God is Not Good

Judge: 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.

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Judge: 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.

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