(February 25, 2015 at 10:37 pm)watchamadoodle Wrote: @Ignorant, I've spent some time pondering your definition of "good", and it still leaves me confused. You say goodness is subjective, but you also say we can be wrong about our perception of goodness (like Hitler). You also say that goodness is for the sake of other goodness, and I'm not sure what purpose that serves in your definition. Then you throw God in at the end and say if he satisfies all our desires then he is goodness itself. What does "goodness itself" mean? I thought Christians believed that God was a person.
So I give up. No more questions.
Because the nature of this conversation is about varying degrees of a commonly used sentiment, such as "good", it's important to be particular with the words used to describe each degree that separates them. Sounds confusing but consider how you might rank things that are good on a scale of 1-10. 1 being a buy one get one half-off coupon on hemorrhoid ointment, a 10 being the highest example of things that qualify as the word. But what is the ultimate standard by which all things are determined to be "good". Just as a shadow of a person shares the characteristics of human shape, it is not human. And so on a scale of 1-10 with regard to human-ness, a shadow could rank somewhere on the list, but it would be lower than a reflection since a reflection shares more of the human-like qualities. And a human would not be on the scale of human-ness, but THE standard by which all humanly things might be measured. He's saying that if an equal standard to goodness DID exist, then we might just call that "God". But it's not necessarily true that such a thing does. Make sense? It's some old Plato stuff. Here's some more info. Hope that helped!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_of_the_Good
