# Christians: when you say that God loves humanity, what exactly do you mean? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [August 9, 2011, 6:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109 "2011-08-09T18:27:44Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 8:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/41 "2011-08-09T20:43:29Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I said earlier that a father’s love for his children was a useful model for the relationship I’m contending exists. > > In what way is that insufficient? I’ll answer, though I think you’re talking to Dio. The problem I have with that statement is that I am not willing to concede that a father’s love for his children is necessarily less passionate or more remote than a mother’s. I know several men whom I judge to be excellent fathers who are the very opposite of detached when it comes to the fate and well-being. I’ll agree that a biological mother’s love for her children tends to be more _primal_ than a bio-father’s, because there is a literal physical connection between mother and child that exists in no other human relationship. In my experience the average father has to learn to love his children in a way the average mother does not. But the Christian God’s love for His children is thought to be more innate and basic than even a mother’s love. Contrariwise, God is capable of a superior level of detachment because He can see the big picture and the future in a way mortals cannot. I was a pretty crappy father. But I could never willingly have stood by as my son was persecuted in the manner of the early Christians. I’d have had to intervene, even if it meant my death. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Christians believe that God is able to countenance such things because He can see that the suffering of martyrs serves a greater purpose. That’s why I find the father analogy inapt. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 8:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/42 "2011-08-09T20:57:18Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > I was a pretty crappy father. But I could never willingly have stood by as my son was persecuted in the manner of the early Christians. I’d have had to intervene, even if it meant my death. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Christians believe that God is able to countenance such things because He can see that the suffering of martyrs serves a greater purpose. > > That’s why I find the father analogy inapt. So you would rush in and prevent the man from slicing open your son’s skin with a sharp implement? Even if the man was a surgeon and the slicing was the necessary first step in a life-saving operation? ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/43 "2011-08-09T21:03:06Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I said earlier that a father’s love for his children was a useful model for the relationship I’m contending exists. > > In what way is that insufficient? Abandoning my point about anthropomorphizing a physical process to God, it’s also insufficient because a loving father doesn’t hide from his children and refuse to ever speak to them, give them anything, support them in anyway or ever even reveal his own existence. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/44 "2011-08-09T21:04:13Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > The dicussion can’t be engaged in intelligently unless the therms are clearly defined. They were clearly defined, you’re trying to hijack a legitimate and interesting religious question with your anti-religious and materialistic stuff. My interpretation of the question was to explain what it means for God to love us, which means giving a definition of love and how God fulfills that. Obviously, different people with different beliefs will have different answers. Expecting everyone to have the same beliefs beforehand sort of defeats the point of the question posed by the OP. > [@](#): > > Cite? Name a definition of “love” that isn’t chemical. I did, you even responded to it. But to make it more clear, if we presuppose the existence of God, then along with that comes the properties that the particular believer believes he has. I, for instance, believe in freewill and consider it a necessary part. I do agree that there are chemical aspects to it but, as I’m not a materialist, I don’t believe that the chemical aspects are the sum total of what it means. And your calling for a cite is completely ridiculous and I won’t bother to honor it. To ask for a cite that religious people believe something has an explanation beyond the purely physical aspects that are examined by science is just… silly. > [@](#): > > But attributing “love” to God is assigning a biological characteristic to a non-biological entity. That doesn’t make sense. it doesn’t get you out of the box to say “it’s God,” or “it’s religious.” That doesn’t alter the fact that it’s contradictory to say a non-biological figure can have a biological function. If I accepted that love was an entirely biological process, then I would agree with you, but I don’t agree with your definition, so your argument here is nonsense. > [@](#): > > The revant one is _agape_, which basically means “compassion.” Yes, and that’s precisely why I think that describing it as a chemical process is missing the point. God refers to his love as agape and he commands us to love others in this way. It was not philia or eros. I think the love that you describe as a chemical process would be best described by one of