In particular, if ‘God’s goodness’ is not to be understood in the same terms as what we think of as good (so that, for instance, it might be ‘good’ of God in this different sense to unleash bubonic plague on defenceless infants) then it has no implications for how I am to live my life. It gives me no way of deciding whether to prefer pleasure to pain, or turning the other cheek to taking an eye for an eye, any more than it tells me to prefer heat to cold. But religion is supposed to do these things. It is important, because people take it to make a difference to how we act. Yet now we find
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