No, unconditional love is a psychological problem, not the One True Definition of the term. Most of the time, love is conditional; any number of actions or neglect of the relationship involved can destroy it.
As I said, it is because He values it above all else. Consider something that you yourself value greatly, whether for its beauty or how it makes you feel or what significance it has for you, the experience of appreciating it can be greatly enhanced by sharing it with someone else. I’m sure you’ve known how delightful it is to meet someone who loves X as much as you do. And I’m sure you know that having to force X on someone just because you like it can actually diminish your own enjoyment of X. And as I said, sometimes the things we value just aren’t amenable to sharing. If a man values solitude, for example, he’d be hard pressed to share that with someone else. God values goodness, and only naturally seeks to experience it with others who feel the same. There’s no point in forcing it on anyone who values something else.
- The god that does nothing and cares not one whit, yet still deserves "worship.
I agree that you can’t push something on someone who doesn’t want it, but goodness isn’t a universally defined word. How do you know each person defines it the same way. Your definition of god and goodness only fits your definition of those words. Universality is impossible, thus making god’s necessity impossible.
Do you want us to define “god”, but only using your definitions of words like “love”, “goodness” etc.? We might as well throw out most of the preceding posts, then.
Not at all - it still doesn’t answer how you can use modal logic to relate a strictly this-world experience in any meaningful way. What I mean is, you have failed to show how you arrive at “God is necessary” within your system. If that’s your basic premise based on revelation, that’s fine, but then your definition of God is actually “God is the thing I’ve experienced”, at heart, and the rest is not actually helpful.
I guess what I mean is that modal logic has not actually being any use in conveying real-world experiences (e.g. your experience of your God) without those experiences being already shared. Yet the whole point of e.g. the Modal Ontological Proof is arriving at an a priori proof, no? You’re mixing experience and modal logic in ways I don’t think go together.
And I would argue that Einstein’s theories were only proved when they agreed with the real world. Before that, logicians may have been happy, but not everyone was - even now, there are some who argue that it doesn’t always hold.
I really am trying to understand your definition, but I still don’t understand how you know what a being in a parallel existence values. To me, it sounds like YOU value goodness, a personal definition of goodness. How do you know there is a universally comprehensible god, let alone what that god values or how he *defines * what it is he values? You haven’t shown me where you’ve gotten the facts to base your theory on. The assumption of necessity makes no sense to me because I live my life without the want, need, or belief in a god. It may be necessary for you, but that is not a universal necessity. I value my personal definition of goodness, but I make no presumption that I define that word the same as the next person; in fact, I assume that the definition exists only in my mind.
Analogies to the supernatural world do not have any descriptive power beyond the way you believe it to be analogous to ours. We cannot know if even simple identity (x=x) always holds true there. As a way of conveying beliefs, an analogy certainly can be effective. Perhaps that’s all you mean to do.
The first two can never be used to test the last outside a frame of shared belief.
I have no desire to deny you your faith. Nor do I wish to impede the exploration or even the sharing of it. My concern is in the way you express your beliefs to others. There seems to be an imbalance. The faith foundation is quickly passed through. Then, on to a significant degree building through logic and reason. The overall perception can be that of an attempt to present faith as if it were logic and reason.
When presenting it to others, why dress up faith in a veneer of reason and logic at all? As you have seen in this very thread, there are those that become confrontational when they think you are presenting proofs rather than logical extrapolations from your faith. I do not believe you are trying to fool the audience with intentional misdirection. I do think your arguments will be better served if you take care to consider how they are perceived.
Then suddenly, things came into focus.
Can you really hate for no reason at all?
God is unconditional love. He loves His creation no matter what they do, say, or think. He can do this because no punishment ever comes from God. The ill deeds we do are punishment in themselves. We suffer at our own hand, both collectively and individually. Occasionally one of us understands, and stops punishing himself.
I agree with everything so far. What led you to believe otherwise? Remember, I’m the one who opened the thread soliciting definitions. 
Just as you need to know how I define terms to discuss what I believe with me, I need to know how you define terms to discuss what you believe with you.
I don’t understand that.
No, Czar. You need to know my definitions if you’re talking about my God (as three or four here are). Why are you finding something nefarious in my attempt to understand you better? If you define your words, I’ll use them the way you do when we talk about your beliefs.
Sez you. You are using a different dictionary than the rest of the world. We don’t understand what you’re talking about.
All axioms are taken from experience. They have to be. As far as God’s existence being necessary, that’s not a premise. It’s a conclusion based on two premises: (1) it is possible that God exists, and (2) it is necessary that if God exists in actuality, then He exists necessarily.
It is.
Perception is a tricky thing. I don’t even perceive any confrontation. People ask questions. I answer them. What am I to do, for example, when Voyager asks me to please explain the logical connection between this and that? Tell him that you prefer I do not? 
