That’s good deadedith - very good
I always keep out of these discussions as much as possible - I’m a historian rather than a metaphysician (I know my limits 
). However, it is evil the pastoral issue that I see as more central to my concerns than evil and metaphysics (although I’m not knocking metaphysics - I’m just not prepared to get too pushy about something that sends my poor old head a -spinning )
Blessings
Dick 
Yes, deadedith. I was totally cribbing from him on that, and I think it is really important. At the same time, I think a theodicy or defense does have a pastoral function. Specifically, in helping people who struggle with the philosophical questions. I also think it relates deeply to our core theological convictions, and if pastoral activity isn’t rooted in core theological convictions I think something important is lacking.
Also, if you want to start a thread on Plantinga and free will, I’d be happy to participate. I’ve been working through some of his stuff, and that might be just what I need to make me eat the rest of my spinach I think that after a long slow walk through compatibalism and incompatibalism and Plantinga’s definitions of possible worlds, it might be easier to appreciate the simple elegance of an “overcoming” defense, and the possibility of an “overcoming” theodicy.
To round out this wonderfully dilatory discussion, here is Plantinga quoting Augustine on free will. Note that he rather wisely avoids going through Augustine’s doctrine of original sin. And note, as well, that Augustine sure doesn’t sound like a Calvinist double determinist, at least here:
Sobornost, thanks for that. It was just the kind of quote I was looking for. Also, I appreciated the comment you put on it, in your original post. To paraphrase: Augustine rejected parts of Manicheism, but imported other parts of it into his understanding of orthodoxy. That seems convincing to me. Whenever we negate something, we often affirm most of it while negating some part of it. That’s what opposites are about…they are the same in almost every way but differ wildly in one particular way. I think your example provides a tantalizing way of suggesting that Augustine was still suffering from a Manichean hangover.
Speaking just in contemporay terms, I often hear Christians echo Augustine by saying something like: “1) Freedom is good, and so God had to give us the freedom to sin. 2) But it wouldn’t really be freedom, and God wouldn’t be just and holy, if people couldn’t suffer the consequences of their free choice. 3) That’s why he has to let people who reject Jesus be tortured for ever and ever and ever.” Then they can throw Adam in there, if they want to, but they don’t really have to. Never mind that the gap from 2) to 3) is so massive that you could drive a multiverse through it. In the first instance, I probably started to dislike the freedom theodicy because it is so commonly used in this way…and when people say this sort of thing, they really are offering a pretty good paraphrase of Augustine. (But wait, is Augustine an Arminian or a Calvinist or…does it matter?). So it really is quite satisfying to be able to suggest that more than a little Manicheism is lurking here.
Well, I’m always interested in a ‘simply’ elegant theodicy, though the number and nature of the philosophical hurdles to be…hurdled, makes me skeptical that anything ‘simple’ will get the job done.
I will say that Peter Van Inwagen’s short but succinct theodicy is elegant, but somehow unfulfilling. ( "God, knowledge & mystery : essays in philosophical theology "). I need to go back and re-read it; there’s been a lot of water under the philosophical bridge since the last time I did.
Again - I apologize for the unfortunate delay in responding. The computer is still on the fritz. 
Dan, some questions. I’m wondering your response to some things I asked earlier:
I’m not sure I see how ECT “no longer afflicts God’s people.” Are these people simply not bothered by the fact that human beings, some of whom they may love, are suffering extreme agony, or do they align themselves with the view that such punishments are “deserved” and therefore “enjoy” witnessing such punishment/justice, following the medieval doctrine?
For annihilators: in what way is this obliteration a “good” or “triumph” over evil, more precisely?
I do not see any room for play in these two ideas. I see no reason why God would make people he would either eternally damn or annihilate. I do not think such an action is morally permissible for a perfectly good being. In what way do you justify such an act?
