Untangling Cliché: "God's Justice"

A provocative and (I think) very important question from a friend of mine about God's justice:

I've been going on and on about my ideas about God's justice and Original Sin. My goal is not to continue that particular issue here, but to use Kim's comment as a jumping off point to what I think is a profound question:

How would a person go about legitimately determining if God was just? 

Is it possible for man to even analyze God's actions or messages and make assessments about their justice?

Maybe the safest way to get to the core question is to envision a "parallel universe". What would the god of that universe have to be like such that man could rightly say "god is unjust"? If the god of that other universe demanded the ritual sacrifice of the first born son of every woman on the boy's eighth birthday, would that be by definition 'just', because it was that god's decree? 

Why or why not?

Rem acu tetegisti.  You have touched the matter with a needle.  I think both "original sin" (where it means anything except "sometimes we do not choose to love other people") and "God's justice" are ideas in deep need of abandoning or renovating.

A corollary question: If we take the "ontological" approach and say that "justice is defined as that which God does (or would do) because of who he is," then what new problems are we raising?

The argument often runs like this:

God makes man fallible

Man fails (or does he? We'll assume most here think so)

God condemns man

God forgives man (for things that arguably God has done).

It's like (says this argument) a couple having a son who is flawed, holding him responsible for the flaws (which amounts to holding him responsible for being born), then graciously forgiving him for being born. 

Is that "just"? 

Maybe so, but that argument about the justice of god has never worried me much. 

Certainly as the problem is set up there, God's in the position society itself is in.  "We welcome you, young infant, and whoops, that's some weird shit you pulled there, yet we are merciful so we will continue to welcome you, but dude, get with the program..."  You are born, by virtue of your individuality, in a semi- or at least potentially adversarial relationship with society, and therefore a potential offender against the law of love.

In other words, the parent, like society, and like god (who is the parent and society writ large, whatever else god is) is in an ambivalent relationship with the will of the individual.

So I'm not dismissing this argument against "God's justice" out of hand: but I'm not sold that it's the slam dunk some see it as.  As we human beings define justice (and I'm not sure anybody else has ever defined it), the punished-for-being-what-we-made-you dynamic is intrinsic to being just.

And as I believe that any god will reflect as well as reinforce the values of the culture that produces that god, it's not going too far to say that a god is a culture writ large.  And we do precisely this: punish people for having been born individual and yet, ideally, try to find a way to make use of that individuality.  We condemn what we forgive, and even exploit.   The starkest libertarian still thinks people should use the toilet for the common good.

But then there's the more thorny question of what one means when one says "God is just" in the face of a world where the word "justice" must be defined by us.

I mean the deaths of innocents from disasters and illness that man cannot stop but God can. Sure, sure, we all "deserve death," and are going to get it whether we deserve it or not, but I think the question at the top of this post is raising the legitimate question, If all horror is "just" in that sense, and therefore you and I are incompetent to even talk about justice, what possible sense is there in saying "God is just"?

If we don't even know what justice is, it's meaningless to say "God is just."  Might as well say "God is prfmgnsuths."  We have just as much (or little) understanding of what we mean.

"Hey, God just allowed the deaths of those three thousand Turks in an earthquake! How is that 'just'?"

ANSWER A: "Well, God is just, and God did it / allowed it, so it must be just."

PROBLEM A: Then our perception of justice is so flawed that we haven't the ability to call God either just or unjust.

And that's a pretty serious problem.

ANSWER B: "God's justice is higher than yours. You don't understand it."

PROBLEM B: Then our perception of justice is so flawed that we haven't the ability to call God either just or unjust.

And that's just a dumb place to stand: if I begin by admitting I know nothing about plumbing but then say, "Joe is a great plumber!" I am a noisy gong and a clanging cymbal.  And the same is true if I'm talking about a god and his justice.

In either case, calling God "just" is essentially meaningless, since we have no content with which to talk about what "justice" is? That our talk about God being "just" means simply "We believe that everything will and should work out exactly as it's going to," and absolutely nothing more, and we have no right to squalk when things turn out really, really bad for us?

Or perhaps we'll offer

ANSWER C: Nature is fallen, God didn't do it. God is still just though creation is not.

PROBLEM C: Okay, but God IS stronger than nature, surely? Yet God does NOT want (? or is not able) to stop the earthquake. And that also is just. The parent watches the child wander into the street, knowing that the bus is right on time, and does nothing. And that too must become part of our understanding of "justice."

It's not an easy problem unless one just wants to say "God is just and that's that." Which is fine, but not an answer.