sweenith

Now I'm sure that different religions may mean different things by the term "soul", but with regard to Judeo-Christian monotheistic tradition, as I understand it, the "soul" is just synonymous with "mind" (as far as philosophy of religion goes, at least). The things that can think and have intentions and beliefs and make choices and so on - those are souls. So in a sense then, you don't really have a soul so much as you are one. Given this definition, your disagreement with religion isn't about whether or not people have souls; rather, your disagreement is about whether or not souls/minds/'you' continue to exist after the death of the body. As I understand it then, when religions (the monotheistic ones at least) talk about souls, they aren't postulating some kind of invisible ghost which is altogether distinct from and in addition to the mind and body, that somehow follows us around. Rather, they're just talking about our minds. So whether or not you agree with them that minds/souls are immaterial objects, you can at least see the rationale for their talking about such things. Also, this notion of soul makes sense out of talk about 'the condition of one's soul,' (as one often hears in religion contexts), for that's just your condition, which betters and worsens in relation to the actions you choose to take, good or bad. So, your conscience is what tells you the condition of your soul.

My impression is that if God is "big enough to be everyone's God" , then, rather than God's being "master of all," this would actually amount to everyone's being master of God (i.e. he's whatever anybody wants to think he is).

From my own experience, I don't recall meeting an Evangelical Christian (or any Christian, for that matter [or anyone at all]) who prayed for that because they wished for peoples' destruction. Actually, I don't recall meeting a Christian who prayed for that day at all (for it's not supposed to be a very smooth transition, if you'll recall what Scripture says). But if there are Evangelicals or theological literalists who do pray for that, I imagine it's because they would like to be in Heaven, not because they would like other people to be in Hell.

Look at it this way: If God exists, God is omniscient and thus knows all true propositions. Now, God would only believe a proposition if it's true. But the truth or falsity of a proposition as such is independent of whether or not anybody knows or believes that it is true or false. If a proposition is true, then it would still be true even if there was nobody around to know it. So, all the true propositions God believes - regarding the future actions you and I will come to choose - would be true regardless of whether there exists a God to know them. It makes no difference to free will whether an omniscient being exists or not. Even supposing there's no God, there would still be true future-tensed propositions regarding all of the actions we will come to take. So we're no less determined, in that sense, given atheism than theism. On the other hand, if there aren't such true future-tensed propositions, then God if he existed wouldn't know them anyways (since he only knows true propositions), in which case the future would be open given either atheism or theism. So free will stands or falls on whether or not there are true future-tensed propositions, not on whether or not God exists.

You say that it's the creator, rather than anyone he created, who is most evil. Whether or not your claim is true will depend on what view one takes regarding God's relationship to morality: if for instance some version of divine command theory (DCT) is true, then your statement will turn out to be necessarily false, since it would then follow by definition that "good" means that which has been commanded by God. That's not my own view, but if you're basing your argument on Scripture as you seem to be doing, then it would then be incumbent upon you to show, among other things, why DCT is false (or probably false). (1) Who says that God has nearly all humanly-imagined attributes? In any case, that's certainly not true, since for every attribute, there is a corresponding attribute which is its negation, from which it follows that God could not possibly have more than half of all humanly-imagined attributed since any more than that would imply that God has some attribute, p, and also some attribute, not-p, which is a contradiction. (2) Your point about wish-fulfillment is question begging, because in order to assert that the doctrine of Hell is a product of our own wishes, you have to be presupposing that the doctrine of Hell is false. But people affirm the doctrine because they think it's true, not because they think it's what they want to be true. Hence you're going to have to give them some reason to think there's no Hell before they're going to accept that Hell is a fabrication reflecting human wishes. (3) Any argument for the evilness of God that depends upon a particular literal interpretation of some Scriptural text, especially if it's a text that has traditionally been interpreted in a non-literal way, or if it's one whose genre is disputed or something like that, any such argument will only be successful insofar as you succeed in establishing that your interpretation of the text in question is correct. Old Testament stories such as the ones you reference were given figurative readings at least as early as Augustine (see his response to the Manichean objections, in his Confessions), so your work is cut out for you. Where did God state that? ("Do as you are told and do not think too much") And you seem to think that none of the actions committed by any of God's created beings have any moral value, for otherwise it would make no sense to say that even though certain created agents (Satan, humans) freely chose to do evil, that it was God, rather than them, who had done something wrong. But any theist who affirms that human beings have libertarian free will (and that's almost all of them) will reject your assumption. Only if determinism were true would it be fair to blame God for the actions taken by created beings. But so long as they could have acted differently than they in fact chose to act, then it will be the case that they can be held morally culpable. Finally, God is traditionally defined as denoting a being which is, among other things, perfectly moral. Since it's a contradiction to suppose that a morally perfect being is to any degree evil, it follows by definition that God is not more evil than Satan (since it follows that God is not evil at all). So, If it's the case that some Scriptural text implies that God is less than perfectly moral, then that text must be false in that regard.

First, I think you are assuming that our notion of God is entirely a product of our own reasoning/experience/assumptions/etc. . Whereas most theists believe that their concept of God is (at least in part) informed by what God himself has revealed to human beings (via divinely inspired Scripture, for instance). Now, if God is omnipotent and omniscient, then he would have no trouble informing human beings of his existence and his nature, if he willed that. And it's not unlikely that an omnibenevolent being like God would be gracious enough to assist us if we were unable to form an acceptable conception of him via our own limited epistemic resources. So, I don't think it necessarily follows from the fact that God is beyond the universe and our experience that our idea of God must be false. If God wanted us to have a correct idea of him, then that's how it would be. And second, it seems to me that even if you don't know everything that there is to know about X, that doesn't mean that your understanding of X is false. At most, it would only follow that your understanding is incomplete. The same is true with respect to God: I'll grant you that we can't fully comprehend God, since there are innumerable true propositions about God which we don't know, and never will know, by the nature of the case. But that doesn't mean that the things we do understand about God are falsehoods. For instance, it is indisputable that if God existed, then God would be identical to himself (as all things are). What's more: in order for our term "God" to even be meaningful, minimally it has to pick out at least one property (*edit: or set thereof*) which belongs to any being which is God, and to no being which isn't God, for otherwise the term "God" would not differentiate God from anything else. Take human, for example: it differentiates humans from non-humans, in that for any object X such that X is (a) rational, and (b) an animal, X is human; and for any Y which lacks either of those properties, Y is not human (I'm using Aristotle's definition for the argument's sake only). Similarly, we at least have to state what quality or set of qualities would distinguish a God from something else, or we're really not talking about anything at all. I would suggest starting with Anselm's definition: God is that being than which none greater can be conceived (Proslogion).