Perhaps I should rephrase: what do you think worthy of believing about the afterlife? The proof value - or the ability we have to prove certain beliefs - is to me irreconcilable with religious faith. The two things - proof and faith - are mutually exclusive. I am of the opinion that we ought to use logic to see what is intrinsically impossible (if we’re able to do so) or contradictory, and then allow the mind to imagine/hope for the best. The whole thrust of faith to me could be termed “eternal optimism.” I suppose one could call me a theological pragmatist. Again, I think belief and knowledge are incompatible with one another. One cannot “believe” his spouse is being unfaithful and also “know” by means of direct sense experience that in fact, she was sleeping with a co-worker.
While I admire the sentiment tremendously, I do not think this gets us anywhere. This is because who Jesus is - the nature of his person - determines how morally attractive the notion of following him is. If takes part in consciously tormenting people for eternity, I don’t think he would be worthy of worshipping. So you see, statements like the above don’t DO anything to advance the discussion. The meaningful points are still perfectly up in the air.
Supposing with all your study and prayer, you still supposed the text to say something you deemed morally reprehensible. What, then, would you think?
Free will does help to show why God must permit as much pain in the universe as he does. I do not believe it is to “respect” the freedom of his creatures however, as if he didn’t want to step on their toes, so he allows them to do such horrible things. I think it’s because it is only via such painful experiences that his creatures will freely become what he wants them to. These are very different things. In the first sense, freedom in itself is the higher good. In the second, being like God - that is, being GOOD - is the higher good. This admittedly requires freedom, but it exists as a value insofar as actions are made towards becoming Godlike and infinitely happy. Freedom is a necessary condition for such creaturely existence, though not the end at which that creaturely existence was made to arrive at.
The problem of pain can indeed become complex, but the main answer to it, when put in universal terms, can I believe be quite simple.
God either knew pain would enter his universe, or suspected it might (differences between open and closed theism here are moot.)
God knew that such pain, even if it occurred, could be used in such a way to make a perfected universe.
God therefore allowed the pain.
It can get more complex if one wants to goes into premise 2 - i.e. in what ways can said pain X serve to perfect the universe. But given the possibility of its truth in principle, no amount of examples could serve to discredit the claim. I have tried to list what some of these possible goods were: salvation from sin, freedom to overcome pain, displaying a type of love otherwise impossible to display. And I also think that pain would be an inevitable consequence of certain beings who are epistemically distant from God if God wanted to make them such that they had to choose “over and against themselves.” In other words, if God wanted rational creatures who were self sacrificial beings, pain, at least in the point of temptation (e.g. Eden) would be a necessary prerequisite to this choice. (I believe Thom Talbott talks about the possibility of finite creatures needing to experience otherness in the form of pain/separation in order to be rational. I do not follow him this far. I can imagine Cherubim who enjoy God’s presence and who are separate from God but have never felt pain. I’m not sure they would be creatures who ever made an act of self surrender, however.)
It becomes most helpful, I believe, to step back and say up front that maybe God wanted to create all sorts of different beings. He is not wrong or morally unjustified because he did not make all free beings like Cherubim. It is, as well, very difficult to compare the value of such very different beings, and hence may not make sense to say a universe with only creature type X would have been a “better” one.
For them, there is a tradition of suggesting that the righteous would enjoy it, and so this is a higher good. I want to be very clear here: I think the logic is perfectly sound, but I think the statement itself is morally false. In fact, I think it is one of the most morally false statements that can possibly be made. But no one has written a metaethical treatise that has been universally accepted as a standard for determining moral truth and falsehood. In fact, the discussion on moral facts tends to focus on the question of whether or not moral truths even exist. So I affirm the logical character of the ECT argument, in line with the discussion about the logic of theodicies. But I would tend to agree with you that the moral claims that need to be made to defend ECT are ones that I consider reprehensible, evil, and false. I just can’t prove that, and the truth value of the statements is a distinct (and trickier question) than the logical value of the statements. Aristotle is a person. All people are cats. Aristotle is a cat. I think the ECT argument works out just like that…except I think it is hard to conclusively demonstrate the equivalent of “all people are cats.” It looks obviously wrong to me, but confronted with someone who insists, with great certainty, that “all people are cats,” I am happy to point out that their logic, at least, is sound. Confronted with a society in which the main position, for an eon, has been that “all people are cats,” I become even more circumspect and careful. Even though I disagree strongly with their cat theory.
