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awfulthings9
Guest
Does God love everyone equally?
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buffalo
Guest
He loves each one fully.
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awfulthings9
Guest
Fully with regard to God’s capacity to extend love, our individual capacities to receive it, or to the full extent of human potential, applied to each individual?
And does this mean “yes”, he does love us equally?
And does this mean “yes”, he does love us equally?
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awfulthings9
Guest
To answer my own question, I would say no.
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true_believer
Guest
God’s love is unconditional, which means that no matter what you do or fail to do, he loves you the same. If God loved one person more than another, it would mean that there are conditions on God’s love and this is just not the case.
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awfulthings9
Guest
Thank you, true_believer.
A follow up:
Is God’s will the cause of goodness in things?
If not, then what is?
If so, would this mean that if some of us are “better” than others, it is because God wills it so?
If not, then what is the reason?
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awfulthings9
Guest
Or it would mean that, for reasons unknown to us and separate from our personal merit, God chose an unequal distribution of his love.
From Augustine (Tract. xxvi. in Joan.): “Why He draws one, and another He draws not, seek not to judge, if thou dost not wish to err.”
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awfulthings9
Guest
Since there do not appear to be any long-term takers, I’ll mention that I started a thread to explore Aquinas’s proposal that God does not love all equally.
Here’s for futher reading.
Here’s for futher reading.
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NewUlm1976_2000
Guest
Yes he does (could be a she, we will not know until we die).
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awfulthings9
Guest
How do you know this? Doctor of the Church, Thomas Aquinas, considered by many to be one of the greatest philosophers and theologians, would disagree with you (see link in earlier post).
Yet … perhaps you are right, but I think that, to disagree with Aquinas, one might do well to quote a little Scripture, some Church documents, or at least add a bit of reason to your post. Care to develop the thought?
Nope. We can know right in the here and now. God is neither male nor female. He does, however, ask us to think of him in masculine terms. At least this is what divine revelation and the Holy Spirit guided Church tells us.
Again, perhaps you have another source of authority. I won’t ask you to develop the thought, though, as it has nothing to do with the original post and was a bit of an uncalled-for side track.
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teachccd
Guest
God IS love. ( 1John 4:8;16) That is His very essence. That is very different than our ability to love. So, the closer that we move towards God the closer we move towards Love. He cannot, by His very nature, love anyone more or less than anyone else. A pale comparison would be like one asking; can water wet one person more than another? Well no because water IS wet. So when one contacts more water he/she experiences more wet. So the more we experience God, the more we experience Love. The only way that one may not be “loved” by God is if that person refuses to either completely or partially emerse themselves in God.
Hope this helps…teachccd
Hope this helps…teachccd
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awfulthings9
Guest
This is fine, except that Aquinas would argue that God is the cause of goodness in things, and that moving toward him more than another is a sign of greater goodness. And that goodness would not exist unless he willed it. And that he might will it efficaciously (using, of course, efficacious grace rather than merely sufficient grace) in one but not another is a sign of an equal love. If it depended merely upon our choice to dip into the water, so to speak, it would mean that our greater good is based upon our own merit.God IS love. ( 1John 4:8;16) That is His very essence. That is very different than our ability to love. So, the closer that we move towards God the closer we move towards Love. He cannot, by His very nature, love anyone more or less than anyone else. A pale comparison would be like one asking; can water wet one person more than another? Well no because water IS wet. So when one contacts more water he/she experiences more wet. So the more we experience God, the more we experience Love. The only way that one may not be “loved” by God is if that person refuses to either completely or partially emerse themselves in God.
Hope this helps…teachccd
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AndyF
Guest
Also, this conclusion sits proper with the understanding that God reprobates some and selects the elect for salvation PRIOR to creation.
There is enough evidence to prove he loves sinning collectives more than individuals, factors other than physical attributes remaining equal.
AndyF
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awfulthings9
Guest
Andy, it may just be too early in the morning for me, but I’m having trouble following you here. Can you put in simpler terms for me? I *think *you are agreeing with the portion of my post that you quoted, but this sentence is confusing me.
