Are God's actions always bound by Meaningfulness and Compassion?

Question

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Even on His/Her [[[<---- as you can tell I'm bound by political and linguistic correctness :-)]]] own terms.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wHd5nWNWYU

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Answer 1

Personally I dont think you can assign human emotions to God

Answer 2

Many believe that God&#039;s actions are determined by God&#039;s essential nature-- unless you are a theological voluntarist.  If this is the case, God&#039;s will and essential nature are bifurcated, and God&#039;s actions are capricious.  

Discern what God&#039;s essential nature is, and you have the answer to your question.

Answer 3

The Question has NO Relevance. In light of Our Miserable &quot;Understanding&quot; of God&#039;s &quot;Mind&quot;, there&#039;s probably NO WAY we could Understand the Reasoning behind His/Her Actions... They&#039;re &quot;beyond us...&quot; [ Which is just as well- since we can&#039;t explain Our OWN Reasoning half the time, nor can we justify our OWN actions...].

Answer 4

Meaningfullness, yes.

But, one may reason, God wiped out thousands of people for being false to him;  Yet, ultimately this can be construed as compassion--compassion for those who obey him.  When the scripture stated &quot;a little while longer and the wicked shall be no more&quot; he stated his promise to wipe them off the face of the Earth so that the Earth will only be inherited by the &quot;meek&#039;.

Answer 5

God has no boundaries and our minds will forever be filled with queries . . . . . .and the debate goes on . . . . . forever into eternity.  The why will always haunt us.

Answer 6

No.  They&#039;re either completely unrelated to our sense of meaning, or he doesn&#039;t exist.

Answer 7

In my opinion, it&#039;s a paradox!!!

Answer 8

only those which you justify meaningful and Compassionate..having conditioned by human limitation views on meaningfulness and compassion limiting Gods actions to the extend of being under humans limited jurisdiction...That which is meaningless to you would be well meaningful for God...Would you agree with that?

Answer 9

I think they are.  For example,  many people who do not believe in God think that if God existed why wouldn&#039;t everyone go to heaven?  It is hard for many people to think that God would &quot;punish&quot; those who don&#039;t believe in him.  It does seem hypocritical to punish but then again there must be a meaning.  Like the saying, everything has a reason, and it is only normal to question some of the things that the Bible says.

I like the video.  I love the Beatles.  My favorite is Help! and Eleanor Rigby.  I don&#039;t get what the video had to do with your question.  Maybe the song had something to do with it?

Answer 10

Gods are fictions -- lacking form or function -- constructed phantasms falsely delineating a physical world.

Answer 11

Yes.

I think that confusion regarding this question arises from what may be considered God&#039;s actions.

Many things that have nothing to do with God are attributed to God for the convenience of a particular ideology.

God&#039;s actions are not bound but are always meaningful and compassionate.  Forget political and linguistic correctness.  Any philosophy, religious system or didactic command that limits the compassion and meaning of God have nothing to do with God.

God desires to bring us to light.

Answer 12

The easy answer is that I don&#039;t presume to know the mind of God. That&#039;s the easy answer because it&#039;s true. I know I can never understand that particular mind. But in the context of your question, that&#039;s also getting off easy.

Half your question is easy, or rather a bit easier. (When are you going to ask an easy question, like, &quot;What was your favorite cereal when you were 8 years old?&quot;) Are His actions always bound by meaningfulness? Well, yes. They are bound by meaningfulness because we humans attribute meaning to them. It doesn&#039;t matter what happens. There will always be someone looking for meaning in it. Ever had a loved one die? You will be told it&#039;s &quot;better that way&quot; or &quot;God&#039;s will&quot; or &quot;God needed him/her for something else&quot; so often you will want to vomit on the next person who says that. But the truth is that if you look for meaning in that death, you will find it. I know for me the meaning was that I grew tremendously as a person because of the grief process. I am not the same person today as I was before my brother died. All of the growth cannot be attributed to the natural growth which occurs in normal people in a span of time. I have grown more because my brother died, and I have grown in ways I probably would not otherwise have explored. So meaning is a yes, simply because we will, by our natures, attribute meaning to everything around us.

