If there is piss in your milk and someone steals your honey and God exists, then it was fair for God to allow someone to piss in your milk and steal your honey. How could that be? Well, what if you're the kind of person who pisses in other people's milk and steals their honey? Does a good person care that you've had your milk pissed in and your honey stolen? Does a good person go out of their way - at cost to themselves - to make sure no one pisses in the milk or steals the honey of the milk pisser honey stealer?

What if you never did something wrong and when you wanna drink your milk you see someone pissing in it while putting your honey jar in his plastic bag to take it from you, grinning atya while doing it?

We gotta face it. There are sneaky bastards among them gods...

Not really following this are you?

If God exists, then God isn't treating you unfairly. No matter what happens to you, God wasn't being unfair in allowing it to happen.

Why? Because God is omnibenevolent. So he doesn't treat anyone unfairly.

So, again, when someone pisses in your milk and steals your honey, God wasn't being unfair in allowing that to happen.

When might a good person allow someone else to piss in someone else's milk and steal their honey? Why, when the person in question is themselves a milk pisser honey stealer.

Now, look around you: you live in a world of milk pisser honey stealers. So guess what you might be? What, you think you're a saint? You think you don't deserve to have your milk pissed in and honey stolen? Think again boyo.

Again, whatever fairness there might be is put there by us.

Again, whatever fairness there might be is put there by us. — Banno

awww :flower:

Who says that I'm no milk pisser or that I don't steal? If someone pisses in my milk I steal some new at the local supermarket and some honey along with it. When I come home, I listen to the theme of Interstellar and realize all life is just a copy of the life in heaven. We're not going to a hell or to heaven. Life just eternally starts over again. In endless variations. Good and bad included. We should thank the gods for that. Thieves and murderers are creations of the gods too. Excesses though appear if we distance ourselves from paradise which has succeeded already...

If God exists, then God isn't treating you unfairly. No matter what happens to you, God wasn't being unfair in allowing it to happen.

To me, there is a very clear distinction between (as you say) God existing and someone having free will to "piss in your milk and steal your honey." In other words, since God didn't actually piss in your milk, the fact that your milk was pissed in does not mean He is unfair. I tend to side with Plantinga on Plantinga vs Mackie on the Logical Problem of Evil (if I remember correctly, even Mackie thought so too).

However, I do wonder that if God intervenes in some cases (and for some people), is it fair for him not to intervene in others. For instance, is it fair for him to intervene in my life and, say, make sure that I meet my future partner, but not have Hitler choke on a piece of bread as a child or something?

I will say the theists I have talked to on this matter (mostly Christian) have given me suitable responses, so I do think their view is consistent.

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? — TiredThinker

Sure TiredThinker, but you are not seeing the forest for the trees. The point is that this world is not perfect, and if it were any different it would not be the same. ;)

How about this, tell us what you think a fair world would look like, and you'll probably just as soon realize why that cannot be. ;)

Btw, what the heck is going on with all the winking around here?

Er, what? None of that made any sense at all.

Btw, what the heck is going on with all the winking around here? — chiknsld

:wink:

:wink: — Haglund

Weirdo!

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).
— 180 Proof

I don't know to which God you are referring to — SpaceDweller

The god of Abraham (i.e. religious theism). Ask the OP; I think my assumption is consistent with his / her query.

but:
i. is necessity for free will to be unconditional and real

Only fictions are "unconditional". Choosing and acting – manifestations of "free will" – are conditioned in fact by consequences.

ii. is generalization

Hardly. Read the book of Genesis about what Augustine calls "original sin". In "paradise", the first man and woman created free of "sin" eventually – inevitably (i.e. set up by god to "fall") – sinned, which afflicted their descendents and all of the rest of "creation".

iii. is false because there is forgiveness of mistakes or crimes

False. There is both forgiveness (for "the elect few") and punishment (for the vast majority). For example, Mosaic Law consists of "613 mitzvahs", etc.

NB: Some familiarity with Torah, NT and/or the Qur'an, for a start, would go a long way to helping you make intelligent remarks on matters of theology ...

Life is not fair because the gods are not fair. Why should your hypothesis about one omni god be correct? If we view life in the light of different creators, fairness and unfairness gets a new meaning. Why should you view god as one omni creature? The God?

Are we just characters in a heavenly TV show? — Haglund

If so it's not a tv show, it's a movie, and I'm in a romcom.