But in practice, what difference does it make? Let’s say someone told you that there was a kid in Somalia that loved everyone unconditionally. What does that do for you? What difference does it make? How would things be differerent if it were not true? It goes back to my example of someone sneaking into your room every night and replacing everything you own with an identical copy. If there is no difference in that person existing and not existing (assuming that they are invisible, do their work instantaneously, etc.) then why devote so much time and energy to them?
That’s the reasoning that resulted in me leaving the church. After I had removed so much from my definition of God, there was just no difference between believing and not believing (except that I got Sunday mornings back).
Well, I guess I don’t understand what sort of god you’re referring to. If it governs you and is necessary in your world, I get that. But it patently isn’t necessary in everyone’s world, so as an entity that is made of love and facilitates, it appears you are agreeing with those who say it exists only in your head; not in the world the rest of us inhabit nor in another world where the image of your god lives. And that’s fine. I’m just not sure why we’re discussing it if it isn’t universally applicable, by your own admission.
As I see it, there’s a leap needed before you can reach that conclusion from just those two premises. You have to fulfill that “if” clause in premise 2 (God exists in actuality).
Of course not, if that is not your desire. But consider, as an example, this…
A casual read comes across as an attempted proof of god’s actual existence. Why? Because people can view logic as an avenue to definitive truth value, but, they may not fully appreciate the limited denotations of the specialized terms of art. Or, they may have forgotten your “supernatural obtains” premise. That the whole proof is contingent (not a term of art) gets lost in the bedazzling logic. A devious huckster might take advantage of those things. It may not be your fault that the logic draws so much attention but it may benefit you to throw in a few more caveats.
Yes, perception is a tricky thing. If I am correct, then to the unalart you seem to be saying something you aren’t. To the somewhat alert, it may appear as hucksterism. Are these impressions you wish to leave no matter how unintended?
Okay. But what is the motivation for the negation of amorality as a characteristic of the supernatural? If you get this from Jesus, fine, but understand I don’t give that source much credence.
It seems to me you’ve swapped absolute goodness for absolute morality, which is an improvement, I grant you. However I think the measurement of value is as questionable as the measurement of morality. While I agree with you here, someone who puts value on chasitity might not. Even if you don’t, most of us agree that there are tradeoffs between the positive and negative values of our actions, and where that tradeoff lies is very personal. What is the metric of value you propose to determine goodness? If it is set by God, you have the same issue as when morality is set by god.
Sorry about the we - that is the royal technical paper writer’s we. I’ve been working on several papers lately.
Whatever goodness is, I absolutely agree it is not obeying the rules. Rules should be guides to goodness. I think your point about the rules being made for perfect beings is interesting. Why do you think this is so? The rules I learned in Hebrew school were handed down after our imperfection was demonstrated. And, how does one define a perfect being? The only way I see is by perfect adherence to the rules.
If Jesus really said be perfect, that’s one more reason I’m glad I’m not Christian. In engineering, and other places, we say that the best is the enemy of the good, in that if you concentrate on perfection you are unlikely to even achieve quality. Perfection is even more of an enemy of the good. Jesus sounds like the parent who, when a kid gets a 95 on a test, complains that he didn’t get 100.
I had a big thread about it, but I don’t think you were cruising GD at the time. This has nothing to do with people, but just God. If God knows all, he knows his actions in the future, and thus cannot change them, and thus he is not omnipotent. If he can change them, then at some point he doesn’t know what he does, since changing is defined as changing from what was seen. The opposing view is that God just changes his vision to match what he eventually decides, but then the problem is flipped, and you get into a loop. The other is that God decides everything at some time in the past, but if God is eternally, and eternally omniscient, then there is no time before he sees what all his decisions will be, and thus no time where he could make these decisions unfettered by perfect knowledge. There is no logical issue with omniscience by itself or omnipotence by itself (I’m not a proponent of the God can’t make a pizza too big to eat school) - only the combination.
so do you disagree with the logically inconsistency of both, or that a supreme being must be both.
I’ll skip the stuff that only makes sense if you require supremacy. But we need to explore possibility a bit more. First, do you think possibility implies existence? If you throw a die, there are six possible worlds depending on the outcome, but after you do so it collapses to one. Do the other five exist because of their possibility?
If so, for any possible world with charactistics A, B, …then there must be another possible world with the characteristic of ~A, assuming ~A is not logically inconsistent. Thus, for any “necessary” entity N, there must exist a world with ~N, unless you believe N is logically necessary in all worlds, which, of course, is what you are trying to demonstrate. I’ve asked this a few times now.
Possible worlds that don’t exist in no way implies that impossible ones do. I don’t know where you got that from.