On Hell and Forgiveness

[Angrboda]

To have any rhetorical force, a hypothetical must have some reasonable connection to reality.  An analogy loses effectiveness the more it departs from the thing being analogized for, and likewise, if the hypothetical is not even plausible in some measure, it becomes less meaningful.  If God were love, then the hypothetical might make sense.  However, that seems like little more than redefining the word love in the same sense as pantheists sometimes redefine God as simply being synonymous with the universe.  If I were a fruit, would I be tasty?  If anger were green, would it be curved?  There comes a point at which your hypothetical is little more than a polemic tool you are using to try and force your idea of reality onto the person answering the hypothetical.  Maybe that's of some use to you, I don't know.  If God were love, and all the other nonsensical things Christians suppose, then yes, I would probably change my mind about the deity.  And if I were a tasty fruit, I probably wouldn't care.

I would characterize God as having the essential property of perfect love. It is 100% informed, 100% dependable, 100% sufficient (perhaps a couple of more adjectives preceded by 100%). "God is Love" is christian shorthand for saying this.

I understand all that, I just find the idea incoherent and likely demonstrably wrong. When we speak of love, we may have one of several things in mind. We may be referring to a feeling. We may be referring to an action or history of actions. We may also be referring to love as a project of some sort, as when we refer to a commitment to a friend or child. In none of these cases is love a thing or an object. And I don't think it matters whether it's immaterial or material. Neither the act or the project is relevant, even if in experiencing love in the ordinary sense we are simply partaking of God, because God is not our action nor our project. That leaves us with God as a feeling. If we are souls, and if we feel love by in some sense partaking in God (or exercising our God-like nature), then in some sense God may be love. But then, that seems to be rather similar to what I mentioned about the pantheist, in that you are simply redefining God to correspond to something familiar and tangible which in most people's experience is not God. Either way, there seems to be some question begging going on there. Regardless, I'm sure that scientists have demonstrated that some of the feelings of love are a result of chemicals in the brain and the body. If that is the case, then it seems unlikely that God is even a feeling.

Christianity in particular, and god based religions in general, simply ascribe everything good to their God, whether doing so makes sense or not. Even being as charitable as I can, it doesn't abet your ideas. If God is love in the sense of being a feeling, then all that my being in the presence of God means is a full and unrestricted imposition of a feeling upon me for no reason whatsoever. If that's what God being love means, then I have to agree with Khemikal in saying that I don't particularly care for it. I think the other explanations I've heard reduce to mere word play without any real meaning.