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IF a Creator created moral truth, submitting to that moral truth should be as clear cut as submitting to gravity. You don't get to argue with it. It simply IS the truth, and any deviations that a person makes from that truth are just that: deviations from the truth. It's not God's "authority" or a "power imbalance" that gives God some right to decide what is or isn't true. What is true is woven into the fabric of the reality God created. Arguing with it would be like arguing that 1+1 doesn't equal 2.
Let's consider this (possibly true) example: God created all the angels and revealed to them all with perfect clarity what His plans for them were. Lucifer says "non serviam". Michael is named Michael because he asks the rhetorical question "who is like God?" Michael recognizes that, as creatures, we are incapable of being able to judge God's ways as right or wrong. Lucifer's resistance is not in his disagreement with God, nor is Michael's non-resistance his agreement with God. One understood that the Creator is the Creator and submits based on that relationship, while the other put himself in equal standing with the Creator.
So the surrendering of autonomy and unquestioning obedience comes from first recognizing this Entity that is truly greater than us in every single respect. The surrendering and obedience is still a personal choice, but it is based off of recognizing the reality of the relationship, not my agreement with said entity after judging whether He is right or wrong based on some separate criteria. He IS the criteria.
If someone's justification for submitting to a Creator is only that they are the Creator, then they simply are submitting to authority, right?. They have not specifically chosen God . . . they have chosen whoever is charge regardless of who they are and want they want.
Lets say that when we die, we go meet God and God reveals all of this moral truth to us. And within this set of moral truth is a rule that says that anyone with red hair should be grouped into the middle of the afterlife and eternally and consciously tormented while everyone else is to stand around and watch and laugh. Submitting to the goodness of this moral truth should be as clear cut as submitting to gravity, right? To say 'no', would be contradictory to your previous post. Failure to laugh at the poor red haired souls is objectively against God and even using your own intuitions to evaluate this rule is absurd and apparently makes you resistant to God. . . Do you submit to this God? If you are given a choice to submit to this God or be annihilated, what do you choose?
This anti-red-hair God is still THE Creator and still the source of objective moral truth. What would give you the right or power to question God. What would give you the right to judge his rule of laughing at red-haired people?
Because I don't want to look like I'm setting a trap, a part of me is wondering if you'll say that God would not torture red haired people because that would not be good. . . . which would set me up to ask on what grounds you get to determine what is good.
The point of this hypothetical is to ask if you can imagine a God whose moral truth is so antithetical to your own moral intuition that would cause you to acknowledge this God as the Creator, but also reject that moral truth and opt for annihilation.
The claim that God sets moral truth and we are all meant to submit in totality IS the abdication of personal intelligence, reason, experience, intuitions, emotions, feelings, and virtually all sense of individuality. It means that any thought, experience, intuition, etc. that any of us has that does not point toward God is wrong. Our intelligence does not matter. Our reason does not matter. Our intuitions do not matter. Our emotions do not matter. All that matters is God's truth.
And maybe that is true and the way the world is. But, if this is true, then I would like to understand how it is that we are supposed to come to believe and then make a choice to follow God? Am I allowed to use reason and logic and experience and intuition and emotion to come to believe in God and then chose to abandon all of those tools in an act of submission to God?
Let me put this another way: I feel like you are simultaneously telling me that I must evaluate and recognize God is greater than me while also telling me that any evaluation of God on my part is absurd. How can I come to understand and choose God without using the tools that I am told I most abandon in my submission to God?
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At what stage of life? Yes, I want them to grow into adults that listen and respect me because they have witnessed that I am a loving father. But I want my toddler to do what I say because I know how to keep them safe and they have absolutely no idea how to do that themselves. When I say "stop" in a parking lot, it's not because I'm bigger and stronger. He shouldn't obey because of a "power imbalance". He should obey because I don't want him to die, and I know better. No amount of explaining that to a toddler is going to make a lick of difference. I think you'd agree that he just needs to submit.
Now how does my toddler grow into a man capable of seeing me as a loving father? By listening to my teachings first. I help form their sense of safe vs unsafe. They don't get there independently of parental (or some other authoritative) input. You seem to think you can get to a firm grasp on morality independently, then use that to judge the Creator of morality. It's akin to a toddler saying he can judge his father's ability to recognize danger.
A parent does not raise a child so that they will forever do and live exactly as the parent has raised them without question. A parent raises a child and gives them guidance and support so that when they are prepared, they can choose for themselves. A parent may wish for their child to make certain decisions, but at some point, the child becomes an adult and the relationship of submission is no longer present.
