Josh,
The path of this conversation is a good example of the complaint I have been registering with you often as of late. I am weary of having my own ideas or categories assimilated into your own systems of thought. If I say goodness, and do not find it useful to specify ontological or moral, it is because I do not think either designation would clarify my position, but that such terms would in fact cloud it. In this instance, I suggested that humanity is such that God does not deserve human obedience merely by virtue of His knowledge and His power. There is some quality of worth in man which makes demands of God's character in order to merit his obedience. I suggested that this quality of worth was not simply what man is or what he does. You suggested that I seemed to be referring to ontological rather than moral worth. However, I would consider ontology to be what man is, and morality to be what he does, and yet I believe there is some other seat of worth in humanity unrelated to these things. Therefore I do not find the ontology and morality distinction to be useful. Without the benefit of a similar system (because existentialists do not construct systems the way Aristotelians, for example, do), I can compare this quality of worth to that which a friend sees in another friend when defending him despite everything he has revealed himself to be and everything that he has done, and yet not a defense out of charity, but with recognition of some more esoteric quality in him that deserves defense.
Now, if you find that you must color-code every idea according to your own schema before you can begin to process it, so be it. But to equate such a demand of a concept with the demand for validity or logic is a sure way to see to it that your system never has to change or adapt a new idea; you can just bludgeon it until it is shaped like an old idea.
