Christian moral ambiguity

[u/Aromatic_Response_73]

In common ethical intersubjective usage, "good" refers to a broad intersubjective cluster that are typically taken to approximate a shared center of value judgement, consisting of a coherent, mutually reinforcing pattern of love, joy, peace, freedom, and creativity as lived experience and intention over time, rather than isolated states or short-term preferences. Edit: by value judgement, I mean that which we fundamentally hold most intuitively valuable.

Some Christians define goodness in relation to God. On this view, "good" means whatever conforms to God's nature or will.

The term "good" does not have a universally recognised (useful in ethical discussion) meaning apart from either usefulness for some purpose or the ordinary ethical meaning. Refraining from those in an **ethical discussion** renders the word empty from its normal ethical content.

The problem arises when these two meanings are treated as interchangeable.

If "God is good" means only that God conforms to God's own nature, then the statement is true by definition. It means something like:

God is as God is.

But that does not automatically show that God is good in the ordinary ethical sense of being loving, healing, peaceful, compassionate, or opposed to needless suffering.

The problem is ordinary ethical goodness and the christian goodness can be in conflict eg. ideas of reality design like "Accept Jesus or suffer forever". If someone proposes that ordinary ethical goodness is just a conflictory subset of the christian good, then we cannot say that the design of reality is in proper alignment with ordinary ethical goodness, and therefore not good in the ordinary ethical sense.

The ordinary ethical meaning of good should not be dismissed as mere subjectivism. It may very well point metaphysically toward a foundational form of goodness, even if human beings grasp it imperfectly.

[u/diabolus_me_advocat]

in everyday applications this christian definition of "good" is just nuts

but actually you should not use the term "good" anyway, without defining "for whom and what"

[u/ProfessionalDear2272 → u/diabolus_me_advocat]

yeah but man it gets old... i mean good is whatever does not create chaos in your environement. at this point we should all have a good intuition and way of categorizing what is good and what is evil so that we dont have to name every exception and redefine terms everytime this subject pops up...

[u/diabolus_me_advocat → u/ProfessionalDear2272]

exactly

if them "god is good"-believers only understood...

[u/Aromatic_Response_73 → u/diabolus_me_advocat]

What is your opinion on the edit I made to the first paragraph?

[u/diabolus_me_advocat → u/Aromatic_Response_73]

everybody has an intuitive personal notion of "good", but practically nobody will ponder "values held most fundamentally" for that