Is God evil

Answer 1

The only way at present we have of gaining information about any god, or gods, is through the minds of the believers in, or those faithful to, that god or gods.

Each believer or follower will have their own image and opinion of their particular deities and their views will be intensely personal, arrived at in their own way with or without guidance from others who study or believe in the particular faith in, and image of, the god in question.

To decide whether any deity is good, evil, or simply indifferent is a personal choice and decision for each person who considers relevant any vision of what that deity might or might not be.

Personal views are just that and should, if anyone needs to debate these views on a personal basis, be addressed to the discussion pages, accessed by the Discuss Question tab, below. It also depends on which god you are looking for. The chistian one, is both. Saten is obviously evil. Cozumel is good. Romulus was evil, and so on. You choose your oun religion, as all are different.

Answer 2

WikiAnswers contributors have posted varied opinions on the subject:

Answer:

God cannot by definition be or do evil. All God's ways are right because He has perfect knowledge not just of mens actions but motives as well. Man, who by definition is finite, not infinite, sometimes pretends to have the right to sit in judgment against God, even though God knows more and is Himself without the excesses to which man goes in his system of retribution.

Answer:

Yes, God can do Evil. He destroyed all of His creation (except Noah and his family) did He not?

2 Kings 6 33 Behold, this evil is of the Lord.

Isaiah 45 7 I ... create evil.

Amos 3 6 Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?

Answer:

Firstly, the righteous judgment of God upon those who refuse to repent cannot be considered in any way evil, but rather just. These are the same kind of people we lock up today, and that is not evil, it is necessary and just and good.

Secondly, all of the out of context verses quoted above refer not to evil in a moral sense at all but to evil in the sense of an action that people considered bad. In the case of 2Kings 6:33, the 'evil' referred to the apparent intention of Jehoram to surrender to the Syrians. This precipitated the prophecy and subsequent deliverance and so was only evil in a metaphorical sense, since God's intention was to use it as the provision of deliverance. In context the Isaiah verse refers to things like storms which are used by God, and sometimes made by Him for purposes of judgment; again, not morally evil. Finally, the prophets spoke in the context of judgment of God upon sin, and evil again was a word referring to God working in judgment upon a rebellious people. Bad for them, but not morally evil. We need always to read the context and understand how a word is used.

So, yes, God can do evil but not in the sense we commonly use the word evil which refers to moral evil - e.g. "Hitler was an evil man." The evil God does in the verses above is not moral evil, nor is anything He does which we do not understand. His actions are never arbitrary.

Answer:

Christian answer: God does not do evil. In Genesis 1-2 there is only good coming from God and his creation --- including Adam and Eve. When they ate the fruit of the garden, man and woman brought forth evil. Evil exists because of man. Before that time, the concept was retained in the tree in the center of the Garden of Eden. Man chose to bring it to life. And its seed is immune to every man-made hope and desire to remove it. Therefore, it has, does, and will exist as long as there are humans on Earth. God set up the only removal system. Just as the knowledge of good and evil brought forth death to all men and women, God provided a way of escape to all that would accept his innoculation: His perfect mind, heart, essence poured out into an incorrupt seed, Jesus. Bear in mind that death did not come into the world until eating the fruit of the tree. Therefore, Jesus did not have to yield to it. He willingly chose to lay down his life in perfect payment for the destruction that Adam and Eve chose.

So, every Hitler, every destruction of man, every thought that leads to evil is made by man. God does not do evil by condemning unrepentant man to hell. Rather, it is the only thing possible as evil does not exist in his kingdom or God's nature. Therefore, there is never room to contain it.

Answer:

No.

Answer:

The God of The Bible certainly can and do evil-noah's ark story is a good example, where he saves an alcoholic and his family (the only good man? how arbitrary) while killing everyone else on earth, including babies, the unborn, toddlers, the mentally retarded, the senile old, etc. In 2 Kings 2:23-24 God sends down two bears to maul and almost certainly eat some children that mocked elijah, calling him something like "baldhead".

However, God cannot be captured in an aged historical document, neither in that culture nor this. The Deity cannot do evil, but in the view of the culture of the time, he certainly could.

Answer:

Jewish answer: consider the two following quotes, which seem to clash. One is Isaiah 45:7, which clearly states that God "creates evil." The second is Eichah (Lamentations) 3:38, which says "from the mouth of the Most High, evil...did not result." The answer to the contradiction may be seen in a third verse, Proverbs 19:3, which says "the foolishness of a man corrupts his way, yet his anger is directed against God." Meaning, that while some evil is undoubtedly created by God (such as the death of an infant), a lot of evil is the result of humans' choices. The Torah reminds us that we have free-will (Dueteronomy 30:15-20); and without the possibility of bad results, free-will would be vitiated.

Further discussion of theodicy is beyond the scope of this answer, and entire books (such as Job) have long ago been written about it. Suffice it to say that Judaism sees the existence of evil as a test, and/or the result of our own (humans') bad choices, and/or a warning (such as pain, which shows you what part of your body needs repair) or a message (Genesis 42:22), and/or mere misinterpretation (such as the bee's sting, which to a child is unmitigated evil but which adults recognize as a protection for that insect which pollinates all fruit-bearing trees).

Also, when viewed in the context of the afterlife, when worthy people who suffered may be recompensed and the prosperous wicked will have the opposite, the apparent injustices of this world become easier to understand.