Per 1 John, God is (agape; selfless) love. There was already the perfect love of persons with one Being (the Trinity), as well as the perfect devotion of separate, purely spiritual beings (the angels who sing “Holy! Holy!” forever). Recall here, and keep in mind, that most classical theists agree that God's omnipotence allows him to actualize any logically possible state: but there is 'no such thing' as an instantiated logical impossibility. Therefore logical impossibilities are not valid arguments, when made the focus of, "Why couldn't God just..."-type objections. So now, if God were to create other beings capable of expressing true self-giving / agape love of the same sort that God *is*, (hence, ‘godliness’), what would that logically entail? It’s also important to note that it is never said in the entire Bible, as far as I’ve seen, that the angels (as in the class of created beings, not the Angel of YHWH / Angel of the Presence) are capable of love… only of rejoicing, of devotion, of obedience, etc., or at most of lust under the Watchers interpretation of Genesis. No, seriously: if you doubt this, or find it strained, try to find a single counter-example in scripture or even in the early Fathers. You won’t find one. I propose that this is a key basis on which one might say that only we as humans are, hence, made in the image and likeness of God. Next, we must admit that logically, you cannot genuinely express love unless it is freely chosen. If someone holds a gun to your head to compel you to act as though lovingly, we do not view those actions as loving. So, a free will is logically necessary to the genuine expression of love. And, because these created beings are definitionally not God, they are necessarily finite. Along with that freedom of will logically comes the genuine possibility of choosing otherwise: for in order to genuinely choose to express the good, you must be able to choose otherwise. So, then, we must admit the logical possibility of evil. At this one might say: well, then how does this not apply also to God? God, immanently, does not *express* good, but *is* the good itself. God does not immanently *express* love (via actions), but rather *is* love in a basic and fundamental sense. Think of it: human beings cannot literally become goodness. We can only steer ourselves towards that end. The logical necessity of freedom I am describing applies only to the incarnated person of Jesus Christ; more on that soon. So, now you might think that God ought to create beings that have free will but otherwise do not experience any suffering or hardship. That is, God can allow moral evil, but not natural evil. Well: that's Eden (and, what I am about to say, I intend theologically; this is a matter of what is true about man and about God and about good and about evil, not what you would see with a time machine if you turned back the clock). Adam and Eve were created capable of choosing to disobey God, but otherwise did not experience suffering or hardship of any sort. It turns out that if the goal is godliness, this seems to leave one in a rather infantile state. Adam and Eve, having experienced no suffering, were not able to avoid being deceived by that serpent, that is, Satan. Though they were innocent in the sense of lacking knowledge of good and evil, they still were not able to muster the proto-virtue to obey God and trust in what He told them rather than be led astray by a deception, claiming that God was in some sense of insecurity holding out on them. But, how could God overlook Satan's attempt? Didn't He know that Satan would try that? What gives? Here we must discuss Satan. First, I must say something that is often overlooked by my fellow Christians, who are unfortunately more familiar with the Satan of Dante and Milton: biblically, Satan was in heaven acting in his role as the Accuser until Jesus' death and resurrection: --- (Job, Zechariah for OT context of Satan as the accuser in heaven) John 12:31 -> "Now is the judgment of this world; now will the ruler of this world be cast out." Revelation 12:7-12 [emphasis added by me] -> "And there was war in heaven, Michael and his angels waging war with the dragon. The dragon and his angels waged war, and they did not prevail, and there was no longer a place found for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, the serpent of old who is called the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world; he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. Then I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, "Now the salvation, and the power, and the kingdom of our God and the authority of His Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers and sisters has been thrown down, the one who accuses them before our God day and night. And they overcame him because of the blood of the Lamb and because of the word of their testimony, and they did not love their life even when faced with death. For this reason, rejoice, you heavens and you who dwell in them. Woe to the earth and the sea, because the devil has come down to you with great wrath, knowing that he has only a short time." (It is worth noting that Revelation recounts cycles that often overlap chronologically, but Rev. 12 is unmistakably about Christ's death, resurrection, and ascension; see v. 5). It is after this that, for example, that Peter says that Satan is roaming the Earth like a prowling lion. I also believe this is why we have seen such moral horror in the actions of the godless since Christ's ascension. Luke's famous, "I saw Satan fall like Lightning," meanwhile, is proleptic, given that Jesus is talking to the apostles about how they are now given the authority over the demonic, marking the beginning of the end of the current paradigm. --- So, what's my point? It is that God knew, of course, that Adam and Eve would fall. The Fall itself demonstrates the incompleteness of the virtues logically possible in a world with no natural evil. God