Dianna

What is the choice, exactly? Is the choice to believe or not believe? Or to love god or not to love god? I admit, I'm confused at this point.

Most people on the planet believe some type of deity exists. Which one are we to choose?

He has asked nothing of me. I haven't heard from any god so far. Is it possible for me to believe something that I don't believe? How would you recommend I go about self-inducing such a belief?

If the choice isn't belief but love...how do you recommend I go about loving an entity that hasn't contacted me, shown me it exists at all, nor asked me to love it?

Funny how you get it both ways. If god shows himself and asks me to love him, he's coercing me into a relationship. If he hides from me and asks nothing of me, it's my own fault for not believing he exists and suffering the consequences of not having a relationship with him.

Your god is a strange lover.

Dianna.

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

Since you have finally (apparently) conceded that providing information does not constitute coercion or an infringement of free will, many of your earlier statements and arguments have become “inoperative”. So it’s time to take a look at the overall process of salvation (as you picture it) and see how God’s “hiddenness” might be explained in light of it.

Step 1: Believe in God’s existence

The first step is to believe in the existence of God. For reasons that are unclear at this point, this belief has to be based on faith rather than evidence.

[Note: It seems clear that you are using the phrase “relationship with God” in a different sense here than elsewhere, where you use it to refer to making a commitment to God – one that must be based on love. But let’s move on.]

The obvious question here is, what’s the big deal about “faith”? Why can’t God make His existence completely obvious and certain from the start? Although you said a good bit about “coercion” and the importance of making a “free” choice in trying to explain God’s thinking here, we have seen that providing clear evidence of His existence would not be coercive in the least, nor would it involve the slightest infringement of our moral freedom. So that can’t be the problem. Moreover, our motives for this initial faith aren’t the issue either, since (as you have said) God doesn’t care what our motives are at this point. And a good thing too, since we are all so utterly depraved and debased by Original Sin that we couldn’t possibly have a worthy motive for taking this first step anyway.

At this point we wil just have to assume that the knowledge of God (which can’t be taken away once given, after all) interferes with the process of salvation somewhere later on.

At any rate, in spite of the fact that believing in God on faith has no rational basis, and is necessarily made from base motives, it is decisive:

And again:

So choosing to accept God once one believes in His existence would seem to be a simple matter of logic. But sadly, things are not so simple, as we shall see.

Step 2: Love God

While a mere belief in God’s existence is essential – in fact, determinative – it’s hardly the end of the story. The next step is to love Him:

However, this doesn’t seem to present any obstacles. As one might expect, God can easily induce us to love Him if He chooses. In fact, all that He has to do is to let us know more about Him, because:

Of course, one has to know, or at least believe, that God exists:

Also:

But all this is to say only that this is the second step, not the first. Once one has faith in God’s existence, love of God would seem to be inevitable. God will communicate His love to us, and we will love Him in return. He “loves us into loving Him. Cool. On to the next step.

Step 3: Commit to God

All right. We love God. Now we have to accept Him, which means to commit to Him:

OK, so at this step we make a commitment, presumably irrevocable. And this is where God finally gets picky. This commitment must be made out of love:

You’ve repeated this so often as to make it practically a mantra, so there’s little point citing other statements to this effect.

But one thing I don’t quite understand yet is exactly what we are supposed to be committing to at this point. I had been under the impression that we would be committing to obey and serve Him, but apparently that’s wrong, because when I said:

you replied:

Similarly, a little earlier you said:

OK. By “accepting” God you mean making a commitment with Him, but apparently we are not deciding to serve Him. So what are we committing to?

Whatever it is, clearly we are expected eventually to serve God, and here again the only acceptable motive for serving God is love:

God doesn’t insist on a lot of love, just a bit:

However, it’s most unlikely that anything less than a massive amount of love will be sufficient in practice, because this commitment is certain to involve suffering, and quite possibly an enormous amount of suffering. In fact, this commitment involves a willingness to undergo any amount of suffering that God requires of you:

Indeed, such an enormous commitment is only possible at all because it doesn’t have to be made all at once:

As I said in my last post, this seems to be a far cry from the orthodox Christian doctrine that all that is needed for salvation is that one accept Jesus as one’s Savior. (Or in many formulations, that one believe in or have faith in Jesus as one’s Savior. In fact the latter formulations are much closer to what we find in the Bible.) To be sure, some versions of the doctrine also require good works (though the standard line is that the good works will flow from sincere faith rather than being a condition of salvation). But no Christian church that I know of teaches (at least when it’s addressing unbelievers) that one has to commit to being willing to endure an enormous amount of suffering, solely out of love of God, in order to be saved.

