I love all people and sometimes I love them more then other times. God is someone we can “greatly” or very much love. Knowing this if we say God is in the plants, the animals, in all people we can feel an immense love for, we love them as much as we love God, but this doesn’t last becasue people simply do things that make you love them less, the reason God can be loved so much is because he does’nt do any of the things human’s do to make you love them less.
So my question is how do we love people as much as we love God?
I think we should proceed in our rational philosophical approach to solvig this problem.
First of all guys can you name the reasons we feel more love for God then people. I see one and thats’ becasue God’s see’s us as precious while people do things every day that contradict this. Can you see any other reasons? And ways to solve the problem?
Perhaps it is the case that God is simply the projection of what we want “Love” to be, thus the ease in doing it in His case.
If so, then we could attempt to ignore the conditions of reality and “project” love on all others. That kind of projection, however, may not be so easy, as it would actually have to contend with a living relation to explicitly manifest beings. God has the clear advantage of being “mysterious”.
Is it really that “people simply do things that make you love them less” (God doesn’t do this?), or that we have ideas about “Love” that makes it more difficult for us to comprehend how to relate to others with basic kindness, separated from any definitive need for a reward?
I think I see what your saying, though perhaps I’m wrong. You say God in a way sort of rewards us with the love we want. that is “he loves” us in “all” the ways we want, and therefore we feel no desire to call him worthless, so our love ends up for him being very strong.
Or rather, that Love should be its own reward, and that we might perhaps attempt to conceive of it in terms of earthly relations rather than perpetually failing to achieve a divine standard. Is our “love of God” meant to be greater than our daily expressions of it on the terrestrial dimension?
A lot of people hate God. They say he does far worse things than any human being has ever done, or could do. He drowns people in floods, plagues them with disease, let’s them suffer through hunger and thirst, allows sadistic leaders like Hitler and Stalin to tyrranize the masses, and so on.
I wouldn’t go so far as to share in this view, but I wouldn’t say your presumption that we all harbor an undying love for God is nearly as universal as you make it out to be.
One of the early Christian Church Fathers addressed your question very directly:
“He who claims to love God, but is yet unable to love His creation, he is deluding himself.”
One can have any number of lofty ideas and words in their head, and even affirm them with all their intellectual might, but this amounts to little, if the heart, meanwhile, remains barren.
Sincerity as the (otherwise almost entirely useless) virtue most singularly worthy of a philosopher. This word denotes a lack of “putting up” and a lack of exaggeration. Unfalsified indifference with regard to how one appears to others. The hearty victory of childish purity over ALL hypocrisy, even the most necessary and justified - thus philosophy begins !
WL and Oughtist I think you mistake me. My Love of God does not in any way reduce my love of man. I love man greatly, though maybe not as much as I do God. Oughtist I find your conception of love being it’s own reward very wonderfull. Gib you may be right when you say some people hate God. But hate is not a good thing, it is a result of despair and ineviatbly leads to fustration. Perhaps the reason these terribe things have happened is simply becasue God is not an entirily omnipotent being. Insteand of saying God is omnipotent why not simply say he is the universe and in all things.
Those things that God did, those are only what some christians believe, not eveyone holds that belief. Though sometimes I think Christians believe God not to be mercifull but expect man to be. Though I’m not sure how this works?
Agreed! Leave behind the Divine artifice, drop the Celestial pronoun, and focus on the dimension of reality about which we are specifically cognizant and to which we are directly responsive. God is as God does. Human is as humans do. Keep Love Real!
Try flipping things around…just for your own interest.
God doesn’t have human emotions.
Human’s have God’s emotions.
Imagine a possibility whereby everything that is created by an entity such as God is left with a residue of the emotions of God to the fullest capacity of that their physical body and mind are capable of accomplishing.
So far then, it appears that man has the largest capacity, on this planet, for understanding the emotional scope of God.
So, perhaps we can let the idea of God emotionally behave however God wishes to behave because we behave however we want to behave, and our emotional scope cannot be beyond the comprehension of a God that created it; God would need some level of empathy with all emotions in living creatures to be able to create them in the first place.