could compel Adam and Eve to be 'spiritually mature' from the start, but then they would no longer be genuinely choosing the good. Satan, meanwhile, is both a real being and essentially a representation of evil that God permits in order to bring about his ends (hence why 'Satan' is sometimes used loosely, as in "Get behind me, Satan!"); he is the “god of this world,” and so not unlike pagan conceptions of a god being both the thing and the agent representing it (Poseidon in some sense both *is* the stormy waves and the personal agent sending them forth; so it is with Satan and evil). I do not think Satan possesses libertarian free will per se, but is rather something like an angel of evil personified (evil being something like a parasitic silhouette; more on this later). God does not desire that evil occur directly, but permits it because of the logical necessities we've discussed up until this point. Note that this doesn't somehow make Satan not evil; it gives us an account of why Satan is portrayed as the accuser in heaven in the Old Testament, and why God permits him in the garden, etc. So because of Adam and Eve's failure, natural evil enters the world, necessarily. Mortality, i.e., death, enters the world, and it's a double-edged sword: it does allow for the possibility of truly strong virtues to develop (and, it's important to note, that apart from individual tragic cases that result from the regularity and law-governed nature of creation apart from God’s active intent, existence remains on the whole / on average good, a net positive), but it also brings with it fear of death and loss, which naturally inclines people in their default state to sin. And God permits Satan to, in a sense, get what he by his nature wants. He becomes "the ruler of this world," per John's Gospel, "the god of this world," per Paul (though God of course maintains ultimate supremacy). He is free to accuse, to tempt. Though humans can resist the fear of death, no human can ordinarily fully resist sin that is present through all possibility of suffering and vulnerability, etc., and only the OT saints can even die with a hope only for what is to come. For every little thing of these, Satan accuses us, pointing at our failures, showing how we disgrace the gifts of life and freedom that God has given us. God could choose to immediately smite evil, to smite Satan; completely remove it/Him from reality, but by using force / power to annihilate evil, we'd be right back where we started in Eden, forever infantile in our virtues. Additionally, it wouldn't really demonstrate anything, beyond that God is all-powerful. Does good win over evil just because it can leverage a greater use of force? Does might make right? As we will see, no, surely not. Instead God intervenes with force just the amount needed to ensure that *evil does not win in the end,* establishing the salvation history of the OT, forming the people chosen for the ultimate culmination of what His plan. And so we come to the crux of it all. A question that might have been lingering in your mind all along is: so, is God like a general leading from the back, sending us in to suffer for the sake of virtue, while forever himself being apart from suffering? This objection, and the problem we have been building towards, find their answer in the same person: the Son, Jesus Christ, who is Himself God. For God does not lead from the back: God in his divine nature is ineffable and impassible; yet God the Son, having taken on flesh, does not ask of us anything that He was not willing to endure Himself. He enters the world as a true human being, born under the same conditions of suffering, vulnerability, mortality, and temptation that we are. He hungers. He weeps at the tomb of His friend. He is tempted in the wilderness. He sweats blood in Gethsemane. He never commits any sin, yet He suffers betrayal by one of His closest, abandonment by the rest, a sham trial, scourging, crucifixion. And He dies. And herein lies the fulfillment of everything we have been discussing up until now. I mentioned before that defeating evil and/or Satan merely through the use of force is not satisfactory. It would not demonstrate anything. So, how is God to best defeat evil? How is God to fittingly defeat Satan? For context, it is my belief that the satanic viewpoint is the cynical, Machiavellian viewpoint: being good is for suckers, power above all, any manipulation is warranted to bring about one's ends. This is Satan's own internal viewpoint; it is what being evil basically is. Yet, like all evil agents, Satan knows that you cannot convince someone to do wrong by presenting this way directly. Rather, evil parasitizes on the good: this is the framework from which Satan accuses. For example, he accuses Job, saying basically, "Job is not good, for the only reason Job leads a godly life is because you, God, have blessed him". If what Satan said were true, he'd be right! He appeals to a true principle, that one should not only be good when there's a reward, but weaponizes it wrongly. It was the same from the very beginning, for the serpent did not tell Adam and Eve to eat the apple to rebel against God, but rather by implying that God was holding back from them, out of insecurity. This was the ur-accusation. And now, back to Christ. Let's turn to roughly what was going on leading up to Jesus' arrest, at a few different levels. Jesus is going around, calling all to trust in Him, laying bare the hypocrisy and the evil of the Pharisees, and showing the people the right way to live: to love your enemies, and do good even to those who hate and persecute you. This is the opposite of the Machiavellian logic. For the powers that be, who thought in that Machiavellian lens seemingly as easily as they breathed, this was a problem. For the Pharisees and Herod, Jesus was a direct threat to their luxurious positions of authority and wealth. That meant He was also a problem for the Romans, who had repeatedly