Spock and God
Somewhere in the Star Trek movies Spock is being quizzed on how well his mind/ soul survived its transfer to McCoy's brain. One of the answers he gives is in answer to "what is (somebody's) first law?" is "Nothing that is not real exists" or something like that.
My corollary to that law is "Things that do not exist have no attributes."
Thus, the qustion "Is God good?"" has no more meaning (and no greater probability of being answered by people of good sense than "Do the pixies who live under my garden shed like peanut butter?"
Perhaps some pretty good tests for whether <em>
you are a a person of good sense are whether or not you try to answer questions about gods and pixies an d whether you waste your time thinking about such nonexistent entities.
There has been a huge expenditure of electrons on atheist and skeptic blogs recently that try to convince people that the god of the old and/or new testaments is a sadistic monster. I even got sucked into a few of them myself.
But those discussions left me cold. My instincts were right: things that don't exist have no attributes.
I'd rather turn my thoughts to whether particular people are currently being sadistic monsters. I know people exist. And if some people have attributes we associate with sadistic monsters, then maybe we could (while being nonviolent and not becoming sadistic monsters ourselves) do something about it.