[Johan]

I’ve found “all loving” to be problematic because people can define loving in many different ways. You can put spin on just about anything to make it conform to loving? Genocide of the Amalekite’s? It was loving for God to put kill their entire group and decedents, so that those descendants wouldn’t only be born to eventually die and be tortured in hell.

I would say that any being who creates something like hell automatically disqualifies itself from being loving.

Any being that allows childhood cancer automatically disqualifies itself from being all loving.

Any being that allows parasitic animals within its design automatically disqualifies itself from being all loving.

<font color=”rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)” face=”inherit”>Any being who created a perfect design but allows the choice of a single individual to </font>corrupt<font color=”rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)” face=”inherit”> that perfect design in such a way to allow the creation of childhood cancer and </font>parasitic animals automatically disqualifies itself from being all loving.

[kravarnik]

Many questions of this nature, in regards to God’s proclamations about Himself and, then, His actions against specific individuals or group of people, are resolved most easily by analogy to human affairs.

When God speaks of “love” or “hate”, it usually denotes a type of action or a pattern in how He acts toward the subjects of His energies that He provides Creation with. He Himself says that what determines how He would act toward one is how one acts toward Him, thus there’s a reciprocal interaction based on one’s subjective state in relation to God.

That is: I believe when God says He hates X, or Y, it is more to denote the relationship between God and subject X, rather than the essential disposition of His will. The essential inclination in God is expressed numerous times in other instances, where He Himself says He loves us.

So, we reason, that just like a human parent with a rebellious child, in which the child’s behavior and predisposition toward the parent conditions the relationship to be one of hatred, not because the parent hates the child, but because the child, through his actions, leaves no other choice for the parent, but discipline and harsh response in hope of correction. Our parents often ground us, or deprive us, of things they provide for us, because we condition our interaction with them to be such. It is the same with God, but since He is all-patient, He never ceases providing at least what is sufficient for each man to exist as long as He has decided for each of us and how long we will exist on Earth.

It’s not that God hates the individual, but the individual has conditioned his relationship with God to be AS IF it’s one of enmity, of hatred, of detest. If He provides what’s good for you, tell you what to do, yet one remains in wickedness and openly acts against what God has called good, then that has God deprive man of particular goods He provides, withdrawing or lessening some of the good energies of His that He lets us enjoy. Just like human parents do after His image: we often deprive our beloved ones of good things we can give them and act in the relationship as if it is one of enmity and hatred, even though we essentially love them.

[jayceeii]

“All loving” should not be interpreted as “all accepting,” which is to say unconditional love. Parents often lay claim to unconditional love but we find it does have conditions. Though it holds in early childhood, in adulthood some children turn so much against their parents’ ways they are disowned. If a child says, “I don’t believe in anything you stand for,” it dissolves any basis for the loving relationship. Similarly if humans were saying to God, “We don’t believe in anything you stand for,” God would not be able to establish a meaningful relationship, for these are not infants, but willful adults sometimes doing evil.

It is not therefore a question of God’s lack of love, but that the humans deny His standards, even the most basic, and this means God cannot befriend them or gain their cooperation. It can eventually become a question of whether God agrees they are spending His resources meaningfully, particularly if in their obstinateness they are also harming their own long-term best interests. God hasn’t been destroying evildoers yet. He has not stopped a single war, for instance. It is unlikely that He hates the evildoers, instead comprehending that they “know not what they do,” as Jesus said. The all-loving God wanted friendship in the beginning, but might demand obedience should that fail.

So if you want to talk about love, then you have to talk about things such as friendship, cooperation, sympathy and the like. Between the parent and the rebellious child all that dissolves, but the hatred and antipathy are all on the part of the child. The love is offered but it is refused. The way things are people believe God is weak in practice. Doesn’t man do what he wants, when he wants? No one stops him, whatever he wills to do, until other men have had enough and write laws with police to enforce them. God hasn’t had an arm of executive action on the planet. If you want to love God you have to revere Him and agree to His basic principles, that have human interests at heart. If He is spurned, He is wise enough not to try the routes of friendship He may employ among fully rational ones.

One thing that bothers me deeply is that humanity has not had prophetic guidance during the industrial era, when it was most needed. Surely God would have sent messengers could these have been received, to ensure preservation of the resources and environment for the sake of future generations. Global warming and plastics pollution are only here because man wanted to decide his own fate, as the Eden fable relates he eats from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is to say defining good and evil by himself while rejecting God’s definitions. Christians say they believe God is the Creator but entertain a facile scripture-born notion He can create planets and biospheres quickly, although the testimony of science insists we took (and God needed) five billion years to get us here.

So if God isn’t sending messengers, it means He knew they’d be rejected. There isn’t a relation of friendship and cooperation between God and human beings. This is the import of the story by Jesus about the vineyard owner, sending many who were killed, then sending his son who is also killed. Logically then, the absence of messengers is evidence God does not regard Himself to have a friendship with man, although He is all-loving and was prepared for such a friendship any time. We’re left again with Jesus, who kept shouting, “Hypocrites!” that human standards of goodness are for show, and not for real. Think of the other option, that just as there were prophets reported in the Old Testament, here we’d have Swedenborg more recently, or even bolder prophets, telling humans how to husband this planet well, which might be God’s greatest treasure, that is being defiled. Swedenborg is not known as a prophet, nor has any voice been raised in future’s defense.