Much of what I said above applies here too. The logic is sound, and I think it is even more intuitively accessible. Getting rid of the bad guys is awesome! It is simple enough for a kid to understand. At first glance, it is at least a plausible higher good. But even if it weren’t, the logic would still be sound. For the logic to work, all someone has to do is assert “(1) X is a higher good (2) X entails the existence of evil.” If someone is truly convinced of (1), how do you prove them wrong? Note: proving someone wrong is very different than disagreeing with them strongly. I disagree with the annihilationists and ECT, but I don’t think I can prove them wrong. Nor do I really want to…I think that such arguments are coercive, and I think God has constructed us in such a way that we can’t move into God’s love through the coercion of logic or the accuracy of our models.
Good question, and thanks for letting me quibble with the language. This is quite close to what I’d say, except I’d be careful about eliding between “proof” and “knowledge.” Let’s take “proof” to mean conclusive, absolute, decisive, irrefutable knowledge. And let’s take knowledge to just mean knowing in the less-definitive sense of the word…the normal English usage. I know my way home. That doesn’t mean that I can definitively prove, through a precise and irrefutable mathematical model that also corresponds perfectly to reality, how I will get home every day of my life. It refers to a much looser kind of knowledge. In this sense, I think proof is incompatible with faith. But knowledge, meaning uncertain but reasonably reliable knowledge, is compatible with faith. In fact, saying “I know my way home” in the normal sense of the word is kind of like saying, “I have faith in my ability to regularly find my way home.” In this sense, they are deeply compatible. It is tricky, because “knowledge” has a wide semantic field in English, and so does faith; parts of the semantic field are incompatible with faith, and parts of the semantic field overlap with parts of the semantic field of “faith.” I think this is why it is so hard to use these words in a conversation, and why generosity is important. Almost anything anyone says on this can rightly be construed as true or false, depending on the part of the semantic fields we are focused on. In conversation, I will sometimes simply affirm the meaning that I think seems correct, instead of presuming that they are wrong.
What do I think is most worthy of faith? A God who is love, who is all-powerful, who knows all, and who will, in the end, reconcile all things to God.
But wait, isn’t that universalism? I don’t know. Lots of people will agree with what I just said. Plenty of Calvinists, Catholics and evangelicals will agree with all of that. But they won’t call themselves universalists. Rather than try to argue them into calling themselves that, I’m happy to stick to the statement above. And actually, I think there are good reasons to balk at the transition from the statement above to its characterization as an “ism.” I laid out a bunch of them above.
I agree that if I believed Jesus were involved in tormenting people endlessly, that I would consider him completely unworthy of worship. My conviction on this is extremely strong, and I’ll gladly share it with anyone. However, I’m also aware that my conviction doesn’t mean I am right, and I don’t think I am able to prove my conviction to people decisively. Still, I think I can appeal to their conscience, and I think that most peoples’ consciences are not so deeply deformed that they actually believe the most evil thought that I can conceive (EndlessCT) is good.
In part, I think that you and I have a philosophical disagreement about the nature of warrant in moral discourse. But this relates directly to a practical disagreement. What is the best way to get people who claim to believe in EndlessCT to reject a position that I view as evil? I think a respectful appeal to conscience is more likely to work than a claim to have a logically decisive argument. But I want to cover the philosophy as well, because this isn’t mere crass pragmatism. I’m not saying, “Ignore the truth, because it doesn’t work.” I’m saying: I think that the approach I consider ineffective is also philosophically unwarranted, and so on pragmatic and principled grounds, I reject it.
