RE: Punishing God vs Forbearing/Merciful God
March 10, 2012 at 2:23 pm
(This post was last modified: March 10, 2012 at 2:30 pm by The Grand Nudger.)
To cut to the chase, whatever you've used to compare batman relative to joker is also relative to your own value judgements, which we do not all share. I do not have to believe in virtue or morality, either can be demonstrated, but only relative to a specific definition of either, which can again be demonstrated to be a product of human social interaction, and relative to whatever group of people we're referring to.
Notice god didn't make an appearance above? Not even a cameo. This is why it is difficult to make a determination of what sort of god would be the greatest. Your terms and assumptions are muddy and not justified. Some of us fail to see "greatness" in any sort of punishment, but similarly fail to see greatness in indifference, or "undeserved mercy". All of this on top of not being able to point to any of these gods here in the real world. Tangled webs.
This sort of reasoning is very often leveraged though, one decides what sort of god would be the greatest (to him/her) and then shops for just such a god. In essence it is akin to deciding which god shares your opinions and then determining that this god is better than the rest because it is more like yourself. Some go further, to suggest that this is the only god that could exist, again, for no other discernible reason than "because he agrees with me, and what I want a god to be". As Norfolk has mentioned, at some point, this becomes a phenomenal waste of time (even that is only a personal value judgement).
Notice god didn't make an appearance above? Not even a cameo. This is why it is difficult to make a determination of what sort of god would be the greatest. Your terms and assumptions are muddy and not justified. Some of us fail to see "greatness" in any sort of punishment, but similarly fail to see greatness in indifference, or "undeserved mercy". All of this on top of not being able to point to any of these gods here in the real world. Tangled webs.
This sort of reasoning is very often leveraged though, one decides what sort of god would be the greatest (to him/her) and then shops for just such a god. In essence it is akin to deciding which god shares your opinions and then determining that this god is better than the rest because it is more like yourself. Some go further, to suggest that this is the only god that could exist, again, for no other discernible reason than "because he agrees with me, and what I want a god to be". As Norfolk has mentioned, at some point, this becomes a phenomenal waste of time (even that is only a personal value judgement).
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