Let's be biblically literary

[Belacqua]

Does the God Belaqua refers to even provide an afterlife at all, or care about our morality? If it's methodology is unfathomable, so are it's motives.

All right, the first thing to do: distinguish the God of the Sunday schools from the God of the philosophers/theologians. 

The first kind is written for simplistic understanding. From the viewpoint of the philosophers, everything people say about that God is allegory at best, outright false at worst. 

I suppose there are various reasons we ended up with both types. Like it or not, most religions have a popular type and an elite type. Even Taoist temples in China have pictures of hell to scare simple people into behaving themselves, although the Tao Te Ching doesn't say anything like that. Christianity, too, when it talks about "God is my friend" etc. is simplistic. 

Taken literally, the God of the Sunday schools is false. This is the God that Dawkins and Hitchens and those types argue against. It is also the kind that theologians and philosophers have never taken seriously. Everyone agrees that we shouldn't believe in that type. Naturally, some Christians do take that stuff literally. Some don't. I don't know what the percentages are and I don't much care. 

In what follows I will try to describe very simply the theologian/philosopher view of God. I do not know if it is true or not. But rather than typing "according to theologians" over and over, I'll just lay it out as they would. 

The God of the philosophers is absolutely unique and unlike a person. It is unlike any object in the world. Since we are accustomed to talking about things in the world, our language isn't well equipped to talk about this God. Sentences about this God tend to sound like normal statements, but cannot be read in the normal way.

For example, "God exists" doesn't mean the same thing as "my cat exists." Though the grammar looks the same, the absolute difference of God means that the sentences refer to different truths. My cat exists. Someday it won't. The Roman Empire used to exist, and now it doesn't. Saying that God exists is different -- God doesn't exist in the way that a cat or an empire exists. Strictly speaking, the word "exist" here is used analogically. To be careful, it would be better to say that God is existence. 

Partly this has to do with God's absolute simplicity. God can't be said to be something which is currently existing. My cat currently exists, but existence itself is not equal to my cat. When the cat stops existing, other things will exist. Existence will go on. Therefore, the cat is not equal to existence. As God is. The cat is not the equal of existence, but God is. God and existence are not different. 

Similarly, when we say "my mommy loves me," the sentence looks similar in form to "God loves me." But this, too, is only analogous. 

First, it's because you and your mommy are separate. Your mom is a person, separate from you, who looks at you and feels something. Included in love (I assume) is the desire that you live and thrive. God, on the other hand, is absolutely simple, which means there is nothing in the universe which is not him. He doesn't look at another individual and feel something, because there is no individual which is separate from him. And because he is impassible, God desires nothing, including your future well-being. He lacks nothing and needs nothing, so he desires nothing. Desire, again, requires separateness. The desirer, and the thing desired. 

The sentence "God loves me," then, is an analogy for something like "God, being the Good itself, draws all things to the Good. You, too, are drawn toward the Good. And being drawn toward the Good is the best thing for you, the best and most thriving outcome." God doesn't love you in the sense of feeling emotion about you and desiring something. He "loves" you in the sense of providing you with both existence and the source of your goodness. 

Another example: "I know my phone number," and "God knows everything." Two sentences that look alike but aren't the same. Because again, to know something as humans know it requires two things: me and my phone number. Since God is absolutely simple, though, God and what he "knows" are not separate; God "knows" by being at one with everything. All knowledge -- all knowable things -- are already included in God. 

It could want anything so why try to please it at all?

It couldn't want anything; because it doesn't want anything. To want means you lack. But God lacks nothing. 

You can't please God, because God doesn't change or have emotions or desire any outcome. The sentence "it pleases God" is analogous to something more difficult, like "this thing, being good, participates in more of God's goodness than something which is worse." 

When you try to be good, you don't do it to make God happy. You can't change God's mood. You do it to make yourself nearer to goodness. 

Some people think that all this is a figurative way of seeing things that was developed later, after science showed that the literal meanings in the Bible couldn't be true. In fact, the roots of this thinking came centuries before the New Testament was written, and before the Old Testament was redacted into its present form. It comes pretty clearly from Plato and Aristotle.

It would be more accurate to say that in regard to Christian theology, the literal version came later than the figurative, as a method of explaining things simply and analogously to people who couldn't handle the full version.