Anyway, getting back to the main point, we still do not have an explanation of why God would want to remain “hidden” and require us to believe in His existence on faith as a prerequisite for starting this whole process. So now let’s examine this.

We have already seen that knowledge does no entail coercion or an infringement of free will. But would knowledge of God be an impediment to loving Him? Paradoxical as this idea sounds, you argued that it would be. (Note: In the passage below I replaced the references to “threats”, “coercion”, etc. with “knowledge of Heaven/Hell”, since this seems to be what you were actually referring to.) This was your argument:

Let’s try to parse this. Say that I am granted full knowledge of God’s nature, and assume that this entails full knowledge of Heaven and Hell. It would seem to be unavoidable that the knowledge of God would cause me to love Him, and that this love would be a more than sufficient motive to make the commitment to Him that He desires, since “the more one knows God, the more one loves Him, and the more obedient one is.” The fly in the ointment is that the knowledge of Heaven and Hell would inevitably supply me with additional motives for making this commitment. As I argued at length, these motives (on your understanding of the nature of Heaven and Hell) would be things like a love of virtue and hatred of vice, a desire to be virtuous, a desire to fulfill one’s intended destiny and fully realize one’s true nature. But you replied that that’s not good enough; they aren’t quite the same as love of God.

The important thing to note here, however, is that these motives would not exist instead of love of God, but in addition to it. You say that under these conditions we might be “deprived of the opportunity to try to follow God out of love”, but this is simply false. It might well be that these other motives would be the first ones that would occur to us, and that the decision to commit to God would be such a no-brainer that we would go ahead before we even remembered that our love for God was also a good and sufficient reason for doing it. But although we might not be conscious this motive at the critical moment, it would be there. (Actually the situation is much better than that because this decision isn’t really made in a single moment, but is spread out over a considerable time. But we’ll ignore that here.)

Let me illustrate with yet another example. Little Johnny loves his father and is thrilled to have an opportunity to spend time with him. He also enjoys circuses. One day his father offers to take him to the circus. Johnny immediately agrees. The only thing he is thinking about at that moment is how much he’s going to enjoy the circus. But in fact he would have happily gone to the art museum if his father had offered to take him, even though he’s bored to tears by art museums. Is it reasonable to say that the fact that he enjoys circuses has deprived Johnny of the opportunity to agree to go with his father out of love? I hardly think so. He is going out of love of his father. He’s also going because he enjoys circuses. So what? What kind of father would say his son under these circumstances, “Sorry, we aren’t going after all. Your motives aren’t pure enough. You can only go to the circus if your only motive is your love for me.” I submit that such a father would be not only incredibly cruel but insane. Why should he mind the fact that his beloved son is going to enjoy both being with him and the fun of watching a circus? (It would be even more insane to say, as you apparently think God would say, “It’s not good enough that you want to go because you love being with me as a result of your love for me; I insist that your only motive be your love for me itself, pure and simple.”)

And yet, this really does seem to be your bottom line. Thus:

Moreover, I repeatedly used phrases like “purely out of love,” “based solely on love for Him,” and “solely out of love” to describe what I understand to be your idea of what God requires in terms of motives for committing to Him, and you had no quibble with any of them.

But most important, your explanation of God’s hiddenness collapses unless He requires the motive for this commitment to be pure love uncontaminated with “baser” motives. Otherwise the mere presence of baser motives (created by a knowledge of Heaven and Hell) wouldn’t be a problem.

But this requirement is an impossible one for human beings to meet. If we believe that Choice A even might result in infinite bliss while Choice B might result in eternal torment, this must inevitably act as an enormously strong motivation for choosing A rather than B. This, after all, is the point of Pascal’s Wager. If God finds the mere presence of such motives unacceptable, we are all doomed to Hell.

Now for some quick comments on the remainder of your post.

In response to my argument that, given a full understanding of the nature of Heaven and Hell, the motives for choosing Heaven over Hell would be far more virtuous and worthy than might seem to be the case at first sight, you said:

Well, of course it doesn’t exist. My point is, why doesn’t it? “Maturity” is just a fancy name for a high degree of knowledge and understanding. If we had enough knowledge and understanding we would thereby have the maturity (at least regarding this supremely important choice) that you rightly find so lacking in the condition in which God has unaccountably left us.

Again:

They would if God gave them the requisite knowledge and understanding.

As to my point about loving God’s qualities being indistinguishable from loving God, you said:

And I say there’s no difference. If you love virtue, you cannot help but love perfect, infinite Virtue supremely. The same is true for God’s other qualities.

