[split] Are Questions About God Important?

[SimpleCaveman]

What fallacy?  If there's a good for a god to be then there's good.  End of.  I don't give a shit about a god.  I seek the good for it's own sake.  God could blip into or out of existence and it doesn't matter a single iota, to the good.

Yes, of course. That’s the point you’re always trying to make. It’s been made. Understood.

But then you tried to use that the argument based on the premises I stated to make your point. I tried to discuss the argument. Then you dropped the argument to make the statements above. That is really just saying that you didn’t mean the argument or don’t want to continue making it because it doesn’t help you anymore.

I am going to try one more time to discuss the dilemma.

Like I said, I'll end up the only realist in the thread.  You're describing theological subjectivism.  Through biological subjectivism, no less.  What is good or bad is what is natural to us.  Naturalness is the good-making property.  I disagree.  We do all sorts of..oh, what was the term..."devil  stuff".  Don't you think?  I'm pretty sure it's natural to us.  What do you think.  What would that say about the author of human nature, if that were true?  Does it not know better, or is there just no better?

You know, as I was reading your post, I was trying to understand why we were talking across each other. When I got here, I realized what the problem is.

You take “nature” here to be the individual nature of each human being. If that’s what I was talking about, then you would be right. If you want to continue with that understanding of Nature, then that’s fine, but I won’t.

In Catholic thinking that’s not at all the case. Nature here is more like (may be the same as) the Natural Law that defines all of us. (I’ll use a capital ‘N’ to distinguish.) I thought the examples I gave would have made that clear. This Nature is objective. And not only in Catholic thinking. This is one of the truths that Catholics have brought to us from the Greeks.

It wasn’t until the 1700’s that the recognition of a Natural Law started to darken. Here’s a quote from the Encyclopaedia Britannica. (We’ll see if the link is allowed. Probably not. I’m still a newbie.)

The philosophy of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), as well as the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832), served to weaken the belief that “nature” could be the source of moral or legal norms. In the mid-20th century, however, there was a revival of interest in natural law, sparked by the widespread belief that the Nazi regime of Adolf Hitler, which ruled Germany from 1933 to 1945, had been essentially lawless, even though it also had been the source of a significant amount of positive law. As in previous centuries, the need to challenge the unjust laws of particular states inspired the desire to invoke rules of right and justice held to be natural rather than merely conventional. However, the 19th century’s skepticism about invoking nature as a source of moral and legal norms remained powerful, and contemporary writers almost invariably talked of human rights rather than natural rights.

Thus, I think my counter to the dilemma you proposed is valid with that understanding. (Well, it’s not my counter. I’m just posting it.) If you can’t discuss it with that understanding, then fair enough. We can stop.

I suppose we could continue under your understanding, i.e. there is no Nature. Human nature is subjective and individualized. However, that’s a different god than I profess. It might be an interesting discussion, but I’d probably agree with you pretty quickly.