>>108940344Now you're just preaching assertions while dissolving the very standards that could make those assertions meaningful or true.
Across all four points, you repeatedly rely on a “God’s reasons are beyond us” move. That move is fatal to your epistemology.
If:
- God’s justice, goodness, intentions, and reasons are fundamentally opaque,
- and human moral reasoning is unreliable when applied to God,
then you no longer have any rational basis for claiming that God is good, just, loving, salvific, or even preferable to a malevolent or indifferent deity. You’ve dissolved the criteria by which any theological claim could be justified.
You can’t both say: “God is good/just/loving in a meaningful sense,” and “We cannot judge or understand what goodness/justice/love mean when applied to God.” **The only way you could do this if if you were God yourself**, conceding the very point I have repeatedly proved: your God-concept is nothing more than the projection of your own beliefs.
> “God can take children, and it’s just because His reasons are higher”This point contains multiple contradictions.
1) You argue that God is just simply because He is God, the originator of matter and beyond time, and therefore whatever He does is just. That collapses justice into mere sovereignty. Under this view, justice no longer means fairness, proportionality, or moral coherence; it simply means “whatever the stronger being does.”
2) You simultaneously claim that suffering is not necessarily tied to guilt, God may punish children for parents’ sins, God may kill children for the spiritual benefit of others, and this is all “loving” and “just.”
This creates an irreconcilable contradiction:
- Punishment presupposes moral responsibility.
- Medicine presupposes benefit to the patient.
- The child is neither guilty nor the primary beneficiary. The child becomes a means, not an end.
That directly contradicts Christian claims about God’s love, justice, and personal concern for each soul, unless those words are emptied of content.
3) You repeatedly appeal to the claim that “the child goes to heaven anyway, so it’s merciful.” If early death is good because it prevents future sin or despair, then:
- The morally optimal world would be one where everyone dies immediately.
- Evangelism, moral struggle, and earthly life itself become liabilities.
You cannot consistently affirm both:
- “Earthly life is a gift ordered toward salvation,” and
- “Removing that life early is merciful because it avoids moral risk.”
Those positions cancel each other out.
> “Suffering isn’t evil, just transformative”Here you contradict both Scripture and your earlier claims.
You say that suffering results from sin, and suffering itself is not evil. Yet Christianity teaches: Suffering and death are enemies (to be defeated), that Jesus' purpose to abolish suffering, not eternally instrumentalize it.
If suffering is genuinely good:
Why is it something to be healed, redeemed, or overcome?
Why is its final abolition in the eschaton considered a victory?
You’re oscillating between:
- Suffering as a tragic consequence, and
- Suffering as a necessary tool.
You cannot coherently hold both.
> “The Fall was evil, but also good, but not required, but necessary”This is the most internally unstable part of your response.
You claim:
- The Fall is evil,
- The Fall enables healing,
- Without the Fall there would be nothing to heal,
- Yet the Fall was “not required,” only “chronologically necessary.”
That's just incoherent.
If healing presupposes corruption, deification is achieved through healing, and the Fall enables that process, then the Fall is instrumentally necessary, regardless of how many qualifiers you add. Calling it “not required” while making it functionally indispensable is just verbal evasion. You’ve turned the Fall into a fortunate catastrophe, which directly undermines the claim that it is an evil opposed to God’s will.
Overall, you have a bunch of presuppositions that contradict each other:
- God is good, but goodness is unknowable.
- God is just, but justice doesn’t resemble justice.
- Suffering is evil, but also good.
- The Fall is tragic, but beneficial.
- God respects persons, but freely uses some as means.
What you’ve presented is not a coherent theodicy. It’s a patchwork of ad hoc justifications, each introduced to deflect a specific objection, even when they directly contradict one another.
And worse: your repeated appeal to mystery doesn’t defend your position, it destroys the very epistemic ground you stand on. Once moral reasoning is declared unreliable with respect to God, you have no rational basis left to claim that your picture of God is true rather than monstrous, arbitrary, or simply imaginary. You’re not arguing, you’re preaching a sermon that collapses under its own weight.
