Life is immensely valuable. Do you regret having been born?
He made me, a former atheist, into a devout Catholic! I remember kicking and criticizing the Catholic Church with all my might as an atheist. I went through some AMAZING religious experiences that forever changed my life! These experiences were all mental and profound. Religious thoughts and ideas became manifested in ways that were uncontrollable! Whereas I was just recently kicking the Catholic Church, I was now being forced to become religious from within!
Nope, I’m glad I was born, although if the alternative was non-existance, that wouldn’t be bad, either.
That’s awesome! But, again, how does that make God good and not just powerful?
Trust me, for God to do that to me proves that He is good. He has yet to let me fall or doubt Him. Amongst the inner thoughts shared with me is that He is good!
Well, that tends to be my problem. I am always looking for proof. I want what I believe to be true. I want God to be both good and powerful. I think that we can see proof for His power, but the goodness is something I always have trouble seeing.
As a scientist, I am also someone who longs for proof. I see evidence for God’s goodness and love in His relationship with us. We humans have gone against God time and time again. We even tortured and killed God the Son, and God still forgives us. The Passion and Cross aren’t a case of Jesus undergoing punishment in our place, it is a sign of just how much God loves us. He was willing to endure all that, all for us. I find that pretty strong evidence for goodness and love. Could you forgive someone as they were torturing you to death, as Jesus did on the cross, “Father, forgive them, they do not know what they are doing”.
because Jesus said it
By praying for the Grace of a lively faith.
Goodness can have many definitions here…so lets try to clarify…in the Thomistic/Aristotlean tradition goodness could be in part defined as that which is desirable and in this sense, God is the ultimate goodness which humanity longs for. The scholastics would equate God’s very existence and being with goodness itself. This was because, being the source of all that exists, the total perfection of all things is in God. By contrast, something is considered evil only when there exists in it a privation - a lacking. Properly understood, evil is thus utterly parasitic to goodness, only properly understood by the void of goodness and in this sense exists as nothing affirmative but only as the remnants of a sort of “negative epmptiness” of that which is good.
If you hadn’t been born you wouldn’t have been able to choose which is better! Thomas Nagel, an atheist, remarked that life is valuable because it is a source of opportunities. And King Lear observed that nothing shall come of nothing!
If God weren’t good why would He bother to create an immensely valuable existence?
Hell is evidence of God’s love! He created us with free will because otherwise we would be incapable of love… and heaven. Corruptio optima pessima!
Have you come across the The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm?
Erich Fromm’s book is one of the exceptions. It was never brought up in any of my classes or in the periodicals that I’ve read. I would consider it more of a pop psychology book. And note that it has a large focus on romantic and erotic love, but does also speak of brotherly love.