Are any of you going to respond to the follow up in post #78?
I never feel obligated to respond to anyone for any reason. Had you been upfront about your intent in your original post, I would have addressed both points in a single post, instead of coming back and dealing with an
Aha! response. I usually don't revisit a thread I've already responded to unless I'm really bored.
4. The problem must be with something else - (briefly explain what you think it is)
There is no problem. My last post was just as applicable to this issue. The egret eats the fish. The egret thinks it a great good. The fish thinks it a horrible catastrophe.
God is good, and God is love. Your logical comparison is good enough, but the way I see it you have been
hoist by your own petard, as the cliche goes (a petard was essentially a directed bomb, and it was known to ignite prematurely and blast the wielder into the air). Inasmuch as there is no good in Hell, and those who go there are deprived of it, the same can be said of love. The fact that people go to Hell is proof that they are not loved at all, because they are deprived of all good. With one goes the other.
You might argue that while they lived they were loved and were endowed with goodness from God, but the fact remains that there are currently people in Hell, and they receive no goodness from God, and they evince no apparent love from him, either, whatever they were, previously. You might argue that they once had his love, and lost it (though I would argue that God's love lasts forever and can never be lost), in the same way that they received his goodness and then lost it. Either way, when people are in Hell, there is no sane reason to expect that they are being loved by God any more than that they are receiving goodness from him. By linking the two, you have taken the nonobjective (his love) and defined it by the objective thing that we do know for sure (his goodness). There is no goodness for those in Hell; therefore there is no love for those in Hell; therefore, because there are actually people in Hell, there are necessarily people whom God does not love. By linking goodness with love, you've destroyed the point that you set out to prove.
God endows this world with a measure of goodness, which is the outpouring of his love. Anyone who breathes the air of this world will benefit from both, but it would be folly for everyone to take it too personally. For one man, it is a fortunate coincidence, before he goes to Hell. For another, it is his personal gift, of which he is to receive abundantly in Heaven. As I said, God endows this world with a measure of goodness, just as in John 3:16, God so loved the world. God does love the world, and Sam is in the world, and Sam benefits abundantly from it, and Sam is going to Hell all the same. On the personal level, it looks like God does not love and is not good to everyone, but on the general level he is both love and goodness to the whole world. Without God's love and goodness this world would be Hell, and it is only by his mercy that such is not the case. Yes, he is good, but he is not good to everyone, and he is love, but he is not love to everyone. All that he does is good, and all that he does is loving, and everything that he leaves to its own nature, doing nothing to it, becomes part of Hell.
