Please help me understand non-religious metaethics.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Regardless of whether god has a physical or not physical form it is a god. It is not a human. If it spends a brief sojourn in a human body, it's still not 'a human' as by being able to do such a thing, to come and go as it pleases from form to form, clearly demonstrates.

Except that if one accepts at face value the gospel account, clearly God clearly did not go from form to form as it pleased.  The body of Jesus did not spring into existence out of nothing, he was born.  He did not wink out of existence, he died.  The resurrection was into that same physical form, with all the wounds he suffered during the crucifixion still present.  He did so because to have done otherwise would have indeed meant that as you assert, he hadn't really been human.  If that were the case, then the crucifixion and resurrection are a farce without any validity because they only have merit if Jesus was human.  You keep asserting a very black or white viewpoint that there are certain categories which it is impossible to be jointly a part of, but that is solely because of how you define what it means to be a member of those categories.

As for the pinky analogy, no analogy can ever be a perfect representation, but I must reject your assertion that your pinky is you.  While it could not exist without you, you could exist perfectly well without it, albeit you would be somewhat different.

[afleitch]

I don’t want this to turn into a discussion about the nature of Jesus, but to touch on it a little if he is who it is said that he is, not who he says he is because quite frankly how he defines himself is all over the place in the NT and only really makes any sort of sense if you subscribe to adoptionism, then he can’t be human. He might have been born, but he cannot be human because humans are not born of parthenogenesis. He cannot be human because humans cannot suspend the laws of nature to perform miraculous feats. He is not human because he did not die, not as we do. He died for three days, was whole again then ascended. He may be an avatar of a human but that is it. If he was literally a ‘god made flesh’ and became human then because humans lack the ability to become gods, if he was truly human he wouldn’t be able to return to that divine state. Being ‘human with benefits’ isn’t human. God was no more of a human that Zeus was a swan.

All this aside you have Matthew 19:17 in which Jesus says ‘Why do you ask me about what is good?...there is only One who is good.’ referring to god. So in his human form he’s still deferring ‘goodness’ to his non corporeal form. He’s saying that the part of himself that isn’t human is still arbitrarily able to determine the rightness and wrongness of the ethics of another self or be ‘more good’ than his other self and it’s human faculties can. Which was very much the position prior to taking on that avatar of a human anyway.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Actually, I do subscribe to adoptionism.  As for the virgin birth of Jesus, it couldn't have been parthogenesis since Jesus was male. Aside from that nitpick, the whole of the nativity story is non-essential to my own views of Jesus. In part that is because as an adoptionist I do not see the need for any miracles prior to Jesus' baptism, but also those alleged miracles run counter to the theme that when Jesus began his ministry, everyone was startled that Jesus was acting as he did.

As for Matthew 19:17, I don't see it as deference, in the sense of subservience that you seem to mean it, but acknowledgement that without the omniscience ascribed to God, it is impossible for us as humans to fully foresee the consequences of our actions and thus know what is absolutely good.  At best, we can establish general rules that certain actions are more likely to lead to good than to evil. I happen to be a gradual adoptionist, so my view is that at that point in the ministry of Jesus, he had some but not all of the aspects of godhood, and in particular he did not at that time possess omniscience.

That said, it is clear that I can't convince you that is possible for a being to be both god and human. The definitions you use preclude not only that possibility, but also the possibility that god could fully ken man or vice versa.

[© tweed]

@Nathan: why is it more difficult to reconcile the presence of good in a world created by an evil God than it is to accept the presence of evil in a world created by the God of Christianity?

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

@Nathan: why is it more difficult to reconcile the presence of good in a world created by an evil God than it is to accept the presence of evil in a world created by the God of Christianity?

I think Nathan laid out a fairly clear position. (Italics Nathan's, bold mine.)

I grant that it's not by any means self-evident that creating the universe would give a deity the right to establish moral norms but I don't see where else in a divinely created universe moral norms could have come from, without positing either that the deity that created it is in some way not omnipotent and has less than complete power over it or that the moral norms are not objective. I don't see any options for a theistic universe having any other setup than its creator deity establishing moral norms or morality being entirely subjective, and neither of those provide any real basis on which to call the creator deity 'evil'.

It's not that Nathan finds it impossible for there to be good in a world created by an evil deity, rather Nathan finds it impossible for there to be an objective standard of good and evil under which a creator deity could be deemed evil.

I'd have to disagree with that proposition.  Granted, in a theistic universe it is difficult to see who else would be in a position to judge "absolute good" but "relative good" doesn't require deific omniscience to determine.  Relative good involves acting upon others in a manner that is mutually beneficial whenever such an option exists.  In that sense, it would be possible for a creator deity to be evil if ey acts in its own benefit to the harm of others, even when a action that would be beneficial to both exists.