Is God Altruistic? Is God Happy?

[Rogue]

P1- God owns everything

I haven't read the exchange so far, but I can try out some responses based on what I've read of Christian theology. Please note that I'm not saying things I hold to be true -- just arguments I know from reading Dante and other books. 

So I think they would say that the verb "owns" is misleading. The God of Dante doesn't own anything in the way that people own cars or pets. God emanates everything. God holds everything in being. Without God everything would disappear. So I don't think that "own" describes the relationship quite accurately.

P2- You cannot be altruistic when you do something for your own (i.e. mow your lawn, take care of your kids, etc.)

It's a fundamental belief that God lacks nothing, needs nothing, and wants nothing. So it's true that God can't do anything to help himself. The idea of Dante and many other Christians is that God just is the Good -- pretty much in the way that Plato's God is the Form of the Good. And because it is the nature of the Good to spread itself (a selfish Good wouldn't be good) God doesn't spread good because he wants to help, but because it is simply his nature. So "altruistic" is a misleading anthropomorphism, I think.  

Since God decides who goes to Hell, he owns you.

Again, the more theological way of saying this is that people decide where they go. Not, of course, by choosing that they want to go to Hell, but by choosing their actions. If God is the Good, and people spend their lives heading away from the Good, then their lives have pointed them in the other direction. It isn't as if God has evaluated the evidence and made up his mind about something. That, again, is an anthropomorphism. 

Now I know that more literalist, child-level Christianity doesn't describe things this way. There is a lot of "in a manner of speaking" going on. But what I've described here is what more educated Christians have believed for a very long time. 

There are, of course, differences among less mainstream Christians, some of whom are very interesting. For example, Jacob Boehme didn't think that God is impassible and unchanging. He thought that God develops through dialectic, entirely through the agency of people. Hegel stole the idea from him, about Geist moving through history. 

Anyway, as I say, I'm not arguing that any of this is true. Just that there are better responses than maybe you've gotten here so far.

That was a "good" response. My bowel movement was "good". Did I meet God? The dead pig I ate for dinner was "good". Did I eat God?

Is this not a category failure? Good is a word that describes many things. Good does not have agency. God lacks 1 "o" Go_d.

That is the lowest superlative good, better, best.

If I say that was good, should I capitalize? Is it taking the Lord's name in vain?

Why did Satan have to ask God's permission to torture Job?