Finally we come to my argument about God’s true motives and purposes:

You seem to have missed the point here completely. What I was arguing is that, contrary to the Christian doctrine that God desires our good above all else, He must not desire our love and servitude because it’s “good for us” to love and serve Him, but for some other reason. If He wanted us to love and serve Him for our own good, He would have no objection to our wanting to love and serve Him for our own good. If this motive is good enough for God, surely it’s good enough for us.

Perhaps this will make the point more clearly. Consider that in Heaven we will become more and more “like God”. Among other things, we will come to desire just those things that are really desirable, for just the reasons that God does. This means that eventually I will come to desire (among other things) to serve God for the sake of my own ultimate good. But this motive, which I will certainly have after I have become far more godly than I am now, is (according to you) an unacceptable motive for me to have now. This doesn’t make sense.

[ April 25, 2002: Message edited by: bd-from-kg ]</p>

free12thinker

I'll answer this one, LuvLuv, with a resounding "YES". If God is real, I guess I am arguing myself out of existence. If God is real and, like Hitler, chooses to go about things, torturing people who don't agree with him, "be it through Hell or concentration camps") than yes, I would rather not exist, than live a life under his guidelines, which, by the way, are pretty bad guidelines.

I like to think of it this way: If there is a God, and we either do it his way or the highway, than I do it the highway. Why, you ask? Because living life under the direction of someone else is not living. It's not freedom. And to quote Braveheart
"They (God) can take our lives, but they'll never take our Freedom, Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!"

Get it?

[ April 26, 2002: Message edited by: free12thinker ]</p>

free12thinker

Luvlyv quote:
It is the choice to believe or disbelieve that is the essential choice. To choose to believe God's existence, and more importantly his character, is the only moral freedom humans have. All others are derivative of that first decision.
--------------------------------------------------
If all others are derivative of this first decision, does that mean that if we decide to disbelieve, that we are immoral? Or does it mean that if we possess other moral freedoms (value life, respect others), than we really do believe in God, but we just don't know it. Those are ignorant statements, not to mention unfounded ones.

Oh wait...they are founded. Founded on faith. Faith which is blind trust. Trust, which requires lending certain credibility. Credibility which comes from.....?

Can you fill in the blank? Probably not, but I'll give you the chance.

Cause you know, you have faith in God's existence, meaning you have blind trust. But where did the trust come from? Where did the credibility come from? Someone told you and you chose to follow? Was that it?

[ April 26, 2002: Message edited by: free12thinker ]</p>

rainbow walking

Hi luvluv,
You said something on page one of this discussion that got me to thinking. You said:

The fact of the matter is, this is almost precisely the view that is propogated by most church leaders and pastors. That God is watching you. Of course the effect it has on the flock is contingent on the depth of each believers faith.

The pastor will usually thunder out a Sunday morning theme that covers some of the general social behaviors that God supposedly frowns upon. If the congregation is of any size he will "step on a few toes" as it is generally referred to. But the silent message to those whose toes have been trampled upon is that God knows what they are doing and is chastising or commending them for it thru the preacher. Often these preachers will use inside information from behind the pulpit to convey the same effect.

The point is, you are claiming that a visible evidence of God's literal existence would undermine freewill when, in fact, the very example you use is precisely the effect the church uses to subversively secure obedience and awe from its flock.

Once you convince a person that there is a god then the rest is like so many falling dominoes. Eventually the psychological coercion begins and then the preacher has you right where he wants you. Why do you think omni-presence was included among God's attributes?

luvluv

bd, firstly I'll just say that you are selecting bits and pieces from my argument, many of which were responses to different questions from you or others, and then presenting them in the order you would like as if I had presented them in that fashion. The result is full of errors and assumptions that are clearly eliminated if one reads the parts of my posts that you decided to edit out.

"The first step is to believe in the existence of God."

No, I said the first step is a WILLINGNESS to believe.

"we have seen that providing clear evidence of His existence would not be coercive in the least, nor would it involve the slightest infringement of our moral freedom."

When did "we" see that? Are we arguing by assertion now?

"And a good thing too, since we are all so utterly depraved and debased by Original Sin that we couldn’t possibly have a worthy motive for taking this first step anyway."

I hope you aren't implying that I believe that, because I don't.

"So choosing to accept God once one believes in His existence would seem to be a simple matter of logic."