those, depending on the circumstances, but the love that God has for us and he commands us to have for others is not. It seems to me that you’re saying that all forms of love we have in English are necessarily the same thing because they use the same word, despite the fact that they have different words in the original Greek. Do you not think that it’s reasonable that God can recognize that we have a type of love for our family and friends and a different type of love for him and for how he wants us to act toward others, and that one is chemically driven and the other is spiritually driven? > [@](#): > > This would be an inaccurate definition. Love is the feeling, not the action. The action can be _motivated_ by the feeling, but the action without the feeling is not love. Again, I thoroughly disagree with this definition. I think it works for the other types of love, but it doesn’t work for agape. You’re arguing a strawman here by forcing a definition on us and then telling us it’s inconsistent. > [@](#): > > When did he gteach us anything or give us lessons? You really have to ask this question of a Christian? > [@](#): > > What does this mean, exactly? Nobody can walk away from God’s goal? All actions are what God wants. it’s not possible to sin? In order to explain what I mean here I’d have to go into a pretty convoluted explanation that involves going through my defininitions of free will, omniscience, omnipotents, and a whole host of other things. I wouldn’t mind doing it, but it’s an unnecessary hijack. So instead, I’ll just give sort of an example. God letting us do our thing is like a father letting his son go ride his bike, but telling him not to cross the big highway and to wear a helmet. The kid still very may likely fall off and skin his knee, or make a wrong turn and get lost for a little while, but he’ll come out of it with some experiences and lessons. It’s much the same way for us. We have free will within the constraints of all the choices previously made. We’re going to make mistakes, but we’ll also learn from them. I don’t think he’s set up the space such that we’ll somehow accidentally annihilate ourselves. We may even get arbitrarily close, but to allow that, as with any ongoing work of art, would be like randomly cutting a song or a film short. > [@](#): > > The Bible says we all have the same knowledge of right and wrong as God. is the bible wrong? I can’t say I agree with that interpretation. What verses led you to this conclusion? > [@](#): > > I don’t really see how this kind of talks really gets at the meaning of God’s “love,” anyway. How is it different from God’s non-existence? If we need “answers,” then why hasn’t God ever bothered to give them to us? It is entirely different and he has. Your expectation of God to give us his message in a bright neon sign is akin to a child telling their parents to prove they love them by buying them a pony or a go-cart or something else like that. It really does work just like a parent-child relationship, whereas in our youth God simply gave us rules, later on he explained the reasons behind them, and as we are older we do a lot of our learning hands on. Either way, it’s presupposed for this thread that God exists, so arguing against God’s existence is hijacking the thread. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/45 "2011-08-09T21:12:07Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > So you would rush in and prevent the man from slicing open your son’s skin with a sharp implement? > > Even if the man was a surgeon and the slicing was the necessary first step in a life-saving operation? What is the necessity for a [9 year old girl to be kidnapped, raped and buried alive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lunsford)? In point of fact, the word “necessary” cannot logically have any application to God in the first place. It is impossible for anything to be necessary for an omnimax being. So the argument that God allows anything out of “necessity” is a logical contradiction. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/46 "2011-08-09T21:13:50Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > So you would rush in and prevent the man from slicing open your son’s skin with a sharp implement? > > Even if the man was a surgeon and the slicing was the necessary first step in a life-saving operation? That’s not an apt analogy, because if my son was being operated on (which he was, several times), I would (did) know that it was for his benefit and that any pain he suffered was to further his individual interests. A better example would be if the surgeon were removing my son’s heart, lungs, & liver to save the lives of four other persons. The Christian God is capable of making such a call, which I cannot. (Please don’t misinterpret the above as my calling Yahweh evil, by the way. I’m fully capable of doing so but that’s not what I mean right now. I mean that Yahweh, as I understand the idea, operates on such a great scale that he can perceive the forest where men see only trees.) ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/47 "2011-08-09T21:16:59Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > I was a pretty crappy father. But I could never willingly have stood by as my son was persecuted in the manner of the early Christians. I’d have had to intervene, even if it meant my death. