In most of these conversations, God is a fish bicycle, isn’t that obvious? There is a possible conversation about what “God chose,” but the theologies that make sense to me essentially zero out the God contribution, beyond creating some expectation that it all makes, in the end, some kind of sense, and that we can search for that. God is, I’ll just say, outside of time and so placing God’s choice in the past, again, makes no sense. What is “God,” anyway?
Since you don’t accept the idea of God, whatever reasoning you create about God is made up, fantasy about fantasy.
Was there any choice at all involved in the creation of your “contradictory preferences”? What are you talking about? What is “choice”?
Okay, the core: you assume that contradictory preferences mean that something is wrong. Otherwise you would not conclude from them that God is crazy or incompetent. I’ll just make up something not-wrong. You have differing preferences because they give you different points of view, and when you can see from more than one point of view, you get depth perception, right? Is depth perception valuable?
My own answer, by the way, about the three possibilities is All of the Above. Those are simply three stories we can tell about responsibility. Each one produces, if held in mind, consequences. Each has a value, but generally the most empowering is the second: you are responsible for your identity, which includes what you describe as your preferences.
Isn’t that obvious? Okay, maybe it’s not. We don’t ordinarily think of ourselves as something that we created, we tend to “blame” it on our parents, society, or circumstances. But our identity was formed out of how we reacted to those factors. Did we chose these reactions or were they just automatic and predetermined? I’ll leave the question there for now.
In most of these conversations, God is a fish bicycle, isn’t that obvious? There is a possible conversation about what “God chose,” but the theologies that make sense to me essentially zero out the God contribution, beyond creating some expectation that it all makes, in the end, some kind of sense, and that we can search for that. God is, I’ll just say, outside of time and so placing God’s choice in the past, again, makes no sense. What is “God,” anyway?
Since you don’t accept the idea of God, whatever reasoning you create about God is made up, fantasy about fantasy.
Was there any choice at all involved in the creation of your “contradictory preferences”? What are you talking about? What is “choice”?
Okay, the core: you assume that contradictory preferences mean that something is wrong. Otherwise you would not conclude from them that God is crazy or incompetent. I’ll just make up something not-wrong. You have differing preferences because they give you different points of view, and when you can see from more than one point of view, you get depth perception, right? Is depth perception valuable?
My own answer, by the way, about the three possibilities is All of the Above. Those are simply three stories we can tell about responsibility. Each one produces, if held in mind, consequences. Each has a value, but generally the most empowering is the second: you are responsible for your identity, which includes what you describe as your preferences.
Isn’t that obvious? Okay, maybe it’s not. We don’t ordinarily think of ourselves as something that we created, we tend to “blame” it on our parents, society, or circumstances. But our identity was formed out of how we reacted to those factors. Did we chose these reactions or were they just automatic and predetermined? I’ll leave the question there for now.