struggled to keep the Jewish authorities placated. And, behind these, to those powers and principalities with Satan at their head: Jesus was showing people the right way to live, teaching them that through Him and His ways they could choose the good, despite how evil might have power and sway over them in their state of mortality and vulnerability. Fear not the strike to your cheek, and turn the other cheek also. All three arrive at the same answer. Jesus would not use violence for his ends, so there was one clear way to defeat Him, it seemed. Who cares that He was completely innocent? Arrest Him and kill Him! Then, the threat to the Pharisees' power would be removed. Then, Rome could scapegoat Him, to restore relatively stable relations between the Jewish and Roman authorities. Then, Satan and those powers and principalities that had the world in their sway could get back to their dominance over mankind. To them, whatever Jesus may have had planned was irrelevant, for He was trapped in what they saw as an inevitable weakness of His outlook, of who He was: He would not turn to violence, so He was inevitably vulnerable. “Then,” (you can imagine them nodding along to their own thoughts), “we will be rid of this Jesus of Nazareth. Then, that’ll be the last anyone hears of *him*. We kill him, and then, no one will even care anymore; he will be forgotten, and we can get back to the way things were before.” At this, I have to chuckle a bit. How’d that go for them? The irony for the worldly authorities is obvious, hopefully even to non-believers. Just ask a stranger what year it is. Even to a non-believer, a carpenter-preacher-prophet from 1st Century Judea, not born to nobility and never amassing any military force, became (I think, clearly) the most influential human being to ever live. It also exposed the very ‘scapegoat’ mechanism itself, that Machiavellian logic meant to restore a false peace of mind at the cost of the innocent (for more on this analysis specifically, I recommend ‘I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning’ by Rene Girard, though I do not agree with Girard on everything). And how about those ‘other’ powers and principalities? What about Satan? I suspect that all of the dimensions that the Cross operates at will never be comprehensively understood, not while we stand here gazing ‘through a glass, darkly.’ I think that, far from contradicting each other, nearly all of the widely-held atonement models correctly capture *something* about Christ’s work on the Cross. So, here is my best account, wrapping in everything from the Fall ‘till now. Look at what is being done in this single descent and ascent. In one complete act, Jesus’ death and resurrection accomplishes: The answer to the “general leading from the back” objection mentioned earlier, even to something so despairing as feeling abandoned by God in the face of suffering: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” It allows us to unite ourselves with Christ in our own experience of horrific suffering, and with Christ to overcome them The exposure of Satan’s accusations for what they are, a mere parasite on the good The completion of a perfect rendition of the human condition (Jesus displaying perfect love even for his executioners, even to the end) and therefore accomplishing rightly what the Fall displayed wrongly, and an overcoming of death itself Therefore, the breaking of the stranglehold that fear of mortality and vulnerability has on human beings, which led to slavery to sin The exposure of the ‘scapegoat mechanism’ that human societies use(d) to restore peace of mind at the cost of the innocent (Girard) The defeat of evil, in the sense of the decisive blow being struck, showing humble self-giving love to be more powerful than Machiavellianism without any force or coercion leveraged God’s answer to Satan’s ur-accusation: far from holding back, He sends His Son to willingly suffer and die for our sake, and invites us to participate in His divine nature The propitiation for the consequences of all of our own sins, making God’s forgiveness honest rather than arbitrary. God Himself bears the consequences, out of love for us. An invitation for all time for us to follow this perfect example: to “take up our Cross” and follow Jesus, not because it’s simply what’s commanded, but because the moral logic of why it’s right to do so is made clear. To discuss all of these in detail would take much more than I can accomplish here now, so I would like to focus on how the Cross brings full circle what has been since the beginning, since Eden, in order to wrap up what we’ve been discussing all along. That in mind, I’ll focus on the two aspects of humanity’s slavery to sin since the Fall: the moral blame, and the consequences. First, we must think about what is involved in an immoral act. I would propose that any such act has at least three ‘victims’ (or two in what we’d colloquially call a “victimless” sin), not in the sense of pity but rather in the sense of being the recipient of the act. Consider: The literal external victims of the act. If you stole something, the person whose property it was. If you attacked a group of people, those people. These are the ones whom you directly wronged. Yourself. Any immoral action damages your own moral sensibility, further wounding it the more and more you act immorally. You deserve better than that, and you deserve better than to be one who commits immoral actions in the first place. So, every immoral action you do wrongs yourself, as well. Yet, even besides the victim and yourself, there is some sense in which you have chosen to actualize this reality wherein that immoral action was committed, rather than the preferable, the more-good alternatives. This universe’s history will forever contain that wound when you really could have chosen better. The only one who can forgive *that* is the one who has authority over said reality, and permitted your choice, that