Hey, when I was on the verge of being on the streets at one point in my life I was taken in by people who showed me kindness, compassion and practical help. You can prattle on about how I don't know what anything is and ramble on about "epistemics" et al and how the "heathen" or whatnot are incapable of true altruism until the cows do or don't come home. You strike me as someone who's never been in a position where such aid may have been needed and resemble the pomposity of the legalists in the Bible.
I’ve needed help many times in my life. Some in extreme crises (of both my own making and of overwhelming circumstances beyond my control).
What I’m attempting to represent to you is the fact that kindness (by its explicit definition, not English vagueries) is something you’ve never experienced from unbelievers. They may have had a diminished equivalence that seemed to you to be the fruit of the Spirit, but it was not kindness.
Kindness is chrestotes. It most overarchingly means “useful”, and according to divine order. Whatever the parallel was for these who helped you, it was NOT kindness. That’s how immeasurably greater actual kindness is compared to whatever they demonstrated to you.
And I’m not sure how you would know much about me based on a limited exposure to my writing in this forum venue.
You’re battling against definitions for words, not against me. You’re warring in yourself against God and the Word, and against the Greek source for all meaning that affects everything you think you know. Language is the very foundation of everything for human understanding and expression. You’re demonstrating how diluted and corrupted it all is.
I’m not arguing that what others have done for you wasn’t effective or helpful in a sense of your temporal need. But kindness has non-temporal meaning and usage intrinsic within it. The unbelieving don’t have that within them, so it’s something else.
“Nice” is what it is instead. Nice comes from nescient, meaning mindless. It doesn’t mean people were mindless in helpin you; it means they didn’t do so according to the changed mind that only God can give. So it has NO significance beyond temporality. There is no enduring everlasting non-temporal quality to those actions.
That’s likely sufficient for you relative to those dire situations; but none of that has any significance to God and His eternal standards of character and conduct. The only reason an unbeliever can even accomplish actions such as you describe is because of the latent Imago Dei (image of God) within them that is unresurrected. And it’s all God’s grace directly rather than them being representatives of Jesus Christ.
All these unbelievers are a testament to the grace and mercy of God, for they could not do these things were it not for the latency of His divine created order within them that they deny even in these allegedly good works by their own standards.