In the case of your God, as I understand it, we will never grow to a place where we are prepared to make our own decisions and our relationship will always be that of submission. And maybe that is what God intends. . . . but its why I object to the analogy. A parent looks for the child to submit during their early years with the intention that they may develop and grow and no longer need to submit. God intends for us to submit forever and has no intention for us to grow and develop beyond our current state.
Understand that I do not mean this as a criticism of God. It is a criticism of the analogy. I don't demand that God must develop and grow us so that we are as He is and no longer needing to submit. I simply think that the differences in intentions between a parent-child relationship and a person-God relationship makes the analogy problematic.
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Let's say a cop goes to put cuffs on me. Then I tell the cop, "I'll only let you put cuffs on me if you fully explain exactly why you stopped me, exactly what your next steps are, AND, based on those answers, I will decide to comply or not". It may not be as resistant as someone declaring themselves a sovereign citizen, but it is resistance. The categories are the same, albeit with wide variation of degree.
Right. Now imagine the cop is invisible. And also that I don't understand what the laws are. but, there are billions of people who, over the last 10,000 years, have tried to understand the laws, debated them, fought about them, killed over them, split into thousands of factions. All this does is add to my confusion.
I'm not intentionally resisting the 'cop'. I don't know what the cop wants me to do. I only know that a lot of people think they can speak for the cop and are all giving me conflicting information. Should I submit randomly and completely to one of the people speaking for God? Should I use my own tools to judge what I think God wants me to? Am I permitted to use my own tools of reason, intuition, and experience to evaluate what God wants me to do?
If there is a God, Creator, establisher of moral Truth, who wishes for us to be a certain way, is it not prudent to be sure we are following God's orders before we act? Is it not more respectful to God to wait for clear direction rather than assume we know with near 100% certainty that we know what God wants? I mean we live in a world where just about everyone is 98% sure they know who God is and yet they cannot all be right. Best case scenario, the majority of people are dead wrong about the thing they are 98% sure is correct. If this isn't a call for humility, then I don't understand what is.
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If we backtrack to the way you lost your faith, it started with you evaluating God based off of your moral intuitions about hell. That same moral intuition is the criteria by which you would evaluate whether God sufficiently demonstrates His love or not.
Sure. But you left out where I said that I know my initial reasons for leaving the Church was based on some shallow arguments.
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Unprovable is not the hidden resistance. Unprovable is just a fact that you and I both agree on. The resistance is what's holding you back from allowing yourself to gather sufficient enough evidence to believe this unprovable is true. Just like you already allow yourself to do with your wife (and many other things we do in life). That's the whole point of the wife analogy. You have to be open to an unprovable thing still being true prior to being able to consider the evidence.
And maybe Hinduism is the correct religion and your resistance to that fact is hold you back from allowing yourself to gather sufficient enough evidence to believe this unprovable is true. Maybe there is a God that wants us to be agnostic in this life and your resistance to that idea is holding you back.
I want to make something clear about who I feel about the bolded statement above. You are not God. Your views are not that of God's. You do not speak for God. I am resistant to you telling me which evidence to gather, how to evaluate that evidence, and what conclusion I ought to arrive at. I am not resistant to learning who God is. I am only resistant to you (or anyone else) speaking for God to tell me which unprovable I ought to believe is true. If I wish to submit to God, then I wish to submit to God and not your flawed understanding of Him.
Call me a doubting Thomas. Thomas was not insubordinate or rejecting of God. For all we know, Thomas loved God so much and respected God so much that he wanted to be absolutely sure God had risen so as to ensure he was not believing the 'wrong' unprovable. If I am called to follow and worship and submit to God. . . . I would sure feel bad if I worshipped the wrong way, followed a false God, and submitted to the wrong truths.
The point of doubting Thomas is to encourage submission without evidence. As with anything else, I can certainly be wrong, but I see this story as pure nefarious snake oil salesman manipulation tactic. This passage calls on us to abandon reason and intuition and experience so that we should believe in the unprovable truth being told to us by the flawed humans. This passage does not call on us to follow God. It calls on us to follow men that speak for God.
Doubting Thomas wasn't added until John, the last gospel. Why? It converts the need for evidence into a character flaw. It makes a virtue out of blind belief and submission to human accounts. It is the tactic of manipulative human beings who seek power, not the tactic of an all powerful God that wishes to be known.
What you call 'resistance' above is simply base level skepticism. Without it, I should believe EVERY unprovable truth and not just the correct ones.
. And I wouldn't dare presume what God would or wouldn't have done.