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Originally Posted by Jibninjas
I would not agree that this ever happens. I think that people do know when they are doing wrong, and that there is not this level of ignorance that you claim. Maybe on a very small level, but even that I would say is debatable.
Well, I go through many situations in which I'm uncertain of the right thing to do. If that is not an experience you have, I suppose I have no credibility with you, but it is definitely the case. And many people act in ways that they clearly believe are right, even when demonstrable harm results. It's called "ignorance," and it causes much more human harm than deliberate malice.
There are people who panic and end up killing a trauma patient because they don't know what they're doing. But they are hysterical and trying to help.
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It has nothing to do with want. To understand and to desire are two different things. The world makes sense to me with a level of accountability. That does not mean that I want bad things to happen to people. I wish that everyone would just make the right choice in the first place.
The question is, what if they have already made the wrong choice? Do you then prefer that they suffer for it, or not? Assume no external implications.
The charge I'm leveling is that your God considers wrongdoers suffering to be a more desirable state of affairs than wrongdoers not suffering. Not that your God considers wrongdoers suffering to there not being wrongdoers in the first place.
Well, then at least one of us is failing to understand the other at some level.
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Once again you insert this this arbitrary choice theory. It is not that God could choose to make love a different way, but that love only works one way, otherwise it would not be love. I think that it is nonsensical to say that God chose his attributes and that he could have chosen differently. As if God could have chosen not to be God, or to be a different God then he is.
If God is cruel, then that doesn't imply that he could have chosen to be kind. It does imply that he's
not kind. If love is cruel, and that's just how love "works," then that raises a question. Did God create love? If so, then God created love to be cruel, and this is a cruel act. If not, then love must be a part of God, and ergo a part of God is cruel.
I'm not convinced this makes sense in the first place. Love has certain benefits - increased closeness, understanding, a feeling of bliss and connection, a regard for one another's interests, and so on. It also bears certain drawbacks, costs, and risks - the likelihood of being hurt, the effort needed to maintain the relationship, the decreased personal flexibility, and (in your view) all the evil in the whole universe. If God is all-powerful, then why can't he remove the costs while leaving the benefits in place? Don't call it love if you want to keep terms straight - call it "lurve." Why can't God create "lurve," a thing with all the benefits of love but none of the costs?
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Love can exist without grief. Unfortunately that is not the way things turned out. Free will does not cause grief. The agent creates grief.
Come on now. God gave
all of us free will, the likelihood that none of us would choose to cause grief was miniscule. I suppose you could just say "love can't exist without a 99.9999999% chance of grief," if you really want to pick nits here. The point is that you believe the
capacity for evil is necessarily intertwined with love, and that love cannot exist without it. In this case, if God is love, then God is also the capacity for evil.