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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12747 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 19, 2025

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To me mercy and justness simply seem like different virtues

Justice classically defined is to give someone exactly what they deserve.

Mercy classically defined is to give someone more than they deserve.

They are contradictory, and calling God both Just and Merciful is one of the classic "mysteries of faith."

In God they are all the same virtue, because God is one simple thing. The most simple thing in existence. He is composed of no components. He has no composite parts.

then you are "judging" God if your praise of His merciful treatment of mankind constitutes a positive claim that it is present; if you can imagine a world where God was less, or was not, merciful, and in which consequently you would not be moved to compliment Him in this particular way. This seems to hold even if you think no negative judgement would be warranted in the absence of that mercy.

I guess we are judging as in assessing. Like I judge an apple to be an apple when I eat it. I can assess that God is merciful. And by merciful I mean something like, "humans are merciful sometimes, and God is doing something analogous to that when He paved a way for our salvation." But not that God is merciful in the same way a human is merciful. Our version of mercy is a pale comparison. The reality of mercy that has its source in God's nature is beyond our comprehension and our own behavior.

The difference is that Orcus, as a pseudo-Devil (though not a fallen angel), would be a scriptural figure and thus one priests had cause to talk about

Ok, Dolphins aren't explicitly in there, but Genesis Chapter 1 does come up and I was actually explicitly thinking of it when I called dolphins good:

And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.

God saw that it was good. Great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems. God saw that it was good. This is one of those places we see that word. I hear homilies all the time on the significance of this. So is there something else that is different between Orcus and Dolphins?

he's good in the sense of being a good person;

Don't get me wrong, He is both good and a person. Just our idea of a good person is limited by our overemphasis on our own species and nature.

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