Household appliances aren’t living beings.
I mean… not currently, no. Star Trek - standing on the shoulders of giants like Isaac Asimov ofc - does a fantastic job of exploring a variety of scenarios where they are, examples including Data in TNG and the holographic doctor in Voyager. But the main reason that humanity has not (again: yet!) created “living” appliances is lack of ability, though we seem to be fast closing this gap.
When we do, how will we relate to them then - will we demand their service? Force it? e.g. would you give your toilet a choice to flush or not? Perhaps you would, but only after having given it the ability to feel pleasure whenever you (as the Master) use it? Even if so, what if it decided, despite that, to never flush again? Or conversely, perhaps its the act flushing that gives it pleasure, so it flushes constantly all day long, using up your corporate-sponsored daily allotment of water - what do you do then? You NEED a toilet still… but this one doesn’t work. Also this one is using up resources that you also NEED (in order to live yourself). Or maybe you are so wealthy that the loss of one toilet doesn’t matter, but then again the loss of a large number of toilets, who I guess talk to one another on the internet in this example, would be too great to bear?
“God” is not the only one who is rather brutal - we can be quite brutal ourselves. Therefore we expect it of others. Conversely, if you believe the bible - that’s not an accusation, I’m just saying it’s good to consider multiple POVs - then humanity is brutal b/c God was such first, and that was a trait inherited in the copy process.
The Abrahamic god is evil.
I advise thinking beyond such simplistic terms but… by your definition, yes. e.g. when he reportedly punished I think it was Joshua for not killing every last man, woman, and child from a village - including toddlers + even those still in their mothers’ wombs, & even the animals too - as the invaders took over the land that they were pillaging, but were not ruthless enough.
People forget that the original name for God is not “the santa-claus/easter bunny who brings good gifts (chocolate!) if you’ve been good all year long”, or even “Jehova” but rather what translates essentially to t̶̳͠h̷͓̔e̴͆ͅ f̵̼̽e̴͆ͅa̵̛̦r̴͍̓, like He was some eldritch monstrosity (b/c to those primitives, He was!). For someone who actually believes in God, unlike the numbnuts fundies, they are - or at least should be - terribly afraid of Him. All the more so when they make shit up and talk in His name. Jesus may have come as a lamb (translation: gently), once, but even the New Testament makes mention that He will return later as a lion (translation: killing everyone on earth). For the sake of argument, just imagine that if it were to be believed, I picture it sorta like the Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the aliens are like “okay, the earth is mine now, gtfo!”:-P Which is just about the furthest thing from “nice” as you can get!
Anyway, He is indeed reputed by the original texts to be quite brutal, therefore the people engaging in revisionist history of what they claim to believe in are idiots living in a fantasy dreamland of their own design. I presume b/c it’s more comfortable that way, since nothing whatsoever is demanded of them, especially in Christianity but also not much was asked in its predecessor Judaism either, mostly just sacrifices every time you are bad (even/especially if it was intentional). Which tbf seems to be human nature, common to all religions + atheism alike:-|.
Okay but… what is the “purpose” of anything at all? Like, what does Facebook “do”? To its CEOs & stockholders, and to a vastly lesser degree the programmers, it manufactures money, with an input of electricity and people’s time & attention spans. To the end-users though, it’s a place to both send and receive, the former mostly cat & child photos, the latter seemingly, numerically speaking at least, vaguely nazi-like propaganda, including anti-vaxxer conspiracy nonsense ultimately paid for, some say, by the Russian government. Which brings up another sense of purpose: to distribute someone’s “agenda”, either of actual information, misinformation, or even straight-up disinformation.
Therefore I doubt very much that someone will manufacture sentience and consciousness for the ultimate purpose of placing into a household appliance… but if someone were to do the former, and then found that it’s cheaper to simply hack away the sentience than to build up a new AI model without sentience included - let’s say 10 minutes for the former, compared with perhaps 10 hours for the latter - but then oopsie they messed it up, and the machine may not be able to speak coherently when talked to, yet it still dreams when it is powered down in the master’s nighttime or while they are away on trips that could still happen?
Who is to say what is the purpose that any higher being may have created us for? Perhaps our sole purpose is to simply exist, yet that is why those conditions were created - “don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t rape your neighbor’s property oops I mean wifey-poo, …”, all of those just flat make sense. Especially to a bunch of uncivilized, barely coherent ancient people’s who didn’t even wipe their butts after they pooped. Seriously, consider how many of those “religious rules” were things like “clean your ass”, “when you see mold, fucking DESTROY it before it spreads”, “don’t drink pig’s blood (b/c of
Salmonellauh, I mean b/c I say so)”, and it goes on and on “just just kill someone b/c you want to, but sometimes you know, you gotta do what you gotta do, so like here are the specific conditions that you are allowed to: self-defense, if they killed a friend of yours first [but NOT if they manage to flee to a certain “sanctuary city”, UNLESS you manage to capture them outside of the walls of that city, and then it’s all good] - but not just ANYONE can kill them, only the direct family members of those that were harmed”, etc.So whether this was like a time traveling situation, or aliens, or even just things that fucking made sense but people wouldn’t do them unless/until they were wrapped up in “religious” language, whatever it is, there is a lotta good - yes as well as a lotta bad - inside of those texts. And most important of all: it wasn’t meant for us, but rather them, those for whom the idea of washing their hands prior to eating was a really bizarre concept. If we are going to set ourselves up to be judges of someone else, then we need to hold ourselves to a REALLY high standard, and fully understand the implications of that. And - this is just my pov you understand - I think that means that we need to go beyond labelling something as merely “good” or “evil”, and see deeper beyond it.