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Christians believe that God is able to countenance such things because He can see that the suffering of martyrs serves a greater purpose. > > That’s why I find the father analogy inapt. I’ll put a different spin on this than **Bricker**. Instead of comparing God’s relationship with each individual to the father-son relationship, compare God’s relationship to humanity to that instead. That is, our relationship with God inherently involves our relationships with everyone else. So, yes, some individuals suffer; in fact, a great many individuals suffer, but relative to the whole of humanity, those sufferings are our injuries and scars that teach us those lessons. This is exactly why he wants us to love eachother in the same way he loves us. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/48 "2011-08-09T21:22:30Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > That’s not an apt analogy, because if my son was being operated on (which he was, several times), I would (did) know that it was for his benefit and that any pain he suffered was to further his individual interests. A better example would be if the surgeon were removing my son’s heart, lungs, & liver to save the lives of four other persons. The Christian God is capable of making such a call, which I cannot. > > (Please don’t misinterpret the above as my calling Yahweh evil, by the way. I’m fully capable of doing so but that’s not what I mean right now. I mean that Yahweh, as I understand the idea, operates on such a great scale that he can perceive the forest where men see only trees.) For a Christian, I presume the answer would involve the notion that pain & suffering in the material world are temporary, transient things. God, being God, would have available an infinite and glorious existence for his creations in the afterlife (and of course the absolute certainty that such a thing exists). To such a being, merely bodily suffering would be a minor matter compared with an eternity of bliss or suffering; the analogy for martyrdom would be the mental anguish a high school kid experiences in studying for and writing exams - a good parent would not rush in to spare the child this pain, and thus preclude the child ever experiencing the accomplishment of passing. This said - I don’t actually believe in any god; I’m merely pointing out that, if religious promises are true, Christianity does not preclude a “loving” God because bad things happen to good people. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/49 "2011-08-09T21:27:16Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > What is the necessity for a [9 year old girl to be kidnapped, raped and buried alive](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jessica_Lunsford)? > > In point of fact, the word “necessary” cannot logically have any application to God in the first place. It is impossible for anything to be necessary for an omnimax being. So the argument that God allows anything out of “necessity” is a logical contradiction. Omnimax means “simultaneously omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent.” I am not convinced that the first two terms mean what you seem to claim they do (respectively, capable of doing anything that can be described in words, and consciously aware of all aspects of past, present, and future at all moments." _Omnipotent_ can mean sovereign–having authority and power over everything in a given framework. But to say that God is omnipotent is not to say that He can do “anything,” because some things are self-contradictory. If God exists, not even he can make a square circle, because the conditions of squareness and circularity are inconsistent. If an omnipotent God exists He is nonetheless constrained by certain rules of logic. He is omnipotent in the sense that none are more powerful than He, that He can find a way to accomplish His objectives–_not_ that he can make an unworkable plan work. I’m not going to read your link; stories like that distress me. But one could argue that God judges it to be best that humans have free will, even though an unavoidable consequence of that is that humans will commit atrocities. Thus God’s refraining from intervening to prevent such atrocities does not mean He is not omnipotent–just that He is omnipotent in a more coherent fashion than the word is typically used. Some might argue that God’s failure to intervene in such a fashion is a failure of benevolence. In fact I’d come close to doing just that, though more precisely I’d say that it indicates that God’s love is quite difference from human love. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/50 "2011-08-09T21:31:14Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > They were clearly defined When? Show me the post. > [@](#): > > you’re trying to hijack a legitimate and interesting religious question with your anti-religious and materialistic stuff. You’re imagining things. I only asked for the definition of a term. > [@](#): > > I did, you even responded to it. What post was that? > [@](#): > > If I accepted that love was an entirely biological process, then I would agree with you, but I don’t agree with your definition, so your argument here is nonsense. Cite that it has another definition? > [@](#): > > Yes, and that’s precisely why I think that describing it as a chemical process is missing the point. God refers to his love as agape and he commands us to love others in this way. It was not philia or eros. I think the love that you describe as a chemical process would be best described by one of those, depending on the circumstances, but the love that God has for us and he commands us to have for others is not. No, it’s ALL chemical process, including the empathic response which os _agape_. All brain function