Why a benevolent God is misanthropic
Let’s define God as a creator who is omnipotent and omniscient, who made the natural world and needs nothing from it.
If such a creator is benevolent, their highest value would be the health and goodness of their creation, that encompasses the whole:
a living, self-sustaining system whose individual parts keep one another in check.
A close analogy would be the keeper of an aquarium. The keeper representing the God and the aquarium the creation.
Even death, disease and predation, which looks like disharmony up close, serves to maintain stability of the system, by keeping the constituent components and populations in balance.
Large-scale disruption occurs only when a species escapes those checks and wreaks havoc on the system itself. Once that happens, restoring balance becomes extremely difficult.
Humanity despite its intelligence, now behaves like exactly such a species.
It is the main driver of mass extinction, climate change and habitat loss, and it has shown little ability to restrain itself quickly enough from within.
Humanity has also over time built elaborate systems that threaten not only other species but its own kind; a sophisticated form of cannibalism.
Back to the keeper of a carefully balanced aquarium ecosystem.
If one species began destabilising the whole tank, a good keeper would act against it. The harmony of the system matters more than the health of any single member.
A benevolent creator who values the thriving of their creation would reason the same way, and the correction would fall on the species causing the damage.
Under present conditions then, such a benevolent creator would be anti-human in effect. A God that is misanthropic.
Prayers asking this kind of creator for rescue, grace or comfort, while humanity continues the behaviour that destabilises the overall ecosystem, rest on a mistaken assumption.
They presuppose a God whose first concern is human welfare.
A creator whose first concern is the health of their creation would more likely answer with correction than with reward.
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