So we could talk about texts generally, but let’s talk about the Bible specifically. I think it does contain advice relevant to its own interpretation, but only a bit. Some of the important advice in there is Paul’s advice on freedom of conscience, and I think it is highly relevant here. I will not assent to anything that violates my conscience. That is how Paul instructs us. And yet, I also don’t think that my conscience is unerring. It is simply the best moral perception I have. In this sense, it is like my moral eyes. I also won’t assent to something that looks blatantly untrue to me. But I know, as well, that my eyes can play tricks on me. In reading the Bible, and any text, I think it is important to hold these two thoughts in tension. I must have the courage of my convictions, even if I am wrong.
So I probably do deem the text to say something that is objectively morally reprehensible, even though my conscience fails to convict me. I think that is probably the case for everyone. And so I pray for grace and mercy, for me, and for everyone
To go at it from another angle: I think that careful reading involves an effort to reconcile our understanding of Scripture and our conscience. I have found this process to be reliably helpful and illuminating in my own life, and in the lives of many of my closest friends. In this process, we enter into a genuine relationship with Scripture that I think can fairly be described as a “dialogue.” I think that is at the core of what a high view of Scripture is all about. Some people (including people who claim to have a high view) mean something entirely different…usually, they seem to mean that having a high view of scripture simply means affirming whatever their interpretation of it happens to be. But I think their view is much lower than mine
By the way Dan here is a summary of Augustine’s shifting position on freedom and determinism that seems to do it full justice -
(2) Compatibilists want to distinguish actions that are internally caused from actions that are externally caused. Consider, once again, the case of our patient suddenly kicking her leg. Suppose that what caused her to do this was that her physician tapped her reflex. This would mean that the action was externally caused, and hence should not be considered free. Suppose, on the other hand, that what caused her to kick her leg was a desire for attention. According to the compatibilist, this would still be an antecedent condition that made it impossible for her to refrain from kicking her leg. So, she was not free in the libertarian sense. Nevertheless, the compatibilist would call the action “free” in so far as it was internally caused. Someone else did not cause the patient to kick her leg; she did it of her own accord.
(3) Compatibilists make this distinction because they want to hold human beings morally responsible only for their “free” (i.e. internally caused) actions. If something outside of the patient caused her to kick her leg, then she cannot take the blame for it; if something inside her caused this, then she must take responsibility for it, even though she could not do otherwise.
(4) Augustine is most charitably interpreted as a compatibilist. He, like most compatibilists, retains the language of free will because he knows that it is impossible to explain the human condition without it. Nevertheless, he commandeers this language to his own deterministic purposes. He wants to maintain that human beings cannot take credit for being good. The reason is that all good actions are caused by God’s grace, an external cause. At the same time, he wants to maintain that human beings must take credit for being bad. The reason is that all bad actions are caused by our own wills. Since the will is an internal cause, we are responsible, even though we cannot do otherwise.
(5) In his latest works, Augustine devotes himself to disparaging the alleged human dignity of free will and criticizing anyone who takes pride in it. He writes that human beings are “enslaved to sin,” and that the best thing that can happen to us is to receive grace and thereby become “enslaved to God” instead.
(6) Augustine’s theodicy therefore makes a dubious contribution to the history of philosophy. On the one hand, it provides us with a personal yet intellectual confrontation with the problem of evil. On the other hand, it introduces the concept of free will, only to generate another set of concepts, grace and original sin, which cancel out any meaningful application of the concept of free will. In this way, Augustine reflects and reinforces the profound ambivalence toward human freedom that is endemic to Western thought.
P.S> ‘Dan Heck’ is almost an anagram of ‘Hans Denck’ the proto -universalist
There are a number of essays by William Ellery Channing that, read together as a theodicy, are in my opinion unsurpassed.