Compassion is similar, if we choose to look at events that way. Look at the great flood, which is discussed in the Old Testament of the Bible. The great flood has always interested me because it doesn&#039;t just pop up in the Abrahamic religions and their traditions. It seems to appear regularly in just about every creation myth around the world. For example, while the ancient Greeks did not attribute the creation of everything to Zeus, they did attribute to him a great flood which killed off everything, save two people, an old husband and wife, whom he had warned to move to high ground. He did it because the people were being wicked. (Sound familiar?) My point is that you can find compassion even in the great flood. While it may certainly be easier to allow a race of people who have gone astray to simply continue on their way, is it not, in a way, more compassionate to wipe them out and start over? Find the one man you can trust, entrust him with the future of the world so you don&#039;t have to start completely from scratch, and then wipe them out. It can be seen as either a vengeful act, or a compassionate one, depending on the way you choose to look at it. We humans, and as I said before, there are many who have passed down the story of a great flood, choose to look at it as an act of vengeance. Could we, with our limited intelligence, not be seeing the compassion behind the act? Compassion is a tricky one, because what may seem compassionate to me may not seem compassionate to you. Again, that happens because we choose what meaning we will attribute to everything which happens. I may see it as compassionate that children die at young ages in Africa, and I can argue that they are spared a hard and dangerous life, and simply move on to Heaven. You may see the same fact as completely cruel behavior on the part of God, because he allows children to die before they have really ever lived. It&#039;s a matter of perspective, and one where neither of us can ever really prove one is right and the other wrong.

Which brings me full circle. Neither can prove which is right and which is wrong because neither knows the mind of God. It is, by our nature, unknowable.

I am not aware of any God who has ever said, &quot;I think...&quot; That includes the God of Abraham and all the others who are worshipped around the world. Since He does not choose to share what He thinks, we cannot know the workings of His mind. He does give directions for behavior, He does say, &quot;Do this...&quot;, and &quot;Don&#039;t do that...&quot;, but He doesn&#039;t tell us why, aside from, &quot;This is pleasing in My sight...&quot; or some similar clue to what He wants. Instead, He is content to allow us, with out limited understanding, to attribute meaning to the things we see happening both to us and to those around us. Some may see compassion, others vengeance. The only thing I am certain of is that what we see is a reflection of who we are inside, and what we truly believe. Everything else is just smoke and mirrors.

It is an unsatisfying answer, even for me. Next time, ask me about the cereal.

Answer 13

if so, could one also suggest that God is selfish? What about Satan? when he fell from grace was God compassionate? and what was his meaning behind this? Was it for the better of the whole?

Answer 14

I think God&#039;s actions are always bound by meaningfulness and compassion.  I think the problem we have with God is that some times things don&#039;t go our way, and we are in so much pain with trying to understand why this had to happen to us.  We pray to God and ask for understanding, and for him to show us the way.  And I also think God does not like to see us in that type of pain, but he knows we must go through that to come out of it stronger, and for certain events to follow in our life.  Everything happens for a reason and a the right time in our lives.  We just don&#039;t always understand why.  But either way, God approaches his children with meaningfulness &amp; compassion because he wants us to grow, learn, and discover what we are made of on the inside.  

Thanks for reading!

Answer 15

God does not &quot;act&quot; because God is complete in of Itself, therefore there is nothing for It to do.  The question posed is a good way of looking at it but its still a limited view.  It is helpful to realize that omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence is beyond all limitation and capabilities.  It just is without any further elaboration or explanation.  The Universe is ever expanding at the speed of light (faster than the mind can register or perceive) and is not caused by anything, it is merely a function of how things are.  The ocean doesn&#039;t not have to do anything to be the ocean.  &#039;You&#039; don&#039;t have to do anything to be &#039;you.&#039;  make sense.