Note that it is abundantly evident from the very post you quoted that I said no such thing:

I said:

'It is the ESSENTIAL decision, and THE DECISIONS THAT FLOW FROM IT (obeying God's rules because He exists and is loving or disobeying God's rules because He doesn't exist) ARE SIMPLY FUNCTIONS OF LOGIC.'

The DECISIONS that flow from the orignal decision are functions of logic, not the initial decision itself.

"Once one has faith in God’s existence, love of God would seem to be inevitable. God will communicate His love to us, and we will love Him in return. He “loves us into loving Him. Cool. On to the next step."

Not true, one can believe God exists and still not be willing to have a relationship with Him. Again, you are presenting a statement I made and then proceeding from that to put dogma into my mouth. I never said, nor implied that one someone had faith in His existence that a love for Him would be inevitable, I said it would then be POSSIBLE. It seems as if you are expecting me to defend the extrapolations that you are putting into my mouth.

One can believe God exists, yet still choose to attribute examples of His love to other causes, or to ignore them. As I said before, the principle of trust and free will never stops, even with a committed Christian like myself. Every day I must renew my belief, every day my faith is challenged, and every day I must make a decision to keep trusting or not. God can show us His love, but then we can choose to accept it or ignore it BECAUSE He has not objectively revealed His existence. This allows the choice to be ongoing and is the reason why God's existence is problematic to free will "further down the road" though I obviously disagree with your assertion that it is ONLY problematic "further down the road". Because I cannot prove to myself with absoulte certainty that God exists I have to choose faith everyday, and my relationship with Him not only ORIGINATES in free choice, it PROCEEDS in free choice for the duration of my lifetime. I can choose to lose faith at any time, and am often tempted with that choice, life being what it is. But the fact that I must use my faith to remain in relationship with Him and therefore determined to be like Him helps me develop character. If whenever I were tempted to doubt or slack off I was confronted with God's existence, I would shape up my behavior only because I knew I was being watched. As it stands, I develop my character, basically of my own volition.

"OK. By “accepting” God you mean making a commitment with Him, but apparently we are not deciding to serve Him."

Yes you are commiting to a relationship with Him, and that includes service. What we were arguing at that point was motives to serve Him after the fact versus motives to make the original commitment to Him. I said that we should leave the later motives out of it because that does not involve the reasons for God's "hiddeness" You have now, again, extrapolated this far from my origninal argument to insinuate that I am saying that we are not commiting to serve Him. I obviously never said that. This can go a lot smoother if you will stop putting words in my mouth.

"However, it’s most unlikely that anything less than a massive amount of love will be sufficient in practice, because this commitment is certain to involve suffering, and quite possibly an enormous amount of suffering. In fact, this commitment involves a willingness to undergo any amount of suffering that God requires of you"

None of which will be required of you on the day you accept Christ.

"As I said in my last post, this seems to be a far cry from the orthodox Christian doctrine that all that is needed for salvation is that one accept Jesus as one’s Savior. "

All that is needed for SALVATION is to accept Jesus as one's Savior, but you are not talking about salvation when you talk about these great deeds of self-sacrifice.

You will be prepared for the greater acts of sacrifice over the period of decades (generally speaking). Again, you are speaking as if there were no duration to a relationship with God. One's faith in and love for God DEVELOP OVER TIME to the point where one is able to make great sacrifices. This is one reason why I asked to omit the things that happen later in the Christian life from the argument: the great things that God will one day have us do are not required of the new convert, and thereby have no basis in this argument.

"that one has to commit to being willing to endure an enormous amount of suffering, solely out of love of God, in order to be saved."

And I'm not arguing it either. When I said that being Christian means being willing to endure suffering, I thought it was understood that that willingness was to occur down the road. I never presneted a willingness to suffer to be key to salvation, you are again apparently arguing with your own false characterizations of my argument. I'm starting to feel extraneous.

"We have already seen that knowledge does no entail coercion or an infringement of free will."

No, we haven't. Maybe it would help if you cut and pasted some JUSTIFICATION for these assertions. We have agreed that IN GENERAL knowledge doesn't infringe on free will, but as I have REPEATEDLY SAID some SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE , i.e. 'God is real, Heaven and Hell are real' would be an infringment on free will. Whatever coercive power knowledge in the abstract may or may not have has no bearing on OUR SPECIFIC ARGUMENT on the SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE of the existence of God, heaven, and hell. Maybe it would help if you could provide some arguments about why this SPECIFIC KNOWLEDGE would be coercive.

