Reply To: Theological Conundrum (read at your own risk)

Ok. Thank you everyone for your responses, even though I still think no one actually answered my questions. A couple of people suggested that it makes sense to serve Hashem out of love. I never denied that. In fact I mentioned that in my first post. The point is that if the only reason to serve Hashem out of love is that you feel good about it, then that means that it is completely up to you to decide how to serve Hashem, and if you don’t want to serve Him out of love (for whatever reason which you feel overrides the feeling that you will get) then there is no reason why you should do so, since there is no extrinsic value in serving Hashem out of love. Unless you use the Ratzon Haborei argument. But no one has yet explained why you should do the ratzon haborei (assuming it won’t affect reward/punishment). Because that’s why you were created? So what – why should that make you have to or even want to do the ratzon Hashem? Unless you fall onto the love/hakaras hatov argument. Which is back where we started. And this is all besides for the question of why you should love/have gratitude to Hashem. Maybe you’re a bad person if you don’t. But why shouldn’t you be a bad person?