RE: Can God be objectively good despite criticism against Him/Her/It?
May 6, 2022 at 8:54 am
(This post was last modified: May 6, 2022 at 8:54 am by Fake Messiah.)
(May 6, 2022 at 3:02 am)Belacqua Wrote: So, what is good for you? We could make a list: health, happiness, peace, etc. All of these are portions of the good which we can experience in our lives, and form a portion of, or reflection of, or emanation of, God.
Take health as an example. It is good for you to live in a way that leads to the best health possible. Why would anyone not do this? Because they are misled by poor advice, or because their love of the unhealthy is too strong, or because their love of the healthy is too weak. God "wants" you to do what is most healthy for you, because God is the good, and aiming toward the good is aiming toward God. In every case, God's "desire" is what is best for you. (These words are in scare quotes because God's "wants" or "desires" are not like people's. Since God lacks nothing, he himself wants nothing. When we say God "wants" X, it means that X is the best thing for you to do, to aim at the good.)
It may be that your love of what is unhealthy is too strong -- say you are addicted to cigarettes. Then you would criticize the best way of living, and say it's boring or lacks pleasure. But it's still the best way of living, even if you criticize it, even if you, at the moment, hate it.
Except, people a lot of time don't have control over if they'll get sick or not. Some people get born already sick and even die at an early age or live a life of suffering, and some want to live a healthy life but don't know how - like in the past when people didn't know how the bubonic plague was transmitted.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"