Musing....

[badstar]

Can The/God/s be blamed in any way for the mistakes and atrocities of their followers? Should they be credited for the merits of their followers in any way?

Discuss.

Comments

[ravenshrinkery.livejournal.com]

I was raised to believe in the fundamentalist Christian mold that because God is sinless that all glory for the merits of followers is due to the benevolence of their God, and the the mistakes and atrocities were the result of sin, and therefore not of God.

This only works if you have a perfectionist image of $DEITY. If you don't believe that deities are infalliable then this won't hold true and may hold some accountability and less than all glory.

I'm leaning more humanist on this subject in that humans guide their own destiny seperate from divine intervention. If the Gods want something to happen it will happen for a reason, but this is no crutch for humanity to rest their laurels on. I can make arguments for them deserving either the blame and the credit, or neither, based on this principle.

[saratoga80.livejournal.com]

I've always argued that:

If you assume free will, then no deity is blameable for a given action.

If you assume a given deity has intent (such as I believe a God created the Universe) then free will has a form of opposition in the form of divine will of some form.

Since we, as humans, exist in finite space and time (at least as flesh and blood) it is impossible on this plane of existence to resolve the seemingly paradoxical relationship between Free Will and Deity-driven actions that can change Human Event.

In other words, can G/od/dess/(s) be blamed? Yes. Will it get you anywhere? No.

-- Rich