Love is always creative whereas the absence of love can be destructive, depending on the power one gives to negativity.
Eternal punishment is a typical negative idea capable of destroying lives. It’s use as a deterrent for sins backfires.
Our view of God is anthropomorphic as is our view of the universe. In other words we see from a human perspective. Thus it is natural for us to imagine a God as being moral in human terms. Our need for the personal demands it.
That’s a problem. It distorts the reality.
Maybe. But what if being human is the only lens through which we can glimpse reality? What we are temporarily not equipped to see would have to break though our limits of vision in order to reveal Itself to us. Some claim God has already split time’s flat line and has revealed eternity to us. I think it was Boethius who believed that.
Here Phyllo seems to be in the postmodern camp who reject all sorts of grand narratives. Yet he supposes that he knows what reality is that all narratives of a personal God distorts.
If you anthropomorphize a gecko then you don’t really interact with the gecko. You interact with a humanized gecko.
Your understanding of the gecko is distorted.
The same applies to God.
That argument assumes that you already have some previous understanding of the gecko. The understanding that a gecko is in some ways like a human, may be an improvement over whatever your previous understanding was.
The same might apply to God.
Indeed according to Genesis 1:27, God was the real person of whom humans were images. So understanding God might help us understand ourselves and to interact with each other better.
If what the human perspective yields is unreality, we can have no knowledge of the real God or the real universe.
We have evolved enough to have some faith in our senses that they reveal what is outside the body–the reality of the Other.
The gecko can be known, with some degree of certainty for what it is other than something similar in ways to a human.
This topic reminds me of Nagel’s “What it’s like to be a bat”. Nagel claims we will never know. Yet we understand echolocation among other aspects of batness
We know their habits. E. O. Wilson, contra-Nagel, explains in “Consilience” what it’s like to be a bee.
Reading plus experience helps us fathom what is other than ourselves. The senses seldom lie, otherwise we would not know what to eat or with whom to have sex. Reading and experience have revealed a loving God to many. And is God really totally Other?
Experience shows lots of people suffering … from disease, starvation, exploitation, abuse, …
How do you reconcile that with a loving god?
Man’s inhumanity to Man, not God’s inhumanity. God is in the rescue and reclamation business, in the healings offered by good doctors, in the charity organizations that feed and clothe the homeless… God does not cause human suffering but works to alleviate it.
There is sufficient supply of food, for example to feed the starving of the world. The problem is distribution.
There is all sorts of suffering that can’t be attributed to human failings.
Humans didn’t create disease and parasites. God did.
Humans didn’t create drought.
“God, if he be good, is not the author of all things, as the many assert, but he is the cause of a few things only, and not of most things that occur to men. For few are the goods of human life, and many are the evils, and the good alone is to be attributed to God; of the evils the causes are to be sought elsewhere, and not in him.” Plato’s Republic, II, 379
Sure.
“God, if he be good” is only responsible for good things.
Can’t argue with that logic.
But is God good? Is God only good?
Plato’s Socrates thought so. And the history of theodicy from Plato on is the effort of men to justify the ways of God to men. The split of the proto-orthodox Christians from the gnostics was mainly on that point. Since Darwin natural selection has taken the place of the demiurge in that controversy.
Hang in there, phyllo. You’re at the part where the Christian tries to convince u that God is not responsible for evil.
Right! I was about to summarize 2300 years of theodicy.
Dasein’s
Yeah, that’s my point. With zillions of Gods and/or One True Paths out there to choose from, how to explain why any particular individual chooses one over the others?
Is it because they sat down and thoroughly researched each denomination in order to arrive at the most rational manner in which to connect the dots between morality here and now and immortality there and then?
Or is it more likely that given the historical, cultural and and experiential contexts in which they were “thrown” at birth, and given years and years of indoctrination as children and given all of the unique experiences they had over the course of their lives, they were predisposed existentially to pick this one and not all the others?
You tell me which seems more reasonable.
For example, in regard to your own spiritual path.
I aim to do the best I can with what I’ve got. Call it the existential imperative.
Whatever best comforts and consoles you, sure.