Weirdo! — chiknsld

I winked at you! In all fairness... :wink:

I winked at you! In all fairness... :wink: — Haglund

:rofl:

If so it's not a tv show, it's a movie, and I'm in a romcom. — chiknsld

:lol:

Let's say Roger and Tim have free will and that Tim is perfectly innocent and is a good person. Roger has announced that he is going to piss in Tim's milk. Now, surely if you are a good person and can prevent this from occurring, you would? Thus, so would God.

Free will is unquestionably valuable, but that doesn't mean that good, powerful people let other people use it to visit great harms on others. They intervene and stop it.

Note, we exercise free will over our decisions and Roger got to make his decision to piss in Tim's milk, even though God would intervene and prevent the actual pissing from occurring.

We live in a world in which people get their milk pissed in all the time. God would not knowingly allow that to happen to good, innocent people. So we're not innocent good people then. God isn't allowing all this milk pissing and honey stealing to go on out of respect for our free will. God is allowing it to happen because we're all a bunch of milk pissing honey stealers who deserve to languish in each other's rotten company.

I am taking God's existence for granted. Then I am reasoning like a boss.

God would not allow anyone to piss in your milk or steal your honey if you were a nice innocent person. Yet here you are living in a world in which anyone can piss in your milk and steal your honey at any time.
Therefore you are not a nice innocent person. Nor is anyone else here.

God would not allow anyone to piss in your milk or steal your honey if you were a nice innocent person. Yet here you are living in a world in which anyone can piss in your milk and steal your honey at any time.
Therefore you are not a nice innocent person. Nor is anyone else here. — Bartricks

What about babies?

It's a shame, Tired, that your thread has attracted so many flies.

But the answer to your question is clear. Based on what one sees in the world, god is not fair. nailed it.

Here's the image I use to explain fairness to children:


Now that is just another part of the inconsistency of the notion of god. So much the worse for theism. The various attempts here to make god appear moral are inadequate. The only resort left for theism is to claim that life is fair despite the facts; an act of faith.

But if fairness is something to be valued, if it is worthwhile, then it is up to us to make things fair.

Of course if someone does not value fairness, that's about them. But I would put money on them squealing like a stuck pig when they think their favourite computer game is unfair.

Folk see unfairness more clearly when they are subject to it.

They are here, aren't they?

Dear sir, if you are saying that babies are not innocent then I think you are redefining the word "innocent". :)

No, by 'innocent' I mean 'not deserving of harm'.

You, I think, must be assuming that babies are innocent. And this, I imagine, is because you also assume that babies do not contain the souls of those who did wrong in another place, but rather that souls come into being at the same time as the baby body, or thereabouts.

Those assumptions of yours are false if God exists. For God would not deal with anyone unfairly - someone who thinks otherwise is simply conceptually incompetent.

Yet clearly it would be unfair - unjust in the extreme - to subject an innocent baby to life here, in a world such as this one, surrounded by idiotic evil doers, yes?

So he hasn't.

So babies are not innocent, then.

We're obliged to assume they are - I do not dispute that. Prisoners in a prison are obliged to treat the other inmates 'as if' they are innocent and that is precisely what our situation is (if God exists). But they are not actually innocent. For it is absurd to suppose God would put an innocent soul into a pathetically incompetent body and then push it through another person's grotty parts and into a world of arseholes, is it not? That is not the behaviour of an even half-way decent person, never mind a morally perfect one.

Needless to say, my view prompts ghastly righteous indignation from many, who think it a terrible thing to say that babies are not born innocent. Yet invariably these self same folk have themselves forced what they believe to be an innocent person into this world - a world of rapists and murderers - despite knowing full well what kind of a world it was (and thereby demonstrating that they themselves deserve to be here).

If we achieved fair as defined by that image would events still occur or would it be like universal cooling whereby entropy affectively ends?

Interesting.

Notice that effort, work, was required to lift the boxes, one onto the other? Equity is cooling, making things the same, leaving the boxes at the same level.

Equity is heat-death; fairness is its antithesis.

Now that is just another part of the inconsistency of the notion of god. So much the worse for theism. The various attempts here to make god appear moral are inadequate — Banno

[Why should god(s) be moral examples?

Not an issue for me. They are not needed.

Typically human. Already in heaven the human gods were something else...

Equity is heat-death; fairness is its antithesis. — Banno

The antithesis of heath death is total order. Fairness and unfairness lay between them. Between the heat and the cold. Between day and night. Between sleep and wake. Between the Moon and the Sun.

What is fairness in the first place? You could just as well switch the "equality" and "fairness" signs in the great picture you showed. And call the first "unfair".