is chemical. > [@](#): > > It seems to me that you’re saying that all forms of love we have in English are necessarily the same thing because they use the same word, despite the fact that they have different words in the original Greek. The language is irrelevant. It’s still all brain function and all brain function is chemical. There is no consciousness or sentience or feeling of any kind outside of biological processes. > [@](#): > > Do you not think that it’s reasonable that God can recognize that we have a type of love for our family and friends and a different type of love for him and for how he wants us to act toward others, and that one is chemically driven and the other is spiritually driven? The word “spiritual” has no useful definition, and point is not that all those emotions are exactly the same, but that they’re all equally [i[biological\*. > [@](#): > > You really have to ask this question of a Christian? If a christian is going to assert that God “gave” me something or “taught” me something, it’s perfectly fair for me to ask when that happened. > [@](#): > > In order to explain what I mean here I’d have to go into a pretty convoluted explanation that involves going through my defininitions of free will, omniscience, omnipotents, and a whole host of other things. I wouldn’t mind doing it, but it’s an unnecessary hijack. So instead, I’ll just give sort of an example. God letting us do our thing is like a father letting his son go ride his bike, but telling him not to cross the big highway and to wear a helmet. The kid still very may likely fall off and skin his knee, or make a wrong turn and get lost for a little while, but he’ll come out of it with some experiences and lessons. > > It’s much the same way for us. We have free will within the constraints of all the choices previously made. We’re going to make mistakes, but we’ll also learn from them. I don’t think he’s set up the space such that we’ll somehow accidentally annihilate ourselves. We may even get arbitrarily close, but to allow that, as with any ongoing work of art, would be like randomly cutting a song or a film short. So the Holocaust was within God’s allotted “space?” What will God NOT allow? what was the valuable lesson being taught to the 9 year old girl who was kidnapped from her home, repeatedly raped, then stuffed in two garbage bags and buried alive? No worse for the wear, you say? What would constitute worse for the wear? > [@](#): > > I can’t say I agree with that interpretation. What verses led you to this conclusion? Genesis 3:22; And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: > [@](#): > > It is entirely different and he has. Your expectation of God to give us his message in a bright neon sign is akin to a child telling their parents to prove they love them by buying them a pony or a go-cart or something else like that. It really does work just like a parent-child relationship, whereas in our youth God simply gave us rules, later on he explained the reasons behind them, and as we are older we do a lot of our learning hands on. When did God give us rules? Cite? Where are these rules? ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/51 "2011-08-09T21:33:51Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > So you would rush in and prevent the man from slicing open your son’s skin with a sharp implement? > > Even if the man was a surgeon and the slicing was the necessary first step in a life-saving operation? If I were omnipotent, you bet your sweet bippy I would. ---
**Author:** ![Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/e99b99/32.png) [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Diogenes_the_Cynic)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/52 "2011-08-09T21:39:26Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > I’m not going to read your link; stories like that distress me. But one could argue that God judges it to be best that humans have free will, even though an unavoidable consequence of that is that humans will commit atrocities. Thus God’s refraining from intervening to prevent such atrocities does not mean He is not omnipotent–just that He is omnipotent in a more coherent fashion than the word is typically used. The free will argument is bullshit for several reasons, for one, free will is a logical impossibility in the first place, for another, the assertion that free will is important lacks support, and most significantly, God has the option of only creating people he knows will freely choose good. It also doesn’t address God’s own evil - stuff like childhood leukemia and tsunamis. ---
**Author:** ![Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/ecccb3/32.png) [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Skald_the_Rhymer)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/53 "2011-08-09T21:40:29Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > The free will argument is bullshit for several reasons, for one, free will is a logical impossibility in the first place, for another, the assertion that free will is important lacks support, and most significantly, God has the option of only creating people he knows will freely choose good. > > It also doesn’t address God’s own evil - stuff like childhood leukemia and tsunamis. Seriously, dude, why are you in this thread? ---
**Author:** ![OneMissedPost](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/8e7dd6/32.png) [@OneMissedPost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OneMissedPost)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/54 "2011-08-09T21:42:14Z")
> [@Skald\_the\_Rhymer](#): > > Seriously, dude, why are you in this thread? I was wondering the same thing. ---