I tend to look at god omnipotence this way, known as the “Hitler” argument.
If God is all knowing then he knew about Hitler and what he would eventually do. If God is all powerful and he could have stopped it but didn’t then how can he be all good?
If God didn’t know about Hitler and had the power to stop him then he is not all knowing.
If God knew about Hitler but didn’t have the power to stop him then he is not all powerful.
In any way you look at it then God must lose one of these three attributes when presented with this argument.
Some may reply that God works in mysterious ways and this was most likely to teach a lesson.
A counter argument is that wouldn’t we just have easily learned the lesson with only 5 million Jews dieing instead of 8 million? How about only 4 million?
An even better counter-argument is why would we even need to learn that lesson if God has the power to take care of all our needs anyway. Whatever major catastrophe would befall us if we didn’t learn that lesson, God could prevent anyway.
Another good counter-argument would be that if God is all powerful, couldn’t he have created us with all the lessons we’ll ever need in our brains from birth?
The expression “omnipotence” is from the latin meaning [b]all/b [b]powerful/b the question arises whether your little ditty about Hitler (or anything else that is deemed evil in world) is relevant to the argument. In fact, what you are discussing is whether God can be omnipotent, all knowing (omniscient) and good at the same time.
The first thing to clear up is whether omnipotence and omniscience are attributes of God. If you take the analogies of the Bible to be literally true then God has to be all powerful and all knowing, but if we take them as analogies, then these features are used of God to show that God is of a different nature or reality to us that we do not have the same abilities. The omnipotence of God, spoken of in Job for example, describes God asking Job where he was when he laid the foundation of the world. It doesn’t say, “I am omnipotential” or talk about the ability of God to “lay the foundations of the earth”. There is no scientific proposition made, but rather the meagreness of Job laid bare – for all of his supposed moral fibre.
When the Psalms say that God is all knowing, it becomes a question as to what God is or is not. If, as I proposed, God is of a completely different nature or reality, then his knowing is of a different kind as well. The assumption that God must know the things we know rather than knowing everything that a “God”, whatever that is, must know, is an assumption on our part. Hitler is only one of a million things that we human beings have said shouldn’t happen if the world had been created by an all knowing and “good” God. What is “good” any way?
If we look to the story of Eden, Adam and Eve are at first oblivious of the many things around them that they would later deem to be “good” or “evil” – but does it mean that these things were not there? Gaining the knowledge of good and evil didn’t mean that they came into being at that point. This means that all of those possibilities that we would rather make impossible have been around at all times, it is only our attitude that has changed. This is however, exactly what all Sages, Saints and Saviours have said throughout the ages – it is your attitude that has to change. It is your perspective that must change.
This means that the evils of Hitler have no bearing on what God is. Our attitude, however, makes or breaks a Hitler. We are all too concerned about the attributes of God and loose out of sight our own inability to wake up and see things as they are. We are too wrapped up in our desires and comforts to appreciate that we are the producers of every evil that has been – and there have been far more than just a megalomaniac from Austria.
Does God love you? How do you define love? Is it the excitement of prospects we hope for, or the hope of all of our expectancies? I don’t think that God or love have anything to do with these things.
I believe with your argument you have done nothing but support my viewpoint, that the traditional all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, God can not exist. The Holocaust argument was presented by Theologian Eugene Borowitz "Any God who could permit the Holocaust, who could reamin silent during it, who could “hide his face” while it dragged on, was not worth believing in. There might well be a limit to how much we could understand Him, but Auschwitz demanded an unreasonable suspension of understanding. In the face of such great evil, God, the good and the powerful, was too inexplicable, so men said “God is dead”.
I was in fact trying to step away from the Bible or any of its contents, an argument for or against God should not have its foundations within a holy text. You have also presented another argument
. Very good question, traditionally there are two sides to this when talking about God. Is something good because God has said it was good or did God say it was good because it is good?