"It would seem to be unavoidable that the knowledge of God would cause me to love Him, and that this love would be a more than sufficient motive to make the commitment to Him that He desires, since “the more one knows God, the more one loves Him, and the more obedient one is.” "

No, I believe it is a choice all the way through. I'm sorry if I implied that, and I can see how it can be confusing. Obviously, if God could thus automatically motivate you by, essentially, seducing you by demonstrating His love to you THAT would be coercive. I think you have to choose to love God even when He is showing love to you. And, in actuality, the Christian life, as I have said, is full of suffering which makes it often necessary to "swim against the current" to love God. I don't believe that if God expresses His love to someone, that person AUTOMATICALLY loves God back. I believe that if a person opens oneself up to recieve God's love, and if he desires to love God more, He will grow in love for God. But God will not even demonstrate His love to people who are unwilling to receive it, and again this applies not once and for all but daily. Even a committed Christian can choose to deny any and every single expression of God's love they receive everyday. If they run into misfortune, they can choose to believe that God is using it to prepare him to be like Him, or he can choose to be upset with God, or He can choose to believe that God doesn't exist. If He continues to choose the first option, He will grow to love God more. If he chooses the other two, He obviously will languish a bit in His relationship with God. So faith offers the opportunity to love God more, but it is still a choice over time. It is not automatic unless one continues to choose to believe. Again, free-will is ongoing.

"The only thing he is thinking about at that moment is how much he’s going to enjoy the circus."

Again, the analogy doesn't fit. Say Johnny was estranged from his Father. He did like his father very much, but had not yet decided to have a relationship with him or to continue to live in his present situation... say in a foster home. Then the father mentions that if Johnny came with Him, Johnny could LIVE at the circus forever. On hearing this, Johnny decided to go and live with His father. We are not talking about going to a circus or not, we are talking about REASONS TO COMMIT TO A RELATIONSHIP WITH SOMEONE. Your analogy fails to address that aspect. Most of us, in our involunatry relationships (spouse, friend) do not accept any motive. I don't want a wife who marries me for any reason other than the fact that she loves me, and would love me regardless of any physical rewards I had to give her. Again, I am betting you would be the same. Heaven is a physical reward, it is in fact the greatest ransom in the history of existence. How can a knowledge of this not be coercive. And again, you are assuming that a love for God is AUTOMATIC. I may have given this impression in that one passage, but I believe I stated in another passage that even though God loves you, you would still not enjoy being in His presence if you did not want to serve Him. Your analogy almost works when Johnny loves his father, but what if he doesn't love his father BUT he loves circuses? It seems to me that MUCH of mankind would NOT love God or want to commit to Him, but WOULD want to enjoy Heaven. Your analogy would not apply to the great majority of mankind, which should make it obvious as to why God cannot go with such a plan.

"But most important, your explanation of God’s hiddenness collapses unless He requires the motive for this commitment to be pure love uncontaminated with “baser” motives. "

I don't agree with that. The way that God has chosen to do it has been to provide us with all the necessary information and yet not present it in such a fashion that it is coercive. Even if you can argue that the doctrine of Heaven and Hell is coercive (I have argued that it is not, since it is based on faith), it is not NEARLY as coercive as a REVEALED GOD, A REVEALED HEAVEN, AND A REVEALED HELL. I think if you can admit, as I think you are, that a DOCTRINE of heaven and hell can be somewhat coercive (again, I don't bellieve they are) then you ought to be able to see how CONCLUSIVE PROOF of them would be coercive, no? Far from making my argument "collapse", I think that notion goes a long way towards proving it.

"Well, of course it doesn’t exist. My point is, why doesn’t it? “Maturity” is just a fancy name for a high degree of knowledge and understanding. If we had enough knowledge and understanding we would thereby have the maturity (at least regarding this supremely important choice) that you rightly find so lacking in the condition in which God has unaccountably left us."

Knowledge and understanding do not proceed unimpeded to maturity, as we both know. Again, I realize that I implied that a knowledge of God would lead to an automatic love of God, and in that regards I mispoke. The love for God still requires willingess on our part.

You quoted me saying:

'The essential part of these analogies that you are missing is that most people would not get that God was the best part of heaven.'

To which you said:

"They would if God gave them the requisite knowledge and understanding."

How would He do that without interfering with their free will? Again, He could TELL them that He was more valuable than Heaven, but He could not FORCE that them to accept that if they chose to value the riches and physical advantages of Heaven over Him.

"And I say there’s no difference. If you love virtue, you cannot help but love perfect, infinite Virtue supremely."

Well, that's a judgement call on your part. I disagree. The Pharisees loved virtue but did not seem to love infinte Virtue supremely. The worship of the law is idolatry and can exist totally independant of a love for God, as many of Jesus' parables about the Pharisees attest.

