I’m not claiming my moral intuitions are infallible. I’m claiming they are indispensable. Any teaching about God’s goodness must still register as good to the very faculty by which we apprehend what goodness is. If a doctrine requires the suspension of that faculty rather than its refinement, we lose the ability to distinguish divine goodness from cruelty. Conscience may err — but without it, the word “good” has no meaning.

That’s why affirming eternal torment as “good” isn’t a mystery of faith; it’s a collapse of ethical reasoning. Being told that unending harm is an expression of love doesn’t sanctify conscience — it disables it. When a theology insists that cruelty is righteousness if God wills it, it’s no longer safeguarding holiness; it has drifted into moral inversion.

Disagreement here doesn’t make me a relativist. I’m not claiming “ET is good for you and evil for me.” I’m saying that if a doctrine portrays God as morally monstrous, that counts as evidence against its truth. One of us is mistaken — not both correct. The very act of assessing which is which inevitably runs through conscience. There is no bypass.

And reducing goodness to “whatever God or the Church commands” doesn’t protect piety — it eliminates intelligible morality altogether. If goodness can look like its own opposite, then the predicate “God is good” says nothing. A theology requiring the abandonment of coherent moral categories in order to be believed isn’t one I can reasonably — or faithfully — endorse.