IMO using your parent metaphor I would say that God if he existed is an abusive and negligent parent in that he sees tremendous suffering and refuses to help in any shape or form. But I agree that yes an over pampering God would be intolerable. But that is not what I am saying God should be if he should be anything at all. I'm saying that if God exists and if he is love then he should own up to the fact that we are his creations and that he should lend a helping hand every once in awhile.
well, the trouble and the point i tried to illustrate (hastedly) is that this is a slippery slope. Levinas for instance makes a very interesting distiction between what he calls 'the sacred' and 'the holy'. the difference between the two is that the sacred burns while the holy does, in his words, retreat in order to make room for its creation. So, the minute a creator shows himself as such, he actually burns any created being in a way beyond human imagination. its very difficult to imagine beyond an eternally tightening suffocation. the soul of a being (or the being of beings if you rather leave religious vocabulary out of it) is crushed in an infinite 'too muchness' from which no escape is possible ever again. If you use psychedelics you ought to be familiar with this burning 'too muchness'. it is this that would consume any creature upon understanding he was created and subsequently 'taken care of'. its like the very essence of self being assimilated leaving an empty husk.
and then you ask if a creator has the right to destroy his creation. No he does not. Once created, the created has a being of its own and is not dependant or controlled by the artist/creator. Any true artist understands that he has to let go of his work. And thats the point; its no longer his upon his decision to reveal it. we say a painting is by michelangelo, not that a painting is michaelangelo. whats the difference? well in one the work is free to be interpreted by each and every one. the hermeneutic circle between the work and its onlooker(s) is an infinite and ever changing one. As such the essence of the work is not fixed at all (its not like we peer directly into michelangelo as if he turned himself into a kind of stone gargoyle); its a kind of 'no-thing' (lotsa discussion there in the sense of 'we know its not that but then what is it.)
Levinas then argues that, just like a painter does, the creator does leave 'a (water)mark'. And for this he returns to Descartes. For us, it would be the idea of infinity. just think about that: there simply is, nowhere in the world, anything infinite. everything we end up knowing is temporary and quantifiable in a fixed number. How the hell did we ever get to this idea of infinity? it may seem very simple; you just count and count up and you realize this in infinite. But; this requires a lot more then meets the eye. at some point in the counting, the counter needs to become self-aware of his counting. and this is paradoxal: how can what was defined as a a counter escape his own counting? computers don't do this, they just keep counting until someone says to it 'alright stop after this many numbers cause its infinite'. the computer cannot process the idea itself though, only approximate it by counting a lot. it never makes the actual leap by means of the counting. the leap is made by simply already having been there. in mathematics there is an interesting parallel called the 'recurrence relation', which is characterized by its 'givenness'. Point here is that this 'leap' or 'recurrence relation' was never made by the created being itself, it is a given to it. the created being in our little example here would be 'the counter'. depending on whether the recurrence relation is already a given, 'the counter' would be either a computer or a self-awareness. because that is the point of any recursive definition: to define something in terms of itself. which requires something to be already there, namely this 'self' or the recurrence relation itself.
So to put it simply, infinity leaves us with an unobtrusive trace towards somthing other then pure quantifiability. it leads to a
quality. perhaps somewhat counterintuitive, infinity is not a quantity, but a quality. and that brings us to:
I disagree wholeheartedly. Wisdom, love and goodness are ideals but they are human ideals. They come from human minds and have nothing to do with God and have been wrongly attributed to God over the centuries. We as a race sometimes don't give ourselves enough credit.
i never said they were anything else then human ideals. i just showed you how the religious thinker can metaphorize this into God. I do have a question for you; namely, how and/or why do you presuppose that God is (or has to be) something else/more then a human ideal? as i said earlier, 'God' is just the ideal of all ideals. Plato called it 'the Good'. its this simple bugger: what is the essence of ideal? its ideality. what is ideality? the attribute of all ideals. aka 'God' or whatever name please you most. Yes that can simply be 'Love'. Philosophers however, are keen to find a term/name that would leave their system without some plain contradiction leaving the position untenable, so he called it the Good.
perhaps i need to make this aspect more apparent: The pure ideal of say wisdom or love is
empty. its perfection as an ideal is exactly that, that essentially, it has been stripped bare from any temporal quantifiability. that is to say; any
expression of wisdom. the point is that as soon as 'Wisdom' is expressed it simply becomes 'a wise statement'. some imperfect, spatiotemporally expanse is given this qualification. and neither 'Wisdom' or 'anything wise' exist independantly. and yet they do... somehow. this would be what i called a 'no-thing', a 'nothing-something'. Words will never transcend beyond this paradox, because its what words are. you can only travel beyond this point
in your own silence. or, beautifully said in Heideggers words: 'the pure delight of beckoning stillness'.