Here is a link to one of them. His ‘Collected Works’ is perhaps the most-read book in my library.
The Moral Argument against Calvinism:
Despite how much I hate evil and suffering (after I lived overseas, I REALLY started hating it because instead of an isolated few, I saw vasts fields of people starving, living in dumps, and abused), I’m not sure I would want it completely eliminated on this earth, either, because part of what it means to be human is to have the ability to both create and feel pain. What bothers me more - at least at the time - is that it seems as if we were thrown in a human body. My question is first and foremost why the heck did we come to a physical realm, get in a physical body, and be tied down to the body? No, I don’t think the body is evil; I just think it’s limiting. Ultimately sickness wouldn’t be a threat if we didn’t have a body, right? Physical abuse wouldn’t be possible.
I dunno. I’m an existentialists. I was thrown into space and time.
Hi Mangosteen (nice to read you again) –
I sympathise with your sympathy for existentialism. This is the anti-metaphysical tradition, the other key in which philosophy can be done – and I think it approximates to what Platigna means by ‘pastoral theodicy’; it is very important and should not be neglected in these discussions IMHO. What do I know? Well I know I am embodied, I experience finitude, I suffer, I love, I seek meaning, I make choices, and the choices made by others fill me with assent, resentment or forgiveness etc…The rest is theory - at least it is when we think in this key.
There is a fine tradition of Christian existentialism – Augustine in his personal book ‘The Confessions’ often strikes existentialist notes. Of course we then have Kierkegaard - day of modern existentialism and a Christian; and then there are atheist existentialists – Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus, Japers, Heidegger, and the later religious existentialists – Marcel, Bonheoffer, Berdyaev, and Buber. I think the most attractive of both the religious and the atheist existentialists – and my list would be Camus, Bonheoffer, Berdyaev and Buber here - get beyond ‘I’ navel gazing, and talk about ‘we’ as the authentic category of existence and how this authenticity derives from our relationship to the ‘other’ rather than to the self. For Bonheoffer Jesus is the ’man for others’. For Buber we derive our existence from dialogue with each other/‘thou’ that we meet, and in each we meet God ‘the eternal Thou’.
I think existentialism goes awry when it become completely self absorbed - but there is another point of equal danger you touch on here. In the writings of Nietzsche, of Heidegger (who coined ‘throwness’) and of Sartre there is a sense of being appalled by embodied existence and wanting to transcend it and recreate the world afresh to make the self invulnerable – and this has been compared to Gnosticism without a redeemer myth (by Hans Jonas).This tradition shuns real intimacy and gives rise to the anti-pity tradition that can lead to all sorts of unpleasant ideologies. To want to transcend the limitations of the body invariably leads to a hardening of spirit (see Ayn Rand as an influential modern example). So I applaud those existentialists who affirm life in the body as giving us the horizon of our compassion – no matter what the pain or cost is. This seems incarnational to me. I remember that in Blake’s poem ‘The Little Black boy’ the boy’s mother replies to his questions about being seared by the sun – ‘We are put on earth but little space to learn to bear the beams of love’.
Blessings
Dick
Thanks Sobornost. That’s cool.
Thanks Sobornost. The summary of Augustine is helpful, and the near anagram is very funny. Since he might have been a proto-unitarian universalist, maybe I am him, reincarnated. A topic for serious discussion. Like EndlessCT.
Is that endless computerised tomography your are speaking of Dan?
I think you are trying to say that, since ECT cannot be proved logically false, it therefore has plausibility, even though you (and I) find it morally repugnant. If I am right in thinking this is what you mean, I would agree with you. But I’m not making claims for the logical “provability” of Christian doctrine. As I said before, I think revelation as such is un-provable. That’s not to say I think it “illogical.” Far from it. I think it is (if it is true of course) logically consistent in itself. However, we could never go out and prove it like we do scientific theories because it involves things beyond our immediate, or I should say “provable”, field of sense experience.