is, God. This is the grounding of any notion of asking God for the forgiveness of sins. However, as we see in the gospels, Christ has always been willing to declare our sins forgiven on His own authority as the one through whom all things were created, if we only humble ourselves to repent and ask for that forgiveness from Him. So why the Cross? Here I must make one thing clear. Take a step back from all of this, for a moment, and consider a much smaller scene. A friend of yours does you some great wrong; let’s say you let them use your house while they’re away, and in their negligence they allow an electrical fire to break out, and your house burns down. They have done it; the doing of it is theirs, and not yours, no matter how close the two of you are. You cannot literally assume the blame for it, all the more because you are the one who was wronged! The authorship of an act is internal to the agent who performed it, in much the same way that authorship of a thought is internal to the thinker. There is no metaphysical operation by which I can become the doer of what you did. We feel this intuitively, in our ordinary moral experience, and I think we should trust that intuition: blame, by its nature, is not transferable. The Bible itself affirms this! “The person who sins shall die. A child shall not suffer for the iniquity of a parent nor a parent suffer for the iniquity of a child; the righteousness of the righteous shall be their own, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be their own” (Ezekiel 18:20). But, if you earnestly perceive that they recognize their own mistake and are determined to be better, there is something you can do: you can cover the damages. If your friend has set in motion consequences they cannot themselves bear, you can step in and bear those for them, on their behalf, freely. We do this all the time on a small scale: parents do it for children, friends do it for friends, spouses do it for one another. The doing of the wrong stays where it was, but the consequences of it get borne by another. The wrong is still your friend's; the cost is now yours. Now, you might say, you could simply ignore that there are consequences. You could just wave it off, and tell your friend you didn’t need a house anyway. Yet, we need to disambiguate between forgiving your friend for what he did, and ignoring the consequences of what actually occurred. To ignore your friend’s actual act would be to act as if something bad is okay, and God, who is the good, logically cannot do that without ceasing to be Himself. So the question is, "how can the real wrongs with real consequences be addressed?" This is also the place to clear up what I believe the Bible ultimately means by "wrath," because so much of the standard caricature of the Cross hinges on getting this wrong. The wrath of God is not a separable divine emotion that has to be discharged onto someone, anyone. The wrath of God is the active form of God's love when love confronts what destroys what love loves. To love the good is necessarily to oppose evil, despite that it is being allowed to exist temporarily for a higher good; that opposition, in its active form against evil, is wrath. It is goodness's own posture toward what is corrupting the good. And so what answers this wrath is not the punishment of a substitute. What answers it is the actual undoing of the actual destruction, the actual rectification of harm of the original wrong. The consequences for sin, from Eden itself, have been mortality, vulnerability, and suffering. Jesus bore the worst of those, without ever once succumbing even one sin that these and the fear of these so often provoke in the human psyche. That is what would be required for any of us to escape the effects of the Fall on the universe; I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t do it, myself. Yet, Christ, who along with the Father and the Spirit is the very being that was wronged by the offense and every offense since, bore the consequences of it in the most visceral way on the Cross. If in my example, my friend had burned down someone else’s house, it’d be up to them whether they’d be willing to accept my payment on behalf of my friend. Yet, as we’ve discussed, in this case God is both the offended and the one paying on behalf of the offender. He *does* have the moral authority to accept Jesus’ work in our place. And, why? Why do all of this? Because He truly loves us selflessly! It is also in uniting with Christ that we heal even the effects of sin upon ourselves. He desires a relationship with us to that end, having given us both the necessary teachings re: virtue and enemy love, and the necessary means of grace (baptism, the Eucharist, etc.) to grow towards Him spiritually. The Holy Spirit is sent through Him to us from the Father, to be with us at all times and guide us in all things. Yet even after all this, there is still a matter unresolved. The consequences have been borne; the damages have been covered. God has the authority to forgive us of our blame, and to count Christ’s atonement in our place. Yet, there is still something about the blame aspect that has been unresolved. Here we return to the matter of Satan. Recall the accusations Satan has been bringing since Eden, and the worldview that powered them. That is, God may forgive us of the blame, yet evil’s cynicism still has purchase: the entire satanic logic that says agape is for suckers and cold self-interest is what logic entails really runs the world has not yet been answered simply because God is willing to forgive the offenses of those who come short of godliness. It has only been paid for. And as we noted before, simply silencing it by superior force would land us right back where we started. The good would not have won; it would have just outmuscled the bad. Might would make right. So the question is not just how the damages get covered, but how the lie that produced the accusations gets exposed on its own terms.