"You seem to have missed the point here completely. What I was arguing is that, contrary to the Christian doctrine that God desires our good above all else, He must not desire our love and servitude because it’s “good for us” to love and serve Him, but for some other reason. If He wanted us to love and serve Him for our own good, He would have no objection to our wanting to love and serve Him for our own good."

What you aren't getting is that this JUST ISN'T POSSIBLE unless you are really willing out of love. What you are essentially saying is that if God loved us He would do what was good for us even if we didn't want it (because it is very possible we would not). I disagree, God's love won't allow Him to make us out to be slaves. It is for our own good, but He will not force our own good down our throats if we don't want it. If He was willing to do that, He would have created us perfect in the first place.

Megatron

Because it's by-and-large the most efficient marketing technique in history.

Nothing sells quite like the illusion of security and immortality...

...well, maybe lightbulbs and oil.

MortalWombat

That, and Hell. I mean, it's the perfect ploy: "Do as we say, or you will be tortured for all eternity. And by the way, no one has come back from the dead to refute our claims."

bd-from-kg

luvluv:

1. On misleading quotes

You say:

First off, the only reasonable objection to “selecting bits and pieces” is that they are taken out of context. Can you offer some examples of quotes whose meaning I distorted by taking them out of context?

It was not my intention to take anything out of context or distort your argument in any way. My purpose was to organize your argument into a coherent whole so as to see how it all fits together. Since this thread is about why God is “hiding” I concentrated on the various aspects of the “salvation process” as they relate to this point. Not all of them do. For example, the distinction between being “willing” to have faith in God and having faith in God doesn’t matter, because if God revealed Himself we would know that He existed. Other supposed misrepresentations were good-faith interpretations of what you said.

2. On coercion and “free will”

As I pointed out some time ago, the term “coerce” invariably implies the use of strength or harsh measures in securing compliance. For reasons I have yet to understand, you insist on using it in some other sense, which accomplishes nothing but to confuse and obfuscate the issues involved. You also appeal to the notion that certain acts would infringe on a person’s “free will” in contexts where it is completely unclear exactly what the objection really is.

For example, you say that if God revealed His existence unequivocally, this would be “coercive”, meaning that we would have no choice but to believe in His existence. But no one talks about “coercion” in this context. If someone takes me to his house and shows me around, and if he then takes me to the county registrar’s office to show me that it’s recorded in his name, and shows me the deed, I have little choice but to believe that he really owns that house. But I have not been “coerced” into believing it: no “strength or harsh measures” were used to “secure compliance”. (Indeed, as this language should make clear, it makes no sense to talk about “coercing” someone into believing something.) As for this being an infringement of “free will”, it’s ridiculous to describe giving someone knowledge an “infringement of free will”. (I am not “free” to believe that I’m not in pain when I’m experiencing it. Is this an “infringement” of my free will?)

And what’s the problem from a moral standpoint? After all, there are many situations in which, if you had more information, you would know that only one course of action makes sense. You can say that providing such information is “coercive” or an “infringement of free will” if you insist, but you surely don’t hold that such “infringements of free will” are morally objectionable in general. So if there is a problem with God’s revealing Himself, it has nothing to do with the fact that we would be “coerced” into believing in Him, or with any supposed infringement of our “freedom” to believe that He doesn’t exist. The problem (if any) must lie elsewhere.

Similarly, you suggest that if we knew that God existed, and if He were to reveal His love for us in a multitude of ways, this would be “coercive” in that we would have little choice but to feel grateful and obligated to Him. But no one calls this “coercion” in any other context: it does not involve the use of “strength or harsh measures” to “secure compliance”. When John’s mother does all kinds of good things to him and shows her love in a multitude of ways, no sane person would say that she is “coercing” him to feel grateful and obligated to her. And this does not constitute an “infringement” of John’s “free will”. John is perfectly free to respond to his mother’s love however he chooses. Moreover, no one would say that there was anything morally objectionable in her actions, or that it would have been better if she had taken care to hide her existence from John. So if there is any problem with God’s letting us know that He is doing good things for us, it has nothing to do with any supposed “coercion”. In fact, it is especially absurd to refer to this as “coercion” or an infringement of “free will” given that it is extremely common for people to fail to return such love with any kind of gratitude or sense of obligation.