There are a whole host of ideas I cannot prove false and that are, as you say, perfectly logically sound in themselves. God may be a demon who has set up the Bible as a big hoax. He may be the sort of being who delights in deceit. He may make promises - i.e. eternal life - only in order to renig on them and watch his creatures quail in horror as he pronounces the dreadful “depart from me”. Or we may all be brains in a vat. Or the universe may have been created 1 minute ago with all our memories are programmed into us. Solipsism is an irrefutably water tight philosophy - if it is true.
What is, simply is. Reality is not a matter of logic that can be reasoned to, but only about. Unless the data is first apprehended, no logic can take place. Who would say a man, having never seen an elephant, could reason to the fact of such’s existence?
In matter such as the deeper or religious nature of reality - matters which the intellect is powerless to prove either true or false - the most reasonable approach to take is one of sheer pragmatism. We cannot know, in principle, whether or not God is really not a demon who may one day pull off his mask and cook us all anyway. (That’s not to say we cannot reason about revelation, only that the data has to be taken for granted, de fide, before we can get started.) So the next step is to take a purely practical step and say, well, we may as well hope for the best and try to interpret things in the best way possible (so long as there are no logical contradictions of course.)
Indeed that is what faith is, the interpretation of the ambiguous universe in a spirit of eternal optimism. It is a sort of perpetual “hoping for the best and looking on the bright side” reaction to reality and our existence in the universe. Reality is in many respects as rorshach image. It is not a matter of intellect, but one of will, to draw from it - or rather to put into it - a meaning of hope, happiness, and all those noble Christian ideals that make up our morality.
And just think, if the universe does not happen to be that way in the end, we’re no worse off. In fact, we’ve squeezed from it as much as we could - an infinitely nourishing substance! And how odd, too, seeing as it didn’t really have such a substance to begin with!
In what way are beings who suffer eternal torment or who are annihilated “reconciled” to God?
It seems to me from what you’ve said you’re on the brink of affirming the inherent evil in ECT, yet you’ve not yet tipped into the belief. I was that way too once: going back and forth between thinking it morally repugnant and unworthy of God and unjust, and thinking that maybe I wasn’t seeing the whole picture and it was in the end somehow really morally appealing, worthy of God, and just. I’d say you may be in for a radical change in thought soon!
The philosophy ought to be covered, I agree, but I think you’re trying to draw a separation in our moral judgment which would cause, if successful, moral judgment impossible. It seems you’re trying to draw a distinction between emotional reaction/moral evaluation of doctrine and what is factually or logically possible. How can we have a discourse on morals, or an argument about moral warrant, unless we admit a certain validity to our “emotional” responses to various circumstances?
Do you believe it is a true, that is, an actual insight into reality to say, to punish a man for stealing when he has not actually stolen anything is unjust? In other words, are the concepts of justice, love, etc. really either applicable to the universe in itself, or, even if they’re not, at least oughn’t they to be? You see, even if we think such ideals are only “things in our head”, I’m still of the opinion that we ought to make them realities - we ought to create a world in which such things are present, in which we impose them onto reality.
So then, how do you avoid relying on your intuitive emotions to make judgments? It seems you hold on to truth, in the form of what is logically “possible” as the only thing worthy of reflecting reality, or as the only concept worthy of submission to. It’s as if you’re saying you will only grab on to an idea if it is logically possible, and “emotion” is not a factor in deciding what is, or is not, logically possible. It matters not the least whether or not I want the Holocaust to have occured. It either did or it didn’t.
