deeds always punished, bad people would do good deeds for the rewards and to avoid the penalties. There would be no difference between good and bad, except that to be bad would be foolish and self-defeating.

Moral freedom requires injustice. therefore God necessarily created the world such that the scum always floats to the top, and the gold sinks to the bottom.

I find it hard to identify what fair means in general. But assuming there was an all knowing and all powerful god that created us and wants the best for us. Are they fair? It is easy to imagine how we'd do things differently, but can we determine if such a god is fair? — TiredThinker

It's a reasonable question, maybe you could liken it to a programmer or a gaming dev: let's say you create a program and it has a few errors, does that mean you are unfair? Let's say you create a game like the sims, where there are people living their lives and they have certain abilities, like walking, talking, procreating, they have pets, and eat and sleep, etc. And in their little game their little deep thinkers create a system of money, and little fields like science and history, and some people end up living a really bad life, etc., would that make you an unfair developer? Or let's say there are some errors in the game and some people are born like missing an arm, or their coding makes them die for no apparent reason. Does that make you an unfair developer? Most devs try to create a good game that people will enjoy.

The intention is not to make a perfect game because unless it's tic-tac-toe any decently complex game will have errors. Usually what devs try to do is upgrade the game in real-time putting out patches to try and fix the really bad errors. Who knows how many upgrades there have been, we could be on version ten thousand or something and the devs finally said okay this game is as good as it's going to get. Does that make the devs unfair? Or what if we are just avatars like the sims and we are playing out a game for some kids in an advanced world? Is our life inherently unfair just because we can process things like self-awareness, love, fear, joy, and all the other emotions that people care about? Those emotions might not even matter to the advanced species.

Are you a vegetarian? Do you think its fair to kill animals so you can eat them? When you walk around are you constantly checking the bottom of your shoes to make sure you did not kill an ant? I'm quite sure you have killed plenty of insects by accident. There are tiny microorganisms on your face, you have probably killed a few when you wiped your nose, does that make you unfair?

:up:

Do we know the will of this god to know if we are doing the right things to the world they created?

How do you measure the gratuitousness of the human suffering? We aren't all offing ourselves? I don't understand your statement about creating us sick.

Would an all knowing and all powerful being need to make upgrades? And couldn't they fix all issues in a space of time and in a way that it goes unnoticed or unremembered?

Are we just characters in a heavenly TV show?

Yeah, God's a fuckin' righteous peach — Tom Storm

Thou blasphemous pagan!

That's only one of them! The peach tree god.

Do we know the will of this god to know if we are doing the right things to the world they created? — TiredThinker

Good question! I wonder about that myself too. Do they oblige us to follow morals? Do they punish with hell or reward with heaven? Don't think so. I think the just recreated heaven by creating the universe. They had good reason to do so. If you consider all life having a god counterpart part in heaven, so not only human beings, and consider the universe and life in it as a collective creation, after a collective heavenly effort (so not an effort of some aliien, so-called technological advanced culture, which posits the creation myth within the universe itself and assign unrealistic power to universal life, namely the creation of life), then all of life should deserve a fair chance. You might ask if modern humans reflect their counterparts in heaven in destroying nature to a considerable extent. If the natural world resembles paradise is it wrong to destroy nature? How did the humans exist in nature? Were they eager to know everything as they are in the modern day, thereby breaking apart the very thing they want to know everything about? Well, there wasn't a universe to know things about in the first place, as the created the basic stuff to let it evolve into life resembling heaven. But I think the human gods are somewhat different from the others. Did they maybe played some faul game in the preambles to creation? Didn't the other gods watched them properly. Did something just go wrong accidentally? Dunno, but in heaven they wouldn't stand a chance to mess things up. From where comes this desire to understand the workings of the universe? Why not just live and act like is acted in heaven? That would be a good life, which trancends good and evil and morals. Good and bad were part of heaven, so they are part of the universe too. A world in which the bad is not allowed to exist is worse than one in which it can exist. Many bad things emerge from a way of life withdrawn from nature. Like fighting with atom bombs instead of body and teeth.

Is that you, listening to Spinal Tap?

How do you measure the gratuitousness of the human suffering? — TiredThinker

If there is a "creator god", then suffering (e.g. animals eating animals, incapacitating birth defects, catastrophic natural disasters, psychopathologies, mass extinctions, etc) is either gratuitious or it's not. And "god-given" gratuitious suffering isn't fair, is it? :mask:

I don't understand your statement about creating us sick

According to Genesis, god gave human beings a form of "free will" lacking in strength, or capability, for us to freely refrain from "sinning" and yet god punishes human beings precisely because we are afflicted with this "god-given" weakness, or incapability. :brow:

According to Genesis, god gave human beings a form of "free will" lacking the strength or capability for us to freely refrain from "sinning" — 180 Proof

Here is the first word on sin in Genesis, direct from God to Cain:

But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it. — 4:7

Paul's teaching to the gentiles is quite different. Here sin rules over man rather than man being able to rule over sin.

i. created nature wastefully indifferent and ravaged by gratuitous suffering
and/or
ii. created us sick but commands us to be well
and/or
iii. eternally punishes us for our temporal crimes

is certainly not "fair" (just). — 180 Proof

I don't know to which God you are referring to but:
i. is necessity for free will to be unconditional and real
ii. is generalization
iii. is false because there is forgiveness of mistakes or crimes


The gift of free will constitutes fairness.

By hypothesis God is omnibenevolent. 'God' with a capital G denote a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.

If such a being exists, then God is not treating us unfairly. Whatever happens to you, God was not being unfair in allowing it to happen to you.

Some have difficulty accepting this because they're already convinced that they're loveable good people who deserve nothing but milk and honey.

By hypothesis God is omnibenevolent. 'God' with a capital G denote a person who is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent. — Bartricks

That's another hypothesis than mine. I consider beings with true creation power as a god.

Moral freedom requires injustice. — unenlightened

Nice.

Some have difficulty accepting this because they're already convinced that they're loveable good people who deserve nothing but milk and honey. — Bartricks

So they should accept it as fair that someone pisses in their milk and steals their honey once in a while or even the major part of their life?