Talk:Evil is the absence of God

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Good and evil as positive and negative electric charges. Protons are not the "absence of electrons", and electrons are not the "absence of protons". The light-darkness and heat-coldness models of good and evil aren't the only logically-possible models! CodeMaster9000 (talk) 23:12, 15 March 2012 (UTC)

[edit] Criticisms of the argument

. . . Okay, raising a discussion section for the third edit I have made today which has been followed for the third time by the same user:

  1. If you compare God to light and energy, then evil becomes a comparative lack of God, not a complete absence of God. I feel my edits express that more accurately. In fact the statement "Furthermore, if some people can experience a "lack of God", then God is clearly not omnipresent" implies "lack of God" == "complete absence of God". However, "cold" != "complete absence of energy" and "darkness" != complete absence of light." (We can say something is cold, even though it does have some energy present; we say there is darkness, even when there are some photons shooting/flowing around) Thus, I think my copy should be used.
  2. We are not wikipedia. Toungue in cheek statements are allowed, and I feel mine are funnier than the xisting ones. Thus, I think my text should be kept.

Thoughts? --Bertrc (talk) 19:54, 3 June 2014 (UTC)

1.) You edit in something like "evil is the comparative lack of God", but are seemingly content with something like "darkness is a lack of light". It seems in the first instance the word "lack" did not convey enough relativeness to you, but in the second instance it did. Why is that?
2.) The phrase "Do you really need us to tell you?" and then refusing to give reasons is the path of the lazy and/or the cowardly. Giving reasons will always trump not giving reasons in my book. A compromise that I would consider with this is to say "Do you really need us to tell you? Oh sod it, I should probably tell you anyway, just in case", but that also sounds a bit arrogant. I say, just leave as it previously was.
3.) The next bit you edited in uses quotation marks inside quotation marks, which is quite unsightly. I will let it slide if you change that, even though I think this humour is too wordy for me and would need incredibly good comedic timing on the part of the reader to pull it off.
4.) The next bit, even disregarding the fact that it added grammar mistakes where before there were none, is also too wordy for me. Additionally, it assumes too much about a hypothetical apologist, where before only the bare essential was assumed. I will let the "most mere mortals" bit slide if you add it back in, although it is not my type of humour, at least it's short. Nullahnung (talk) 20:20, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
2.) Heh. I'll concede that point. I didn't see the need to recap what is covered in the snopes article. Would it be acceptable to simply include my snarky comment, but have it link to the snopes article? My problem is that few people would actually believe this is true when we have been screaming "URBAN LEGEND" at them earlier.
3.) I think you might want to look at that again. I wasn't including quotation marks; I was including double single quates which italicize the included text and do not appear, themselves, in the article. As for humor, I would once again throw that to the wider audience.
4.) Point taken about the grammar. However, the meat of the text still stands as a better (if snarky) representation of the apologist position. According to the argument, you don't experience a lack of God any more than you experience a lack of energy. I think the original writer was trying to be snarky, but I feel my snarkiness is more clever. Still, as with the other instances of my humor, I would be interested in further opinions. --Bertrc (talk) 20:56, 3 June 2014 (UTC)
3.) If that was so with the quotation marks then fair enough.
4.) I think you added too many assumptions about a hypothetical apologist as soon as you wrote "Well, hopefully, the apologists would simply tell him "Dude, that sucks" but among themselves, they would say this", which may or may not be accurate, but it certainly widens the error bars. Just keep it clean and simple, keep the basic essentials that are necessary for someone to be an apologist and run with that, no need to add more. The original version was fine. Nullahnung (talk) 01:37, 4 June 2014 (UTC)
I thought of what may be an extra argument to be used: If a benevolent god exists, why is there lack of Good in this world? We would expect from such a deity to at least put some benevolent things in this world, not just erase what's evil. After all, what's not evil isn't necessarily good, It can be a neutral state of neither harmful or helpful. Also, on second note, why would a benevolent deity "erase evil" from some places and not others? Many of these places "that lack good" have a high percentage of religious people, christians included, and a good part of the places that are more "Utopic" than others aren't very religious (Northern Europe countries, for instance) so it would seem faith is not the answer, even less that a good deity would treat people based on blind faith in one of many just as valid religions, rather on how good of persons they are.

BTW, this is where the idea i expressed is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_evil#Evil_as_the_absence_of_good , also another thing: we could also reverse that thing and say "good is the absence of evil", as in the idea of good is not a quantity by itself, just as valid as that idea of evil being the absence. After all, someone shooting sadistically an innocent isn't doing something neutral but intentionally harmful. Imadmagician (talk) 07:37, 14 October 2014 (UTC)


Evil is the absence of sanity. An all knowing sane being would understand the cause of every action and see that no action is good nor evil until you compare that act to an ideal standard which that same being would see as a falsehood and not reality. Thus a rational all knowing being would not compare reality to fantasy to divide reality into good (that which seeks the fantasy) and evil (that which harms the fantasy).— Unsigned, by: 173.65.109.191 / talk / contribs
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