The #1 issue with OpenAI models in particular, for me. Claude models vary but the 5.5 series largely avoids it in my experience.

If this is meant to primarily be about climate change, I feel compelled to mention that modern (2022 or later) academic models predict that there will be more people and the average person will be around 2-3x richer by 2100. Climate change will reduce progress, not reverse it.

Opus 5.5 really is something. Kinda crazy ngl

This is bullshit, in the proper sense

Not a perfect comparison, but you get the idea

I'm glad he said "pound-for-pound" so that we can finally put to bed the equivocation between 'more powerful' and 'more evil' that leftist arguments on this abuse. The USG is far from innocent, but Al-Qaeda used the limited resources it had to *maximize* civilian deaths on 9/11.

See what I mean meta stays winning

What's ironic is that the boasting Paul condemns is exactly the idea that some have access to God (in the OT period, through covenantal works) that others cannot have (Rom 2:17, 23; 3:27–29; 4:2; Eph 2:8–9; Phil 3:3–6; cf. Rom 11:18). He isn't against boasting if it's proper (Rom 5:2–3, 11; 15:17; 1 Cor 1:31; 2 Cor 10:17; 12:9; Gal 6:14; Phil 3:3), following Jer 9:23–24.

Actually it really proves that this prophecy from Jeremiah 16, which was specific, falsifiable, given at a time when Jerusalem was facing destruction, and unique in ANE religion, came true. js

Idk I think the Holocaust was probably worse than an intellectual defense of God or religion

I believe in one God,
the Father almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all things visible and invisible. I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,
the Only Begotten Son of God,
born of the Father before all ages.
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; 
through Him all things were made.
For us men and for our salvation
He came down from heaven,
and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,
and became man.
For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate,
He suffered death and was buried,
and rose again on the third day
in accordance with the Scriptures.
He ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory
to judge the living and the dead
and His kingdom will have no end. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father through the Son,
who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified,
who has spoken through the prophets. I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.
I confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins
and I look forward to the resurrection of the dead
and the life of the world to come. Amen.