God is Perfect

I'll start this round by pointing out your concession of the inherent flaws of the Bible. At the point where your entire argument about God's perfection is predicated on the word of the Bible, and you don't answer the fact that the Bible is indeed a creation of man, not God, you cannot support your own argument. Secondly, you fail to provide a definition of what 'perfection' means. I provide the classical interpretation of the Christian God, namely, omnipotence, omniscience, and omnibenevolence, and your answers avoid taking this into account. It is clear to me that we must first make the distinction between evil and sin to progress any further in this debate. I will define evil as being 'undesirable states of affairs' whereas sin is 'a classification of human behaviors disallowed by the Christian God'. When I refer to evil, I'm not necessarily referring to sin. While a Christian may view someone taking the Lord's name in vain as a sin, and therefore evil, the majority of non-Christians would not view this in the same way. However, an earthquake that kill 10,000 people would (by the majority of people) be viewed as evil, or undesirable. Granted, there is a debate to be had on the definition of evil, and how different individuals/cultures define evil in different ways. However it is relatively clear that there are certain acts of both natural evil and moral (caused by humans) evil that the *majority* of human beings would classify as 'undesirable states of affairs'. In light of this, God's mercy doesn't enter into the fact of whether or not he is perfect. However I shall take a few lines here to disprove your discussion of God's mercy as well. We can presume for a moment that God allows for there to be evil in the world because he wants to be merciful to those who would commit evil. There are two inherent flaws in this. 1. If God is perfect, shouldn't he be able to create human beings who don't commit acts of evil? It seems rather silly to me that he would go through the trouble of imparting within some humans the desire to do evil, just so he could be merciful to them. Why not just do away with the evil impulse all together, and therefore create a world without suffering, where no person does evil to begin with? 2. A. If your reasoning behind the existence of evil is God being merciful, I ask you, where is the mercy in allowing individual people to suffer through horrendous acts of evil? Not the person committing the evil mind you, but the victims of evil. What about an individual who is not guilty of any sin, being slowly tortured in a prison camp over a period of many years, never allowed to die, but forced to suffer unending pain at the hands of tormentors? Why would a perfect God allow this to happen? B. What about natural evil? What is the reasoning behind a perfect God allowing for natural disasters that kill, injure, and displace thousands upon thousands of people yearly? Your answer to both of these things is "because Adam ate the forbidden fruit". To reword this slightly, "Because a man ate an apple that God said not to, God decided to punish humanity for eternity with disasters, pain, suffering, disease, etc". First of all, this clashes with the traditional definition of the Christian God. Secondly, it defies the concept of perfection in it's entirety. Shouldn't a perfect being have the capacity to forgive humans? It seems ridiculous to me that a perfect being would A. Cause humanity to suffer such evil, even though it had the capacity to stop said evil and B. Would put humans through the pain and suffering of eternal damnation because they broke a few rules. Where is the logic? God is supposed to be benevolent and kind, not malicious and unforgiving. Yet this is the picture you continue to paint to us-that it is humanity's fault for all the evils in the world, and God is just giving us our due. I reject this view in its entirety. No perfect being would engage in such an act, for the reasons you give. That being would not truly be perfect, if it had not the capacity to forgive, had not the heart to end the perpetual suffering of man. To give an analogy-if you were walking past a dark street and saw one person beating the life out of another, and you had the power to stop them by either A. Yelling loudly to attract attention, B. Calling the police, C. engage physically with the assailant to force him/her to stop, and you chose to D. Walk away and ignore the situation, would you not be held responsible for your failure to act? Similarly, should God not be held responsible for his decision to force humanity to endure suffering, even though he has the capacity to stop it? To return to my original point-you fail to answer the fact that the existence of a perfect God and evil is impossible. An omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God has the knowledge, desire, and power to eradicate Evil, and you fail to give a reason as to why this would not be. Secondly, your argument is illogical. God destroyed cities, according to the Bible, because they were rife with violence and rebelled against him. Following this logic, I would presume that God would destroy every city that is influenced by another major religion, as punishment for violating one of the commandments. In fact, I would presume that God would have eradicated the world of violence and hatred, since "God told that City to stop the violence and the homosexualiyt and the hatred for along time." However, I think we can agree that all of these things are still present in the modern day world. Why would God only choose to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, when present day cities are as bad or worse? All of this comes back to the root point-if God is truly merciful and perfect, why does the Bible depict him as continually engaging in scenes of violence and destruction? A truly all-powerful God would have the capacity to rid the world of these things, and yet he doesn't. Why? Lastly, I'll point out that the Bible supports the degradation of women by continually referring to God as a male, even though there is no justification to this. Language is a powerful barrier, and as your religion refers to it's supreme deity as a male instead of female, it is clearly establishing a hierarchy where males are superior. Considering there is no real way to prove God is male, why not refer to God as it?