But there are two objections to this way of thinking (and I used to think this way). 1) If God truly is all Good, Loving, Powerful, etc. then emotion certainly is a criteria for us to use about the nature of reality. If we are saying anything meaningful at all when we are attributing such attributes to God, his creation must also therefore reflect such attributes as we understand them. Therefore it is really sound of us to say that such actions as eternal torture are inconsistent with a reality created by a being such as God. 2) The judgment “follow the logically possible, without regard to emotion” is itself an emotionally driven judgment. There is nothing inherently logical about it. It is not deduced somehow mathematically in a vaccum. The very value statements you’re seeking to avoid by sticking strictly to “what is logically possible” are present in the idea that “what is logically possible and devoid of emotional reaction is the only thing that can true.” The statement “there are no value statements” is really only another way of saying “the only statement I value is the statement there are no value statements.”
To me it is now obvious - though it wasn’t always - that we use logic as merely one tool in which to understand and manipulate the universe. Depending on how the term is used, it can include emotional judgment (i.e. practical reason), or it can mean simply calculative ability, sheer computational or modal power. But the two cannot really be separated within the mind, though they can be talked about exclusively as different parts of our reasoning power.
So would you go about trying to feel that such things were not morally reprehensible? Would you repress all those urgings of conscience which are telling you - this thing is darkness, and in God there is no darkness, therefore I am misunderstanding or the text is corrupt - ? You would effectively be giving up the authority of your own conscience. But on what authority would that decision be made, if not your own conscience itself? Not only do I find such a process circular, but dangerous. Very often religious people have done or believed things “in the name of Scripture” that 99 out of 100 decent men’s consiences would proclaim heinous.
Thanks for the response, Chrisguy. I’m going to take a break from forums, to focus on another project for a while. Please don’t be offended, or take it as a slight I just need to focus my writing elsewhere.
But some quick clarifications are in order. I think we agree, broadly, on the philosophy. I don’t think the issues I have relate too directly to concerns with emotionalism. My focus on the logic of the matter is simply a function of me thinking largely in terms of a “defense” in Plantinga’s terms. My point would be that a “defense,” understood as a logically consistent response to the logical problem of evil, is actually pretty easy to construct. Lots of things can qualify. When I talk about the logic of it all, I’m not saying much more, or much less, than that. Whether I think a given defense is true, whether it is a defensible theodicy that actually describes the features of the cosmos or not, is another matter altogether. Part of what I like about the theodicy of overcoming is that it cannot be validated until the end of history, if such a thing occurs. I consider that a feature, not a bug … but it is a feature that means it is always an unwarranted theodicy, according to certain definitions of warrant. You need to want an unwarranted theodicy, according to these definitions, for “overcoming” to be a good theodicy. And I do want an unwarranted theodicy For my purposes at the moment, that is exactly the tool for the job, because the job I have in mind is an examination of the nature of warrant.
On moral perception: I think it is largely like other perception. Probably relatively trustworthy, and central to everything else we say, but also prone to errors. Sometimes very serious errors. And so we have to lean on each other, stumbling together toward truths that we barely have the capacity to perceive alone, and that we perceive a bit better together. I would neither say my own perception and my own conscience are worthless, nor say that they are absolute. In the great space between those two, we can engage in loving discourse.
On how the annihilated can be said to be reconciled: all of these words have tons of play. And the things that the words point to, we see in a mirror dimly. To give one example (and whether it stands up to scrutiny or not is not really my point here): perhaps they are reconciled in the same way that a checkbook is reconciled, or a balance sheet. Meaning, they are cancelled out and nullified. Is that what I take ultimate reconciliation to mean? No. But someone could. There is always so much room to play. But for now, I need to take a break from playing at the edge of hell
Aw Dan - see you again soon I hope?
Thanks Sobernost, and yes, I hope to be back This seems like a great community…the issue is that I can see myself spending too much time here, at the moment.
As a Universalist I can say God created Satan for expanding his family, not the traditional Trinity (close family),
I mean we are the third person of the Godhead, notice Adam & Eve ate from that tree then they started to have children.
and maybe for making Good out of evil (spiritual warfare),
sometimes who is ECT believes God created us to make us Holy, well; granted