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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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that God is not just good by analogy,

God is not just good by analogy, but what humans like you and I can understand about His goodness is only by analogy. He is not good the same way you are (presumably) good. When we see a saint, we see God's goodness there. A saint is good in the way God is, but God is so far beyond human behavior that we can't work the other way back to him. It's directionally confused.

And pure reason would never imagine a God who is communion, who is Father, Son, and Spirit in an eternal relation of love.

Yes, we learned something additional to God's nature through revelation, that doesn't discount the things we can reason about His nature and is revealed in Scripture as well.

as though "well-behaved" exhausts what it means to describe someone as "good."

No, explicitly God is good but not in the sense we mean when we say a human is good. When we say a human is good, we colloquially mean something along the lines of a human behaves well. That is not what we mean when we describe God as good, that is entirely the point I am trying to make!

Omnibenevolence is a recent term and I object strongly to people outside the religious tradition inventing it and then using their own invention as an attack against the logical consistency of God. I have no objection to calling God benevolent. He is. I object to Omnibenevolent, because it can be defined any which way. It's the "omni" part that I object to.

Goodness, must I sing God's praises with every Motte Post!

God is great, He created us for such good things. He is an ocean of love. He holds nothing back, He takes pity on my who is weak and has entered into the depth of God-forsakennesss for our sake. God went out from God to the furthest reaches of not-God, to the furthest reaches of degradation, torture, despair, guilt, shame, DEATH! So that no matter how far we run away from him, He will always be there first. So we can always find our way back to Him. Forever His praise shall be on my heart!

If I start every theological discussion like that will it make people listen better?

Why would you call God "good" if it's explicitly not the same thing as human good, and you explicitly cannot understand what God's version of it is? When a blind man hugs an elephant's leg, is he right to conclude that an elephant is like a cylinder, except perhaps not the same kind of cylinder that we know?

It is a lot like the blind-men-elephant analogy. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing though. We can see how that goodness interacts with us. Our own human goodness has its source in His goodness as well. Since our goodness has its source in His goodness, we can say that it really is something like a goodness we recognize. It's not some kind of alien shrimp colors. But it is vastly beyond our morality as well, encompassing it and exceeding it.

The average normie Christian hugs the elephant's leg and thinks it's just like us. Look, it has a torso to hug! And that's wrong, but not necessarily dangerous. The average normie 8th grader thinks that the Earth goes around the sun in a circle and that's wrong but not necessarily dangerous or impactful to how they go about their daily life.

But those who have reasoned more about it or have further experience with the Goodness of God start to see other parts of the elephant. The goodness of God inspires such sentiments as:

One evening, not knowing in what words to tell Our Lord how much I loved him, and how much I wished that He was served and honoured everywhere, I thought sorrowfully that from the depths of hell there does not go up to Him one single act of love. Then, from my inmost heart, I cried out that I would gladly be cast into that place of torment and blasphemy so that He might be eternally loved even there! (Story of a Soul, St. Therese of Lisieux.)

or

St. Catherine of Sienna had a vision where God told her, "I am He who is; and you are she who is not."

Or the desire many Catholics have to suffer, their only desired relief being the presence of mind to offer that suffering to God as a sacrifice for the salvation of souls.

The goodness of God starts to look kind of distorted and weird the deeper a soul dwells in it. A human can reach beyond just a leg and we start to see something immense, kinda scary, but still recognizable and connected to the leg. We have every reason to believe it goes on further and further, beyond our comprehension but still Goodness because it's all part of the same animal, connected together.