Not so. I don’t think that we has humans were responsible for Tay-sachs disease, and I think most would contribute that to evil. What of other natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina in the US? Did we as humans cause Hurricane Katrina? Some would reply that this is the best of all possible worlds God could have created. But could God have created a world with less suffering and evil in it? To say no then you limit Gods power but to say yes then you limit his goodness.
Another good point. I think I started a thread somewhere else on ILP on this point. I’ll see if I can dig it up, but I essentially made the point that when this phrase was first used by Hebrews (or other religiously oriented thinkers in early antiquity), it must not have been nearly as sophisticated and advanced as the term ‘omnipotent’ that we use today. I questioned whether the sense we have of this word today was even conceivable back then. For all we know, ‘all powerful’ may have simply meant ‘very powerful’. That would be the most conservative interpretation, but through the ages, the term came to acquire more indepth meanings, and eventually culminated in absurdity - for instance, the insistence of many that God is so powerful that he can defy logic itself, lifting a rock that not even he can lift. I’ve never understood why the latter theists insist that God can do this since it wouldn’t be any threat to their religion should he not have such an ability - as if some other god could have that ability.
I think some people can actually go through life believing God is omnipotent. So some theists probably were worried that their God would be called less powerfull then another God. We’v also got to take into account the shift from paganism to belief in one god. Christians may have understood at one point that one thing that was attracting people to their religion was a belief in a more powerfull God, thus one God, so they took this belief to the extreme and made him omnipotent. We must also take into the account the belief in Hell and who is more terryfying then an omnipotent God. Remember how christianity and Judism denied other Gods. They wanted him to be as terryfying as possible. The only power and all power.
I agree, the “traditional” God is something of the past – however, I do believe that the metaphor God refers originally to an otherwise indescribable reality in the lives of mindful men and women. Some chose to use the theistic, some the polytheistic and some an atheistic framework to speak of their experience. The problem is that at some time the framework took the place of the experience itself and an academic understanding excited the imaginations of “religious” men in place of the original inspiration.
During this period, lacking inspiration, belief took the place of trust. It became more important to believe in the “right” theology rather than be directly inspired. Divine inspiration has always been a little subversive and the priests and theologians of all ages have known this and this explains why the most inspirational of teachers have often had short lives or been silenced in some way. Their teaching wasn’t intended to convince you that God will intervene and put things right, but to show you that you are the intervention of God, and that you can find ways to bring consolation and alleviation of suffering if you would only be attentive and allow yourself to be inspired.
The main thing with suffering is that it isn’t simply “evil” as some people would have it. When I was recovering from an injury that had prevented me from doing sport for five weeks, I really suffered when I tried to get back into condition. It took me six months to get back to the same condition as I had been in (I am a little older) and each day was gruelling. In fact, there seems to be a principle to be discovered here, that a certain amount of struggle does provide a feeling of achievement and a sound sleep.
The struggles we have on other levels of our existence are often similar – however, there are many struggles that arise as a result of our lacking or suppressing our sentience. There were times (not so long ago) when the Europeans were considered brutish and underdeveloped by Moslems and other ethnic groups. Today, the Europeans have such reservations against other ethnic groups, despite the shame of the Shoa which (I am English) I consider the shame of all nations in Europe.
The greatest problem with Hitler and Auschwitz is that, for all the claims that Hitler was a Catholic, he was a megalomaniac with a murderous racism in his heart. He could not have succeeded had not the whole of Europe been susceptible to racism to one degree or another. Such an attitude reveals that their minds were desperately befuddled, since nationalism and racism are primitive holdovers from tribal competition and, more important, indicators of cultural stagnation or regression. The imagination that Germany was a nation without enough land to develop, added to the Neo-Darwinism and the prejudice that Jews were less than human and responsible for the “betrayal” in Versailles after WWI, as well as the rise of communism in the east, were developments that showed that the fact that many of the cultural developments of Germany were due to Jews was brushed aside for a brutish fascism.
Much of the heated arguments and salutations to the troops in the Iraq/Afghanistan today are also a result of racism, I’m afraid, which shows that we haven’t learnt our lessons. Religion is just an incidental complication of the issues at hand, but not the central issue. The spiritual men and women of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam can learn complementarily from each other – once they give up their exclusivist views and fundamentalist positions. A sign of this is the Mosque in Amman that is named after Jesus Christ.