**Author:** ![Czarcasm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/czarcasm/32/4050_2.png) [@Czarcasm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Czarcasm)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/55 "2011-08-09T21:45:03Z")
> [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > I’ll put a different spin on this than **Bricker**. Instead of comparing God’s relationship with each individual to the father-son relationship, compare God’s relationship to humanity to that instead. That is, our relationship with God inherently involves our relationships with everyone else. > > So, yes, some individuals suffer; in fact, a great many individuals suffer, but relative to the whole of humanity, those sufferings are our injuries and scars that teach us those lessons. This is exactly why he wants us to love eachother in the same way he loves us. Some of are here to learn his lessons, while some of us are here to be merely tools for his lessons? ---
**Author:** ![Der\_Trihs](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/der_trihs/32/233_2.png) [@Der\_Trihs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Der_Trihs)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 9:58pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/56 "2011-08-09T21:58:53Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > Abandoning my point about anthropomorphizing a physical process to God, it’s also insufficient because a loving father doesn’t hide from his children and refuse to ever speak to them, give them anything, support them in anyway or ever even reveal his own existence. Yes. God fails the “Turing test for love”, his claimed behavior and observed inaction simply don’t fit the label “love”. > [@Blaster\_Master](#): > > I’ll put a different spin on this than **Bricker**. Instead of comparing God’s relationship with each individual to the father-son relationship, compare God’s relationship to humanity to that instead. That is, our relationship with God inherently involves our relationships with everyone else. > > So, yes, some individuals suffer; in fact, a great many individuals suffer, but relative to the whole of humanity, those sufferings are our injuries and scars that teach us those lessons. This is exactly why he wants us to love eachother in the same way he loves us. :dubious: That’s pretty horrifying actually. God wants us, like him, to treat individual people as expendable, to ignore their suffering “for the greater good”? This is _desirable_? And we’re supposed to think that what is important is humanity _as a mass_ - which doesn’t actually think or feel anything. ---
**Author:** ![Blaster\_Master](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/cab0a1/32.png) [@Blaster\_Master](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blaster_Master)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 10:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/57 "2011-08-09T22:31:10Z")
> [@Diogenes\_the\_Cynic](#): > > When? Show me the post. They were clearly defined in the OP. > [@](#): > > You’re imagining things. I only asked for the definition of a term. No, you gave your own definition and assert that no other definition works. That’s not asking for a defintion at all. > [@](#): > > What post was that? Umm… in the very post you quoted. I gave my definition. > [@](#): > > Cite that it has another definition? Seriously, what kind of a ridiculous question is this to ask me to cite my beliefs in a thread asking about people’s beliefs. Next thing I know, you’ll ask me for a cite proving I believe in God. > [@](#): > > No, it’s ALL chemical process, including the empathic response which os _agape_. All brain function is chemical. You can assert that all you want, but it doesn’t make it true nor will it change my beliefs. Again, and for the last time, I am NOT a materialist, so giving me a materialistic explanation and then insisting it is the only one is just ridiculous. If you want to insist that’s the only definition, then I don’t know why you’re bothering to participate in this thread at all since you are unwilling to consider the topic at hand, love, in the context at hand, religion. > [@](#): > > The language is irrelevant. It’s still all brain function and all brain function is chemical. There is no consciousness or sentience or feeling of any kind outside of biological processes. The language is entirely relevant. You’re being intellectually dishonest by treating them as the same thing. Hell, even in English most people recognize that love is such an ambiguous word and they have to clarify it like “love you like a brother/sister”. But I’ll post it to you differently. If God wanted us to love him like we love our family and friends, considering that there was a perfectly good word for that in Greek, wouldn’t he have used that word? Clearly, there is a meaningful difference in the contexts in which they’re used and so to say they’re all exactly the same thing is to completely gloss over that fact. > [@](#): > > The word “spiritual” has no useful definition, and point is not that all those emotions are exactly the same, but that they’re all equally [i[biological\*. Spiritual has a perfectly useful definition. That you’re a materialist and don’t believe in things that are spiritual doesn’t make them unuseful concepts. > [@](#): > > If a christian is going to assert that God “gave” me something or “taught” me something, it’s perfectly fair for me to ask when that happened. And “long division” was “taught” in third grade, and arguing that just because you don’t know it that it wasn’t “taught” doesn’t mean that the lesson wasn’t there, it just means that you didn’t learn it. You can disagree about the quality of the lesson or that it’s ambiguous or whatever, but obviously the other kids learned it some how, so acting as if it was never “taught”, you’re only fooling yourself. And, FTR, I wasn’t asking you why you were asking it because it was unfair, I was asking because it looked like a gotcha question, and it apparently was. > [@](#): > > So the Holocaust was within God’s allotted “space?” What will God NOT allow? what was the valuable lesson being taught to the 9 year old girl who was kidnapped from her home, repeatedly raped, then stuffed in two garbage bags and buried alive? No worse for the wear, you say? What would constitute worse for the wear? Ah, a Godwinization of the thread, how droll. And then again pushing with this 9yo rape thing. You’ve completely misunderstood my point. I’ll be honest, I think you’re deliberately misinterpretting my point, but I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and try again. Simply put, our relationship with God isn’t a 1 to 1 as individual to God, but 1 to 1 as in humanity to God. Humanity is in this sense a single entity. To go “OMG look at this horrible thing that happened to these people” is to completely miss this point. To give an analogy, consider an individual akin to the human body. Cells die and are reborn constantly without notice. We do notice when some die prematurely with, say, an injury. Hell, some of those injuries can be quite serious. But like many injuries we encounter every day, we likely had a lesson to learn or simply ignored a lesson we should have already learned. And so, yes, the holocaust was a horrible thing but we also learned some important lessons from it. Of course it would have been great to have learned those lessons without something so serious, but if we had learned it before, we never would have walked into that. The reason I think you struggle with this concept is because you’re a materialist and you see our individuality as absolute. I don’t see it like that at all, that our perception of individuality is, for lack of a better term, an illusion. I believe we are connected in a way beyond the material world, be it our souls or whatever term you want to give it. Of course I regret the loss of life, particularly in horrific ways, but I also believe that we are more than the sum of our parts and as a whole we add up to something more. > [@](#): > > Genesis 3:22; > > And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: I had a feeling this would be the quote you would offer and your interpretation isn’t remotely fair. It doesn’t say we have the same knowledge of what is good and evil, only that we have knowledge of it. For example, a layman may have knowledge of general relativity, but it doesn’t mean he can solve relativistic equations like a theoretical physicist could. My personal interpretation of that verse is that it marks the point in our evolution that we had achieved the ability to make decisions other than those dictated by instinct and that we were able to judge actions based upon moral decision. However, that we recognize that good and evil exist and can point out examples of what is clearly good and what is clearly evil doesn’t mean we have complete knowledge of that space. That is part of the growth and learning process. We recognize that good and evil exist but there’s still plenty more to learn about exactly how to guide all of our actions. > [@](#): > > When did God give us rules? Cite? Where are these rules? Seriously? If you want to attack Christianity, this isn’t the thread to do it in. Otherwise, you know exactly where to look. ---
**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/58 "2011-08-09T22:43:58Z")
I don’t really want to fight another round of heathens vs. theists. My understanding was that the OP had asked for theists to respond, and wanted a thread in the context of a theistic understanding of God. I’ll leave the remaining particpants to it. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 11:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/59 "2011-08-09T23:07:22Z")
> [@Bricker](#): > > I don’t really want to fight another round of heathens vs. theists. My understanding was that the OP had asked for theists to respond, and wanted a thread in the context of a theistic understanding of God. I’ll leave the remaining particpants to it. Sorry–for my part I was mostly just reading along, but failed my will save vs. replying to your question. I do find the basic idea of the thread to be interesting and find the folks questioning the premise to be really irritating threadshitters. **Skald** , totally not trying to junior-mod here, but is this is GD because you’re interested in a debate of some sort? or is it because you’re effectively asking people to witness? Are questions of theodicy and the problem of evil appropriate within the thread? ---
**Author:** ![PandaBear77](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@PandaBear77](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/PandaBear77)\ **Post date:** [August 9, 2011, 11:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109/60 "2011-08-09T23:11:19Z")
Check your PMs, OP. I’m not answering in the thread, too much threadshitting going on. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/christians-when-you-say-that-god-loves-humanity-what-exactly-do-you-mean/592109.md?page=4)