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Does God Love Everyone Equally?

Trailblazer

Veteran Member
The best we can due is subdue our subhuman urges and inclinations sufficiently to succeed in human society, but we deserve to congratulate ourselves for any success we have there rather than berate ourselves for having an older, pre-human nature with which we struggle. Instead, we have religions that denigrate man and leave people feeling guilty for being human which includes the legacy of our forebears.
I cannot argue with that. Religion leaves some people feeling guilty for not living up to its ridiculous standards. However, most religious people don't feel guilty since they don't have a propensity for guilt and they do not take those standards as seriously as I do. They just realize that they cannot perfectly live up to the standards and call it a day.

Recently got into a discussion on a Baha'i forum about some injunctions from the Baha'i Writings, that we should be x, y, and z. I said there is no way I can live up to that standard so I end up feeling guilty. A Baha'i said that the guilt was coming from me, not from the injunctions in the passages. Sure, the guilt comes from my internal thought process, but I would not have anything to feel guilty about if not for those injunctions to be x, y, and z. :rolleyes:
 

danieldemol

Well-Known Member
Premium Member
Science is irrelevant to this discussion since there is no scientific evidence that deals with free will.
To the contrary, there is scientific evidence for this which you said;
"What people end up choosing is determined by their childhood upbringing, heredity, education, adult experiences, and present life circumstances"

Neither a determined choice nor a random choice are a free choice, which leaves us with no free-will in my opinion.
 

Saint Frankenstein

Here for the ride
Premium Member

Many people are under the impression that Christianity teaches an absolute equality between all individuals. That God loves everyone equally. That in the eyes of God every soul is interchangeable in value. But that is not in fact what Christianity has taught historically. According to St. Thomas Aquinas:

I answer that, Since to love a thing is to will it good, in a twofold way anything may be loved more, or less. In one way on the part of the act of the will itself, which is more or less intense. In this way God does not love some things more than others, because He loves all things by an act of the will that is one, simple, and always the same. In another way on the part of the good itself that a person wills for the beloved. In this way we are said to love that one more than another, for whom we will a greater good, though our will is not more intense. In this way we must needs say that God loves some things more than others. For since God's love is the cause of goodness in things, as has been said (Article 2), no one thing would be better than another, if God did not will greater good for one than for another.
God loves everyone with the same intensity but not to same degree. The intensity of God's love cannot differ since God is love itself. But the degree of love to which God predestines us differs from soul to soul. Although God sincerely desires the eternal happiness of every soul, some souls are nonetheless more valuable to God than others. The greater the capacity a soul has for good, the greater degree of love God will have for that soul.

St. Thérèse compares Heaven to a garden where each soul is a flower.

“[Jesus] opened the book of nature before me, and I saw that every flower He has created has a beauty of its own, that the splendor of the rose and the lily’s whiteness do not deprive the violet of its scent nor make less ravishing the daisy’s charm. I saw that if every little flower wished to be a rose, Nature would lose her spring adornments, and the fields would no longer be enameled with their varied flowers. “
The divine garden would be boring if everyone were a rose or a chrysanthemum. The daises and the violets have an irreducible beauty of their own that is not diminished by the presence of the bigger flashier flowers. That some are loved to a greater degree does not detract from the intensity with which God loves each of us without distinction.

The idea that we are all equivalent in the eyes of God is a conceit of modern egalitarianism rather than actual Christian teaching.
I believe that God loves everyone with the same intensity but not all souls are capable of responding to it in the same way, for various reasons.
 
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