Yes Man said:
Hello everyone. I've been wondering lately about God and his actions in the Bible. God caused plagues and rained famine upon people, so were his actions "good"? I'm not saying what God did was bad or evil or that God is evil. What God did was right to rain his wrath upon the opressors of his followers. This caused much suffering. However, in Moses times, the Egyptians had enslaved the Jews for years. So what God did was right, but was it completely good? The differences and definitions of "good" and "right" has been frustrating to philosophers for many years :banghead3 . I believe that what God did what right and essentially good, as it led to the freedom of the slaves:dan: . I was just wondering what you all thought about this. Oh, and if any of you are reminded of an episode of the Cartoon Network [adult swim] show Moral Orel, I was thinking about this before I saw that. It just kind of reminded me about it . :bonk:
We have to remember two things here:
1) The Biblical writers were writing out of their own perspective. If God had freed their ancestors by causing plagues, they saw that as "good," because God was taking care of God's faithful people. We have the luxury of "seeing both sides of the story," as it were -- a perspective the early writers and their audiences would not have hsared.
2) The important message of the stories isn't "God caused plagues to befall the Egyptians," but "God always comes through, saving God's people from oppression. If the ancient culture needs to get that message across effectively by having God perform some atrocity upon someone who has perpetrated atrocities of their own, that's a literary device used in order to get the point across, and not necessarily an historical fact.
We also have to remember that these are the writings of a very ancient and very different culture from our own. Their scientific perspective was that "God caused it to rain." We know that, even if we believe that God set the natural pattern in order, that it's natural meteorological conditions that cause it to rain, not some supernatural whim of a far-removed God.