EDEB8 - Ultimate Online Debating
About Us   Debate    Judge   Forum
Views:
2347

God is Not Good

(PRO)
0 points
(CON)
WINNER!
7 points
Darth VitiosusDarth Vitiosus (PRO)
A Pro, I will be arguing "God is not good."

Some say God is good because they are healed or a miracle happens. But what about when a massacre happens like the Holocaust?I am more than sure Jews prayed to their god. Their god did nothing.God is not good.If god does miracles he does massacres too.
Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 12:52:19
| Speak Round
BlackflagBlackflag (CON)
In the bible and quran, it is quoted that "god is love". Love is considered a good thing. To accept god, we must accept that everything he does is out of love.
Pro argues that all bad things are a result of god, like the holocaust. Theologians say that sin is the corruption of god, not god alone.
Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 14:08:14
| Speak Round
Darth VitiosusDarth Vitiosus (PRO)
My opponent said that the quran and the bible "god is love."If "god is love," is he not hate?Did that same god not punish the ancient Israelites to being lost for forty years? The same god who plagued pharoah?Is this is not the same god who sent his son to be massacred on a cross?How is this good?
Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 14:27:08
| Speak Round
BlackflagBlackflag (CON)
Pro restated himself. No, love does not mean hate. That is a contradiction. Pro is referencing Yaweh. We can not verify any of these events happened, or 100% true. What has been asserted is that god does everything out of love. If Pro wants to debate from scripture, this must be considered true.
Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 14:41:36
| Speak Round
Darth VitiosusDarth Vitiosus (PRO)
No contradiction.My opponent brought scripture up.If he assumed his claims are true,so are mine since it is from the same source. For every miracle there is a massacre.If the Holocaust was out of god's love, how is god good?My opponent stated "god does everything out of love." God is not good then.
Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 14:58:00
| Speak Round
BlackflagBlackflag (CON)
Everything god does is out of love. Opinions of what's good and bad is how the Pro side is arguing.
It was also argued that sin is the corruption of god, not god alone. 1944 was an act of man.

Love = hate is a fallacy. Pro's contentions only exist in the torah. I argued three religious texts.

Return To Top | Posted:
2014-11-09 22:59:05
| Speak Round


View As PDF

Enjoyed this debate? Please share it!

You need to be logged in to be able to comment
The judging period on this debate is over

Previous Judgments

2014-11-16 12:27:21
nzlockieJudge: nzlockie    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Blackflag
Reasoning:
PRO's arguments were not fleshed out enough to make them convincing. I understand that this was due in no small part to the limited characters but even still.
In the first round PRO makes a statement. He states that the Holocaust happened and infers that it was a bad thing. He then makes two suppositions:
1. The Jews prayed to God for release.
2. God did nothing.

There was no attempt to add weight to these suppositions as fact, in fact PRO actually admits to guessing at the first one.
This is followed by a restatement of his contention that God is not good and a rather obscure conjecture that, "If God does Miracles, he also does Massacres".
I'm not sure what PRO was attempting to do with this statement and I'll be honest, that really bugged me. It didn't clearly relate to anything previously stated and yet on its own it was a completely unsupported statement.
CON counters with a fairly weak link. God is Love. Love is good, therefore God is Good. It's weak because it's unsupported that Love is good - but PRO never challenges this. If I accept that Love is good, then God must be good.

The second round sees another left field statement from PRO - "If God is Love then he must be Hate".
He then attempts to show that God is hate - I think?
If I accept this premise, then CON must win the debate. It wouldn't matter that God is both Love AND Hate, the resolution is only whether God is Love. There's no exclusivity mentioned. PRO needs to not argue a self-defeating line.
Fortunately for him, CON calls him on this argument and points out that just because God is Love, it doesn't mean he has to be Hate. This is convincing to me because, well it makes logical sense. It's true, they're opposites.
The third round sees the arguments most clearly.
PRO now questions, how can we marry the idea that God is good and yet the Holocaust is bad?
CON counters by pointing out that "Good" and "Bad" are relative terms, it's only PRO's opinion that the Holocaust was bad. For good measure he also adds that sin is a corruption, and contests the premise that God caused the Holocaust.

PRO has failed to meet anything close to his BOP in this debate. His strongest argument was that God allows bad things to happen and can't therefore be considered good.
CON attacks this argument in a few different ways; "Good" and "Bad" are not objective terms, they are PRO's opinion, Some of the bad things PRO cites may not have happened and God may not have caused them if they did.
Any one of these things is enough to negate PRO's argument.
CON's BOP is met way back in round one, when he states that both the Bible and the Quran agree that God is Love. Love is Good, therefore God is Good. This link was never attacked or disputed by PRO and therefore stands.

Feedback:
Both Debaters: I had to really work to even try to follow your arguments. If my recap above failed to correctly interpret them, then I'm sorry, you need to own that. You need to express your ideas more clearly.
I get that this debate had a very short character limit. That is a legitimate excuse, but I didn't get the idea that either of you had worked hard to factor that challenge into your rounds. You need to reword things to still be able to express your ideas clearly.

