The first of these views-the one that thinks God beyond good and evil-is called Pantheism.

The other and opposite idea is that God is quite definitely 'good' or 'righteous.' a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not in another.

We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. Consequently, these people think that long before you got anywhere near the divine point of view the distinction would have disappeared altogether. These people would say that the wiser you become the less you would want to call anything good or bad, and the more clearly you would see that everything is good in one way and bad in another, and that nothing could have been different. But according to some people that is merely our human point of view. We humans call one thing good and another thing bad. One of them is the idea that He is beyond good and evil. There are two very different ideas on this subject. People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in. On this point, Christianity lines up with the majority-lines up with ancient Greeks and Romans, modern savages, Stoics, Platonists, Hindus, Mohammedans, etc., against the modern Western European materialist. The first big division of humanity is into the majority, who believe in some kind of God or gods, and the minority who do not.

As in arithmetic-there is only one right answer to a sum, and all other answers are wrong: but some of the wrong answers are much nearer being right than others. But, of course, being a Christian does mean thinking that where Christianity differs from other religions, Christianity is right and they are wrong. When I was an atheist I had to try to persuade myself that most of the human race have always been wrong about the question that mattered to them most when I became a Christian I was able to take a more liberal view. If you are a Christian, you are free to think that all these religions, even the queerest ones, contain at least some hint of the truth. If you are an atheist you do have to believe that the main point in all the religions of the whole world is simply one huge mistake. If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through. I have been asked to tell you what Christians believe, and I am going to begin by telling you one thing that Christians do not need to believe.

Mere christianity online