(November 15, 2013 at 2:36 pm)ChadWooters Wrote: Like Ryanology, the subsequent replies of MitchBenn and DT reflect a childish and superficial literalism about the nature of God as presented in the deeper meanings of the Holy Scriptures. Perhaps this will clear it up. God represents the highest good, or in neo-Platonic terms, “The Good”. Willing and doing good, because it is good, moves you toward the ultimate good, or God.
Translation: I am going to try extremely hard to make this sound exactly the opposite of what it says while trying my hardest to pretend that there's no contradiction between what the Bible says and what I'm saying.
Quote:To do otherwise is to do what is good for the sake of some gain or benefit: to protect your reputation, avoid the sting of conscience, and/or fear of the law. To the extent that these consequences preserve civil order and cultivate ethical habits, there is some natural benefit to them. When you grasp that these incentives follow from Divine Providence, you bring your will into alignment with the will of the Lord, thereby uniting yourself with Him. This is not a “good boy” pat on the head for doing a chore, but rather the satisfaction of being in harmony with the One you love. That is Heaven. Conversely, when you do not align your will with that of the Lord, you move away from Him. Since the Lord is Divine Love and Wisdom, doing so moves you into the darkness of falsity and the cold comfort of self-love, which is Hell.
It has to take a lot of effort to be this full of shit. You're going to ignore the blatant offers of reward and threats of punishment which appeal to primal fears (death and mental/physical torment) and pretend that they're just metaphors for dealing with the giant, dumb, unplanned and undirected material universe full of neutral dangers, while insisting out of the other side of your mouth that the universe is actually a meticulously-planned creation overseen by a god who has control over everything. You want to have a universe which operates according to a god's will while pretending that all the bad things in that universe are some inexplicably unintended consequence which only the victims could possibly be to blame for. Ever consider a career in public relations?
You compare it to playing with fire and being burned, as if fire decides whether or not to burn you based upon whether or not you worship it and listen to what it tells you to do.
Quote:If you want to quibble, you could argue that the satisfaction I describe is a “reward” for obedience rather than a “consequence” of it. I think there is a difference, but one in which reasonable people can disagree.
If this was the case, then there would be no need to describe the rewards and the punishments so frequently. God would simply tell people to do good and to avoid evil and promise nothing at all in return. No rewards. No consequences. Then, after death, he could hand out whatever results he wants, knowing that, if anybody did what they did for selfish reasons, it can't possibly be because God did anything to instigate their self-interest in either direction. You simply can't say God doesn't instigate self-interest in the Bible. I could give you a hundred examples with no effort.