As pointed out to me, the rules for this debate clearly state that no sources are to be used. However that only means you don't cite sources. It doesn't mean you can't word your contentions to make it clear that they are based on fact. CON gives a good example of this when he states that the Bible and the Quran say... That statement carries more weight with me because I know he's not just randomly making it up.
That's all it takes.

PRO - you seemed to be saying that, "If God is Good - why do bad things happen?" Solid argument. But you need to also establish that God is able to stop these things as well. God's sovereignty is so widely disputed that it is not taken as given that he can.
I think I even get what you were saying about Love = Hate. They're two sides of the same coin. But you needed to say that as a statement, not a question. As mentioned above, it was a silly argument to make anyway, because had I bought it, you would have lost.

Finally, you asked 7 questions in this debate and made 12 statements, several of which were technically parts of the same statement. Your entire second round was made up of nothing but questions. As a general rule, questions will never sound as convincing to a third party as statements.
In the future I would keep the ratio of questions to statements far lower if you want to sound more convincing.

CON: Your sentences were the hardest to follow:
(Rnd 1) "Theologians say that sin is the corruption of god, not god alone." - Relevance? When did PRO argue that God was sin? And what theologians? How is God corruptable?
(Rnd 3) "Opinions of what's good and bad is how the Pro side is arguing" - Read this sentence again and tell me this makes sense.
Compare this to my version, trying to use as many of the same words as you did: " The PRO side is arguing their opinions of what's good and bad." - see what I mean?
Assuming I'm garnering the intended meaning, my version communicates it more clearly. If I haven't garnered the intended meaning then my point is proved.

1 user rated this judgement as a vote bomb
1 user rated this judgement as exceptional
2 users rated this judgement as constructive
5 comments on this judgement
Darth VitiosusDarth Vitiosus
Read the rules before voting.
Posted 2014-11-16 13:00:44
BlackflagBlackflag
I'll probably update the rating later. Uh, not sure if a lot of the things you required could be done in 300 characters. Let's just say this was a challenge in making compact arguments. My own personal beliefs is that debates aren't judged by BOP, so BOP isn't an acceptable basis for judging a case. To that point, I think it isn't logical to create a rule saying BOP is shared, because realistically, that's impossible in any argument.
Posted 2015-11-03 14:14:56
nzlockienzlockie
Hi Guys, if my judgement here sounds harsh then I'm sorry.
I totally understand that making a convincing case in 300 characters is hard. But that's the challenge. This debate gave me the impression of two people who typed a longer argument and then deleted words until it met the character limit, rather than going into it with a specific strategy that targeted this area. The result was sentences that did not flow, meaning they were not convincing.

I think I've demonstrated what I mean best with my rewording of one of PRO's lines from his last round.
Posted 2015-08-25 21:59:37
BlackflagBlackflag
I did delete a lot to save space. I moved my vote to excellent. You still judged from BOP though. Technically it is possible for pro to be more convincing without fullfilling his BOP
Posted 2015-11-03 14:14:56
nzlockienzlockie
I agree with that for sure. Exactly what makes an argument convincing to a person is going to vary, since it is relative to that person.
For example, if I am highly sceptical then I'll be convinced more by evidence than clever talk or pretty pictures.
Your role as a debater is not to tell me what I should be convinced by, it is to try and anticipate it without me telling you.
Posted 2015-08-25 21:59:37
2014-11-16 05:21:58
adminJudge: admin    TOP JUDGE
Win awarded to: Blackflag
Reasoning:
Pro was going for the problem of evil but never actually explained it. Sure bad things happen, but he never told me how that proves a problem for a good God. I granted the argument but I had it as weak because of rather clear causal link gaps. For example, say God didn't know, or was incapable of stopping evil, or something. Con's response to this was essentially that these evils are sins which represent the corruption of God, because God is love, and love is good. I felt like this was an entirely adequate response. Despite some attempts to extend this argument by con in the final round and initially mostly relying on an appeal to authority, this line tended to dominate the narrative of the debate. It was certainly a surprisingly complex argument to run in a debate this short and very well communicated.

Pro also had a few empirical examples of religious acts perpetrated by Jewish and Christian gods that he considered evil. Con had a rather weak response - essentially, asking pro to prove that God to be real, which I felt was not pro's onus in this debate at all. I felt like in terms of God as a philosophical concept, con had won the debate - but as a myth, pro had clearly won the debate.

Overall, I was convinced there are good and bad sides to God, but ultimately the greater weight in this debate came to the first argument, where con's God=love beat pro's narrative of God making evil miracles happen.
2 users rated this judgement as good
0 comments on this judgement

Rules of the debate

  • Text debate
  • Individual debate
  • 3 rounds
  • 300 characters per round
  • No reply speeches
  • No cross-examination
  • Community Judging Standard (notes)
  • Forfeiting rounds means forfeiting the debate
  • No images
  • No HTML formatting
  • Rated debate
  • Time to post: 3 days
  • Time to vote: 2 weeks
  • Time to prepare: 1 week

#1. No Sources allowed.
#2. The Burden of Proof is shared.