Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Dimmesdale
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Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Post by Dimmesdale »

If God is Love, how could He be anything but Loving? If Love is just an attribute of God, one which he may possess in certain regards and in some instances, and that may not be the case in some other senses or circumstances, that I can understand. But if God's very Essence is that of Love, then how can he damn sinners? He would then have to be Hate, not Love!

So, can Love pull the trigger? Can Love plunge a dagger into someone's heart? Or something infinitely worse?

I can, however, imagine Love walking away. That I can understand. So then that would be consistent with hell being God's absence. Yet God is still present in some sense, otherwise the sinner would pass out of existence (in traditional Christian theology). So it's hard to see how God would not be actively involved in hurting the sinner in some sense....

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Re: Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Post by ttruscott »

Dimmesdale wrote:If God is Love, how could He be anything but Loving?
Psalm 11:5 The LORD examines the righteous, but the wicked, those who love violence, he hates with a passion.

Psalm 5:5 Therefore, the proud may not stand in your presence, for you hate all who do evil.


Either what you have understood till now about HIS Love is wrong or your must reject the Bible.
PCE Theology as I see it...

We had an existence with a free will in Sheol before the creation of the physical universe. Here we chose to be able to become holy or to be eternally evil in YHWH's sight. Then the physical universe was created and all sinners were sent to earth.

This theology debunks the need to base Christianity upon the blasphemy of creating us in Adam's sin.

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Re: Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Post by Dimmesdale »

ttruscott wrote:
Dimmesdale wrote:If God is Love, how could He be anything but Loving?
Psalm 11:5 The LORD examines the righteous, but the wicked, those who love violence, he hates with a passion.

Psalm 5:5 Therefore, the proud may not stand in your presence, for you hate all who do evil.


Either what you have understood till now about HIS Love is wrong or your must reject the Bible.
I do reject the Bible. As being anything like a logically consistent document regarding the objective truth of reality. So yes, on that score, yes, I do.

My whole point though is whether it is logically consistent to believe that God, who has Love as his Identity, can at the same time be of the nature of hate. It doesn't seem possible to me because then his nature, his identity would also then have to be hate. Hate would cancel out love. So it doesn't seem possible to meld the two into one. Logically.

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Re: Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Post by JehovahsWitness »

[Replying to post 3 by Dimmesdale]


Would you say that because a father is loving he must love someone raping his baby daughter?
  • Love is not the absence of hate, it is the absence of inappropriate hate. In certain circumstances hate is indeed the appropriate and most desirable emotional reaction; true love hates what is bad.
Would hate not cancel out love?
  • No, suggesting it would is just so much nonsense, emotions are not math. Love no more cancels out hate than eggshell cancels out egg yolk. Love and hate exist as part of a whole, it is a logical fallacy to propose they both cannot coexist. Hate of bad is love of good; love of good is hate of bad, if anything you cannot truly have one without the other.
JW





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"For if we live, we live to Jehovah, and if we die, we die to Jehovah. So both if we live and if we die, we belong to Jehovah" -
Romans 14:8

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Re: Can Love Really Pull The Trigger?

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Post by ttruscott »

Dimmesdale wrote:My whole point though is whether it is logically consistent to believe that God, who has Love as his Identity, can at the same time be of the nature of hate.
It is GOD's nature to fully love without reservation those HE loves but that has no inference about HIS feelings for those who have rejected HIM by sinning the unforgivable sin. None.

Love and hate are conditional...to say HE is love is to say that Love is HIS prime consideration for those who have accepted HIS conditions to be loved leaving those who rejected those conditions to be hated.
PCE Theology as I see it...

We had an existence with a free will in Sheol before the creation of the physical universe. Here we chose to be able to become holy or to be eternally evil in YHWH's sight. Then the physical universe was created and all sinners were sent to earth.

This theology debunks the need to base Christianity upon the blasphemy of creating us in Adam's sin.

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