Sorry. I took a rhetorical comment as a statement of your own position during the conversational wandering.

You are correct that pantheists don’t view God as “him”, but I feel it’s jarring to refer to God as “it”. Maybe we need additional English pronouns.

Doug:

I don’t know what it takes, but it’s not a nom de guerre.

Since I’m a pantheist, I don’t think that God is separable from “things”, so I view it more as He’s experiencing all things and maximizing that experience. He guides us toward maximizing the experience of our spirits as part of that “goal” (Process theology, which I think Margie is favorable toward, would call that maximizing complexity and beauty, from my reviews of the subject.)

I have no reason to think that there is any limit to His “self-control”, but should there be one, I’d be very surprised that the limit was correlated with anything we humans consider good or bad.

Margie:

“A catastrophe like an earthquake is not caused by God. God laments the damage done to us in such an earthquake but does not cause it.”

But the earth itself was created through such catastrophies, and all life (including human) exists because of it. If He does not cause the catastrophies that kill, He does not cause the catastrophies that give birth. And if He does cause the catastrophies that give life, He does cause the catastrophies that kill.

I think there are other world religions (like Hinduism) that grasp this balance in the Godhead better than we in Christianity do.

So I’m not quite agreeing with BTC that there is no hope of comprehending a lot more about God than we do, but to comprehend more, we do need a reorientation, IMO, on this point.

I do agree that God is disappointed with us when we intentionally snuff out the possibilities of another to make ourselves something we have no hope of being. That’s a pretty good operational definition of sin.

I think God would be very sad, upset and disappointed in us when one human kills another or steps on a kitten because of “intent”. To my way of thinking “intent” is everything. If we unintentionally hurt someone, we should not be felt to be accountable for that although we may be led to apologize anyhow. But if we intentionally hurt someone or something…that is “intent”.

I think we tend to mistake a God who is “loving” for a God who is “cuddly”. Creation and destruction are part of the same whole. That’s what I mean when I say He’s not paying attention to our concepts of good and bad.

I can agree with that as stated, but I don’t think God is particularly paying attention to human notions of “good” and “bad” when He tries to influence us or any other aspect of the physical world.