That may well be, but I find that the greatest enemy of theistic spirituality is the way we Christians live our faith. Agnostics and Atheists are of no worry of mine, since they only show that my church is not inspirational but quite bourgeois and dull. The inspirational excitement that occurs, when it occurs, is often staged and a case of puffed-up egos rather than inspired spirit.
The second problem lies in the theistic insistence that God is “a being” of incredible proportions, but all the same a being “up there”. If we could understand that the divine, the numinous or the spiritual is something “in [which] we live and move and exist”, as Paul is reported as quoting, we would see that we must loosen some of our prejudices and realise that we are looking at reality through glasses that conceal more than they reveal. If Paul, nearly two thousand years ago, could make such a distinction using the poetry of the day and culture he was in, what has happened since then?
And yet, “good” in the language of Jesus meant ripe, timely, appropriate, suiting, fitting; whereas “evil” meant unripe, untimely, inappropriate, unsuited, unfitting. This is also the way the creation is to be seen when God is said to have deemed it “good”. It was suitable for the explosion of life that took place on it and supported an abundance of diverse life. In fact, much of the ethical judgement has been regarded as an extension of natural or agricultural values of aiding growth and development or promoting ripeness for reaping.
In such a worldview, the seasons are indicative of how lives are to be seen. We are “sown”, grow and become ripe, sow our own seed, reap our harvest and finally enter the autumn or fall of our lives, becoming barren until we die and return to the earth we came from. The prerequisites of a long and prosperous life are seen in the ethical standards we keep, which primarily are the same virtues of the farmer or herdsmen. In the Ten Commandments, it is the reverence of mother and father that bears the promise of a long life on the land.
This grows out of an understanding that we are all going down the same path and reverence sows reverence, upon which we are all reliant in our old days. So too with regard to widows and orphans who are to be taken in by the brothers or fathers of the fallen – even to the degree that the widows should, where possible, bear a child of the brother in order that they truly find respect within the family. We can see that the whole social structure was seen more pragmatically than in our days, in which we have ideals that are born more out of romanticism than reality. A long life, especially in unquiet days, was not particularly desirable and sometimes more of a burden than a blessing. So here too we see that what is “good” in our eyes does not resound in scripture and amongst the sages. Buddha is said to have said that he didn’t want a long life for fear that his followers would think that that was the goal of a righteous life.
Dis-ease is a disturbance of the natural order of things which interferes with vital physiological processes and the one you mentioned comes about simply because the body doesn’t produce hexosaminidase A, an enzyme whose absence allows a lipid called GM2 ganglioside to build up in the brain, destroying the nerve cells. It proves to me how complicated our life is and upon how many apparently minor factors our health is dependant – but it isn’t evil in my understanding of the word, because it doesn’t imply something that is morally wrong or bad, or wicked. The same is to be said of natural disasters like hurricanes and typhoons, earth quakes and whatever. To call these “evil” is along the same lines as saying a dog is smiling. One thing we can say however is that we are able to influence our climate enough to increase the number and intensity of such natural disasters, and we have worked on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons that disturb vital physiological processes.
To the General Audience: What importance is it to your life specifically if God is or is not omnipotent?
Is it not enough that God contains a potency that, used as willed, is more powerful than anything that you can tangibly comprehend?
I’ll confess that, insofar as God were to be revealed as some figure analogous to one or other of those “higher dimension beings” you might see on Star Trek, with His own little foibles and grandoise but petty limitations, nevermind all-too-superhuman ideosyncracies, then I end up saying, ya, pass on that. I’m very childish in my requirements for what God must be… vast beyond vastness, powerful beyond power, inconceiveably inconceivable, able to lift rocks He can’t lift, etc. etc., none of this Limited Being bullshit. If God ain’t that, then God’s just a soup’d up human. Might be nice to meet and all, but a real disappointment nonetheless. I’d be eternally deflated. Thus my proactive disbelief. Profound-most Mystery Or Bust!!!