Some people did allow leeches to suck on their body. Similarly, today, maggot therapy is a legitimate and widely used medical procedure.

We actually have symbiotic relationships with several parasites. Our gut fauna are essential to our survival; and microscopic eyelash mites live off of our shed skin and oils routinely; etc. Indeed, the mitochondria inside our cells, now the literal engines of multicellular life, got there originally as parasites.

So there is nothing inherently bad about parasitism; when we use the term pejoratively, it does not refer to symbiotic relationships we are glad of and depend upon and thus consent to (we could kill off our gut bacteria, and in fact inadvertently must when we are on a course of antibiotics, but we know we need to restart our gut biome, and so we voluntarily consume probiotics after a course of antibiotics). Rather, the pejorative connotation refers to exploitation: taking that we do not consent to and are not glad of.

In economic parlance their crime is theft: taking more than is given, or taking what cannot be afforded to give. Often this produces actual destructive outcomes (pain, debilitation, disease, even death). No compassionate God would create such things naturally, and he would help us police any that arose unnaturally. Because they would be contrary to any such God’s design, and not an outcome they intend or want.

Sentient parasites would be in a different situation. Actual human “thieves and leeches” are a thing. And they are correctly classed as immoral takers, because they do not have to be. We would have to construct convoluted fictional scenarios to get imperative parasites, who would thus need to find a way to be moral parasites, by negotiating with their hosts (the fictional Southern Vampire Mysteries universe explores an example of this). Or parasites who do no harm to or even benefit their hosts (like our mites and gut biomes). There is an entire trope for this concept in fiction.

So to explore the moral implications of your hypotheticals you’d have to expand more on what is going on. For example, the alien emotion-eaters: Does this do any measurable harm to humans? Does it return any benefits to humans? Do the aliens try to negotiate a symbiotic rather than malevolently parasitic relationship with humans? Are they prevented from doing that by something beyond their control, such as a planar barrier barring communication? And so on.

There’s a thing I read about a gnostic book… said something about, how we deem that it would be evil that parasites would feed on us, but just as they feed on us, they live thriving… which to them isn’t a sign of violating their free will, but ours. We deem this to be a violation of our free will, because it is not in our physical survival interests. Would you allow a leech to suck on your body? But would a good God allow that, justifying it as its all part of his grand design (biosphere and the harmony of it), or of course, this fails because a good God would design an environment wherein those parasites can live in perfect equilibrium in their environment? Like a self contained terrarium. What about if its… well, immoral to us, it may not be immoral to others? Imagine hypothetically, say extraterrestials or interdimensional beings feed on our emotions. They see it as a moral thing to do, but to us it’s immoral. Well, I know, I know… Crackpot stuff, but it’s still something to consider.

Is there anything there not already refuted here? Any arguments there you need me to reply to?

I generally have given up even reading the giant rambling wordwalls of apologists claiming to respond to me. Almost always they contain zero information worth the bother of any reply. So do help me out here: please point out anything worth the bother of my even reading, much less answering.

I sat in my armchair, put on my thinking cap, listened to Pat Boone singing the good, old gospel, and thought about it. (I’ll bet my boots this will shut your no-good traps.) If God is so bad, why did He send His only begotten Son to die in order to save mankind (Leviticus 3:16)? Furthermore, it could be, might be, peradventure, maybe, perhaps, conceivably, possibly, for all we know, God has excuses for His actions. So there — put that in your pipe and smoke it.

Proceed forthwith to my [nonexistent] website, thesinnersprayer-dot-info.

Oh, I sure expected an hypothetical response from Christians along those lines, but then it throws free will into the mix, with its own bag of contradictions. Also I believe it still would contradict the premise that God’s behaviour and nature shows the moral standard for human beings to behave, as it sets separate standards for God and for human beings : God is allowed to “toy” with evil in order to teach human beings “valuable” lessons (although we know that they aren’t valuable enough to warrant that amount of evil, and there are better ways they could be taught) while a human being doing the same thing to other human beings would be deemed as immoral by that same God.

I agree with you, when you follow those hypotheticals all to the way to the end, all you get is massively convoluted nonsense, and this is why I’m convinced, about as much as any other thing, that the Christian world view can’t possibly be true.

Although that’s true, here is the standard response:

God wants to wait and see you do the good thing to realize your goodness, but already predicted you either will or won’t; so his non-intervention is justified. If it wasn’t the best thing to happen, God would have intervened (after all, he arranged the world so no exceptions would occur, no matter how much we can’t tell he did); but if your intervening is the best thing to happen, he mustn’t intervene to allow you to, or your failure to then becomes a lesson, which then is the “best thing” and so on.

This is massively convoluted nonsense. And it’s not all that moral. After all, no good human would act like this—letting people more ineptly and expensively accomplish goods the observer themselves could easily do far better at trivial to no cost; neglecting goods to be done merely to “teach people a lesson,” and other such callousness; and all the while never explaining any of this to anyone ever. But it’s what Christians use to maintain their delusional rejection of all this vast evidence of God’s total lack of concern. The real problem is that even granting this extremely irrational and bizarre and amoral scheme for God, the evidence still does not match that model to any appreciable probability. It’s simply impossible that God cannot have arranged a better world. For we have already demonstrated we can do so. And we aren’t gods.

Even if we grant that there is a valid excuse for God allowing evil, and we also accept the premise that ultimate objective morality exists as part of God’s nature and as such, God’s behaviour is a perfectly accurate reflection of that standard, then it follows that when God does not intervene to prevent something we identify as evil, it must be the most moral thing to do.

Therefore, a human being cannot justify acting morally when preventing such an event at a given moment, because maybe God would have let it last longer, and if he had, it must be because intervening sooner would not have been the most moral choice, maybe even downright immoral.

Thus, the only way to be sure one is acting in perfect accordance with ultimate objective morality is to intervene at the same exact moment God would, and the only way to do that, since God hasn’t revealed it to us, is to wait and let him do the work.

Or in a nutshell, since we don’t (and probably can’t) know about God’s excuse, the most rational thing (given the premises) in order to allow for the most moral unfolding of events is to leave the matter in his hands.

…which I think not many Christians would accept as a good moral standard.

Do you see any flaw in this ? I’ve been toying with this in my head for the last 10 days or so…

That is so true. Best Paul

There is only one definition of good that matters: what we all would deem so when rational and informed. Therefore what people think or thought when irrational and uninformed or misinformed is not relevant to any point being here made.