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AndyF
Guest
Simple but a little long, sorry for the length.
1/ The form of man is unit, he is one man accountable for his actions. He can sin in this form alone by desire or actually. He can murder a person. For the most part Dogma provides for these cases in this condition.
2/ He can choose another form to realize his desires. He can join a collective by verbal,written contract or one of desire(allegiance). Perhaps his motive is he would like to see a certain race murdered or wiped out. He joins a collective out of a desire to murder but does not actually take part in a murder of a person he desired dead. Here his desire is satiated all the same. The consensus here is that he should receive a lessor responsibility for the crime. That would work for humans, but God’s standards calls for higher expectation from His subject who are to monitor their lives accordingly.
3/ The collective is formed by all people with different motives, but they all enter into a solemn contract, the contract becomes the central focus has it is a document of desire and intent. By this contract they are bound to receive rewards and suffer consequences of the combined actions of the collective. They know this. (Loss of war, or gain territory or booty, etc.)
From God’s perspective the collective acted out a sin in a unital collective under contract(tribe,allegiance,etc), making them culpable of the crime, and God makes formal recognition of the collective slight. So far so good. We have smiting of the Levites,Sodom,etc.
Now the problem. After smiting, the collective is dispersed into individual components(individuals) for separate judgment, so as to assess each person’s unital contribution to the overall sin. Seems reasonable, but isn’t. Here God loves sinning collectives more than our individual in 1, has he excludes their contract responsibility from the factors of the case. 1 can’t do this out of a technicality that he is one carbon base. He cannot blame his arm for the stabbing it caused, with the expected arm receiving a lessor sentence for it’s part. There is no standard that should recognize the most disadvantaged of the judged.
I’m saying this procedure overlooks the initial contract, and I feel they are all culpable of the same crime. The proportion of the sin should equal the proportion of the sentence.
Let’s say Zorah knowingly moves his family to war hungry,plundering,murdering Zog. In the second year his nation goes to war and returns with plunder and he benefits by receiving slaves and gold and wealth. I say he is has sinned in the receipt of the plunder, not because he accepted it, but because he did not separate himself from the occasion of association of a sinning entity nation. God wants us to remove ourselves from any “entity” that is capable of offending God, not just any man that can offend God.
This is why nations are seen has more favorable in God’s eyes by the exception of it’s judicial handling. If God loved individuals more, he would see fit that every entity receive his just measure in the form it offended, which by default is the case for unital man. In his judgment of man he is saying, the form in which you offended is the norm. So by this standard applied to individuals, we should then expect some nations receiving the same punishment en masse, for the same sin, all factors remaining equal of course, and as far as I know the children at Lourdes saw no nations in hell, only man.
Therefore God love collectives more by default of how he judges it, and will always be this way no matter how better a person you are than a collective.
Phewww.
AndyF
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teachccd
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Fair enough…
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awfulthings9
Guest
Sorry, I meant an unequal love here, and I didn’t catch it until teachccd quoted me. Sorry for any confusion I caused.
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teachccd
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No worries except that I respectfully disagree that God possesses unequal love. All grace is given to all who will accept such a gift and the will of God is that all receive His grace and by that grace move closer to Him Who is Infinite Love. He could never will that we could , without our own consent, move away from Him. We then lose our free will and then our love for God renders futile…
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awfulthings9
Guest
I believe Thomas would agree with you, except he would make the following qualifications:
God does not possess unequal love, but he distributes his love in an unequal manner. After all, he offered a greater love for Christ than for, say, Satan (or me, for that matter).
All grace is given to all who will accept, but Thomas will say that God moves some to acceptance for reasons that have nothing to do with their own merit.
He would agree that God would never will that one moves away from him without their consent. That would be the doctrine of double-predestination, rejected by the Church.
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Usagi
Guest
I can’t tell if you’re entirely serious, but…
Even if the entire population of a given "nation’ were condemned to Hell, one would still see only individual men and women in Hell. A nation is not a separate thing from the people that make it up.
Or am I entirely misunderstanding you?
Usagi
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