On Hell and Forgiveness

[polymath257]

Well, relying on 'revealed theology' is the first, most basic mistake. There is no such thing. Just claims made by people to get power over others.

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Yes, it does make for incoherence: you are making a claim that there is *one* concept of greater that applies to all virtues. Instead, you have a concept of greater for each individual virtue but no consistent way to merge them.

Once again, ask yourself the question: what is the largest pair (x,y) such that x>=0, y>=0 and x+y<=100?

The largest possible value of x is 100. The largest possible value of y is also 100. But you cannot have both x=100 and y=100 at the same time.

This is an analogy to the issue you have with competing virtues: each one individually *may* have a maximum, but there is no *single* combination that maximizes all.

Your analogy seems to be equivocating on the word greater. And I don’t have your background in math, but their is a maximally great answer to your equation.  It’s not incoherent at all.

Once again, I would encourage you to make your arguments directly, rather than with analogies.

I've been trying to get you to define your concepts well enough that an argument can be made. But, at this point, the concept of 'greater' is too vague to do anything else with: there are simply too many interpretations of that word that are mutually contradictory.

Unless you define the term, you cannot know there is a greatest.