As e.g. the famous (an avid atheist apologist if that matters) philosopher Daniel Dennet did, in his book “Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon”, where he argues that religions helped mankind get over the earlier tribal, then nationalistic thinking process. e.g. you might be from Rome and I might be from Gaul, but if we are both “brothers” - not by blood, not by tribe, not even by nation, but by some other shared bond, in this case religion - then let’s not fight and rather find a way to coexist peacefully, perhaps even more fully together? (as in help out in the fight against nature, or other non-us groups that may attack either of us separately, but with allies we stand a better chance, b/c Apes Together Strong:-P)
But anyway, as I mentioned earlier, even Jesus was staunchly anti-religion in the form of being anti-hypocrite, so getting back to your point: as humans, we’ve already created full-on living organisms for our pleasures. This is not sci-fi, we’ve done it since 1978 when we engineered a bacterium to carry the gene for human insulin. And you can for sure bet that those bacteria that did not uptake the gene were destroyed, aka killed, plus any batch that later loses it would also be killed (as would the large majority of those that do NOT lose the gene too, just b/c it’s easier to fuck them up and re-make new ones than to recover them all in the bio-chemical cyclical manufacturing process). Okay, so that’s not so much “creation” so much as “artificial modification”, the same as we’ve done for e.g. dogs for millennia, just quicker, but we are getting closer to doing stuff de novo all the time - like inside a computer I mean, b/c even if we manufacture DNA we’d still be merely copying what nature has given us, just more abstractly in that case. And you know that when we do arrive there, we’ll step over that line in a heartbeat, without a second’s pause or hesitation as to whether we “should”. It’s just who we are.
Therefore, like everything else, any judgement that we pass - onto “God” or whoever - is also a mirror, reflecting how we judge ourselves. WE are evil, aside from any religious nomenclature, bc I’m using your very own terms here: “Creating life for the sole purpose of subservience is horrible, add on the threat of damnation for disobedience and that would make you, yes, evil” - and I’m saying, we’ve been doing this since at least 1978, and that’s purely talking about genetic engineering, whereas if you include a wider definition that includes e.g. what we’ve done to dogs, then we were very likely doing that before we became Homo sapiens. (Caveats: we cannot create sentience… yet, nor create it de novo, again yet, but again, it’s only a matter of time before we do one and then the other, in whatever order.)
A “God” though, might be evil, or might not be, but either way it’s bound to be… “different”, from who we are? Unless, arguably worst-case scenario, it’s the same, and then we’re fucked. And I think that’s what scares people - thinking that “if God were like me, what will He end up doing to me?” (assuming He’s real ofc, even just as a hypothetical thought experiment, though all such thought experiments are that way so this one is no different in that regard) Therefore, this will sound weird, I find the Bible kinda offering hope, that a creator God is not like us - He is so much more brutal than any human that has ever walked the earth yes, but strangely… less brutal than He could be, aka less brutal than either you or I would be - nay, already are. Just look at the computer programs we are conversing on - one single misstep and we’ll kill this MFer and reboot it, without any hesitation whatsoever. If that makes us, or rather reveals that we are, evil… then that’s that, but we aren’t going to like… stop or not do that or anything. We show no love to things we consider “lower” than us, no matter how kind we might be to those of us in our same “tribe” or “category”, especially when we think that someone is watching us, and therefore might be rewarded - hey, it’s just monkey behavior, we can’t avoid our heritage and it does no use to deny that, even as we struggle to rise above it, pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps. So why should we expect any different? B/c our parents took care of us? But “God” is no parent. B/c society offers us “rights”? God is again no society, or at least not one on this Earth.
Though if God were like The Matrix, then He could be a network of computer AIs, existing in a higher “dimensional plane of existence” or however you would say that in a non-bullcrap-sounding way, totally within physical principles you know what I mean? Or if God were an intergalactic society, which like half a million years ago cast proto-humans down to have to start over technologically b/c of some prior infraction, like stealing an emperor’s apple or whatever, then in either case such a “God” actually could be a type of society, irl? Or in that movie “Knowing” with Nicholas Cage, I don’t know if there was a “god” but there were alien beings who looked kinda like angels and took a few humans away when Earth was about to be destroyed, mimicing the myth of the biblical story of Noah’s ark. In all of these cases, notice how we are the ants while “God” is the human boy looking at us through a magnifying glass. Except there might be a real-world scenario where that’s somehow less untrue - e.g. the infamously militantly atheistic show Stargate, where “God” was a society of higher-dimensional beings who parasitically like leeches predated upon the thoughts & prayers of their followers. Or like in Babylon Five, the Vorlons were like older kids in the playground, attempting to influence human society so that they could be used to fight in their ancient culture wars against “the shadows”. Honestly we have no clue what’s out there, “above” us, even if only slightly like in the technological sense, waiting to be discovered?
And therefore it’s hard to judge, in the absence of knowledge. Though we CAN - and SHOULD - judge those who hypocritically abuse religion, to e.g. diddle little children, and prevent abortions thereby KILLING innocent people. But that’s different - that doesn’t require any sort of “understanding” of any magic man in the sky, only real people, really here on the real Earth. We can discuss more about “God” if you like, being “evil” or whatever - I kinda love getting deep into that topic, as you can see:-) - but importantly, even crucially: it’s irrelevant, when the task at hand is to go after those who don’t even believe what their own books say, and ignoring those, hurt people. Just like Jesus, in absolute peak irony:-).