You also suggest that such a policy would be coercive because it would “seduce” us into loving God. Now this argument seems to me to be downright perverse. Let’s say that I’m courting Susan. A courtship is basically a process by which two people get to know one another as well as possible (short of complete intimacy) with the object of determining whether they are “right” for each other. Thus my most honorable policy is full disclosure: doing everything possible to help Susan understand my true nature as completely as possible. If she rejects me on that basis, so be it; if she accepts me, it is with “eyes wide open”. This is the very opposite of “seduction”, and no one in his right mind would call it “coercive”. So if there is any objection to God’s inducing us to love Him by displaying His love as fully and openly as possible, it has nothing to do with “coercion” or “seduction”. In fact, it’s very difficult to see how there could be any objection to it at all.

As for saying that it would be an “infringement of free will”, once again it’s difficult to understand this objection. If knowing from direct experience that God is perfectly benevolent, just merciful and loving makes Him irresistibly attractive to someone - if he can’t help but love such a Being - what exactly is the problem? Doesn’t such a person belong in Heaven? But if, on the other hand, he finds such a Being obnoxious and disgusting – if knowing His nature through direct experience makes Him intolerably repulsive – then doesn’t that person belong in Hell? There’s clearly a choice here, and that choice will derive from the depths of the soul of the person who makes it. How much more perfectly free can a choice be?

In short, it really appears that you are attempting to redefine “coercion” and “free will” in ways that eliminate their moral significance, but want to retain their moral overtones just as if they were being used in the standard way. This is nothing more than a rhetorical trick. It’s time to start using these words in the standard way.

3. What’s that again?

A couple of your comments leave me somewhat baffled. First:

I guess my reading comprehension skills are declining. How is this different from what I said?

Second, by way of explaining the relationship between committing to serving God and actually serving God, you said:

Are you saying that the only acceptable reason to commit to serving God is love, but that it’s OK to serve God out of some other motive? The only sense that I can make of this is that, having committed to serving God, we might serve Him out of a sense of obligation: we are obligated to serve Him because we have made a commitment to do so. Yet you have said that a sense of obligation is not an acceptable motive for making this commitment in the first place, even if we are justified (as we surely are) in feeling that we have such an obligation. So why would this be an acceptable motive for keeping the commitment, but not an acceptable motive for making it? Or do you mean something else entirely? In any case, I find it incomprehensible that (your) God would find it acceptable for someone to serve Him even though his love for God is not a sufficient motive, but does so only because he has other motives.

3. On salvation

You seem to be so involved in explaining the mechanics of the “salvation process” as it actually (supposedly) works that you have given little attention to the crucial question of what exactly would “go wrong” if God revealed His existence and nature to us fully and unequivocally. This is what I’ve been trying to explore. So let’s go over what might happen if we were given certain knowledge of God’s existence and character.

First, of course, the steps of being willing to have faith in God, and of actually having faith in God, would be bypassed entirely.

As I indicated earlier, I can see no possible problem here (from God’s point of view)

Second, the step of loving God would come more or less automatically to those who find His qualities lovable, but not to those who find them hateful. Again, no problem so far as I can see. (See the discussion above on this.)

Thus the problem must lie in the third step, of accepting God, entering into a relationship with Him, committing to Him (all pretty much the same thing according to you).

Now those who reject God because they find His nature repugnant will of course not even be candidates for this step, nor would they want to be. ( This is discussed at some length later.) So we need consider only those who find His nature lovable, and who have (surely) come to love Him as a result. And at the end of the road there is the irresistible prospect of living with Him and becoming more like Him. It seems self-evident that the certain knowledge of God’s existence and character cannot be an impediment to making this choice.

But you say that there’s a problem here somewhere. You say that it’s a matter of motive. But as we have seen, the people in question love God, so this will automatically be at least one of their motives for committing to Him. The problem seems to lie in the fact that they might also have other motives. But what I have yet to understand is why God would object to the presence of these other motives.

It has proven very difficult to engage you on the subject of mixed motives. Every time I bring it up directly you either fail to reply or pretend that the issue is why God would not accept unworthy motives as the sole reasons for accepting Him. And every time I try to illustrate the point by giving an example in which someone does something out of love and other “worthy” motives, you insist that it’s not a “good” analogy, and replace it with one in which he or she does it solely for other unworthy motives.

But in the real world, the presence of “mixed motives” is not an unusual or unrepresentative case; in fact it is virtually the only case. It’s very rare to do anything from just one motive; generally there are several. It even frequently happens that some of the motives are quite worthy and others quite unworthy. To pretend otherwise is to ignore human nature.

It’s time to stop evading this issue. Let me put the question directly. Suppose that someone chooses to make a commitment to God, and that he loves God enough that this alone would be a strong enough motive to make the commitment. But suppose that he also has other motives, such as a desire to be with God, a love of virtue, a desire to be virtuous, or a desire to cast off his present sinful self and be “born again” in Christ. And suppose that these motives would also be strong enough in themselves to make him choose to make a commitment to God. Would God find this acceptable, or not?

If your answer is that such mixed motives are unacceptable, and that God’s reaction to someone with such mixed motives would be simple rejection – end of story - we have nothing more to say. I consider this position completely ridiculous and not worth discussing. But if so, I am still baffled as to where the problem lies.

You continue to insist that, if people knew of the existence of Heaven and Hell, they would choose Heaven simply because it is so overwhelmingly preferable to Hell. But besides the fact that God can help us (and surely will help us, if He loves us as much as Christians claim) to achieve a purer state in which such motives are either absent or insignificant, this has at least two problems:

(1) So what? If someone loves God, and this motive would be sufficient in itself for him to commit to God, why should it matter if he has other motives as well?

(2) The bliss of Heaven consists overwhelmingly of the fact that one is with God. What’s more, it seems highly likely that that the other joys of Heaven will only be experienced as joys to those who love God. Thus to someone who has rejected God, Heaven would be even worse than Hell.

You agree with this, but insist that, even with His best efforts, God wouldn’t be able to make people understand this. That seems absurd. God is omnipotent. How can he be helpless to make us understand such an elementary point?

Look. Suppose that six-year-old Susan loves strawberries. She eats them eagerly every chance she gets, and they send her into a state of pure ecstasy in which she forgets everything else. You offer to let her eat nothing but strawberries for the rest of her life. But you warn her that she’ll be sick to her stomach, nauseous, and in severe pain all the time if she accepts, and in fact that she’ll soon come to hate strawberries with a passion. I submit that even a six-year-old is capable of understanding that this is a really bad deal, and will decline your generous offer. How can an adult be unable to understand what an ordinary six-year-old can grasp?

On the other hand, you suggest that many people might choose the “riches and physical (!) advantages of Heaven” over God. But again, it seems impossible that an omnipotent God would be unable to make them understand that His presence would be by far the best part of it. In fact, if they were vouchsafed a really thorough understanding of Heaven, this would be immediately obvious; no explanation would be needed. Alternatively, He could simply tell them that it’s a wonderful place without going into details. Remember, these people would have experienced God’s nature and His love first-hand. It’s hard to imagine that they would prefer features of Heaven that would be only vague abstractions to them over the presence of God, whom they love and with whom they would have had extensive experience.

One final analogy. Suppose a child has never seen a mansion and has only a vague idea of what one would be like. On the other hand, she knows her mother intimately and loves her dearly. She is separated from her mother for a time, and then is offered a chance to be reunited with her in a fabulous mansion. The child will be intrigued by the idea of living in such a mansion, but the opportunity to live with her mother again will be overwhelmingly the stronger motive for accepting the offer. (Indeed, this is very likely to be the case even if she is familiar with the mansion in question and loves the idea of living in it.)

One final possible objection is that some people (even though they love God) might choose to commit to Him because they want to avoid Hell. But how in the world could they not want to avoid Hell? To be in Hell would be to become someone that those who love God would find unimaginably hateful. The very thought of becoming such a person would be, if possible, even worse than the prospect of the torment that would await them. As I pointed out before, this is not an unworthy motive, but a very worthy one. Anyway, since God has created us with an intense desire to avoid torment (especially intense eternal torment!) a desire to avoid this torment will necessarily be present in everyone, saint and sinner alike. If this is disqualifying, we are all disqualified. What kind of cruel God would give us an overwhelming aversion to such a fate and then subject us to it on the grounds that we desperately want to avoid it?

In summary, it seems to me that if God revealed Himself fully, those with a natural disposition to love Him would come to love Him even more, and in more cases, than they do now, that this love would in almost all cases be more than sufficient motive for committing to Him, and that a just God would have no reason to reject those whose love for Him is a sufficient motive for accepting Him regardless of any additional motives that they might acquire (or that would be strengthened) through their knowledge of Heaven and Hell.

St. Robert

God is not hiding. He is seeking.
There is only one true version of God. The rest are counterfeit, man-made gods.

God is a fully spiritual being, who became man to teach us how to love one another perfectly. Instead of hiding, He chose to be killed publicly on a cross for the whole world to see.

God is above the need for sexually, which is part of what makes Him God. When 'He' is used to describe God in the Bible, it is primarily a spiritual, role-based reference.