Is this a forum for idol worshipers?
The Torah is full of prohibitions against worshiping other gods, and you ask “whether one should”?
As for psychopaths, there is a special law in the Torah that uniquely advances the punishment of such a person even before he has sinned at all: the stubborn and rebellious son. And you’re still asking whether someone like that should be punished after he has sinned?

Point,
This is not a forum.
There is no discussion here about idol worship.
A stubborn and rebellious son is not a psychopath.

Yosefon,
Socrates asked in the dialogue Euthyphro whether (a) God commands actions because they are good, or (b) they are good because He commands them, but this is a false dilemma. It imagines the good as part of a world of Ideas that exists independently of God, and in effect inserts Him into some entity or mode of being that is logically prior to God and fixes His knowledge—and that is impossible. God apprehends the Ideas (including the good and the exalted) not as something objective existing outside the knower such that His knowledge depends on them, but rather from apprehending His own essence He also apprehends everything that necessarily follows from His essence (the world of Ideas, the laws of logic and mathematics, all possible worlds, and the like).

Therefore there is something justified in Point’s remarks. To worship a god who contemplates the world of Ideas as something independent of him is idolatry, because such a god is not the first cause of reality. On the other hand, the Creator does not invent the Idea of the good arbitrarily, as Muslim theologians who decided in favor of side (b) of the above dilemma claimed (and against whom Maimonides’ wrath was directed).

God cannot act contrary to His rational nature, or in other words: “The Rock, His work is perfect, for all His ways are justice; a God of faithfulness and without iniquity, righteous and upright is He.” But this is not a question about His omnipotence, as some theologians thought, because from the outset omnipotence means the ability to create any possible world, whereas a state of affairs in which God acts contrary to His own nature does not represent a possible world.

Copenhagen,
There is still an assumption here that His nature is imposed on Him (which I agree with). That means the status of the good does not depend on a decision/command of the Holy One, blessed be He (but on His nature). The question whether He could have had a different nature is Yosefon’s question. If His nature is imposed on Him, that means His nature is something prior to Him (not necessarily chronologically). But this really is a discussion that is somewhat hard to conduct.

To the Rabbi,
As I understand it, the very same necessity that rules out a possible world in which God does not exist is what makes it impossible for God, and the laws of mathematics and logic, and the concepts of good that derive from His nature, to have been different from what they are. But I will have to “philosophize” a bit in order to show this.

The question “could God’s nature have been different” presupposes a possible distinction between God’s “I” or self and His nature, but in classical theistic thought (Duties of the Heart, Maimonides, Aquinas, and others) this is a mistaken distinction. What makes it possible to distinguish between the individuality of an object—or, if we follow Aristotle, its matter—and its form is precisely what makes the object in principle cloneable or reproducible. From matter comes the principle of individuation, the thisness of the thing, by virtue of which it is this specific entity and not another entity of the same kind. Form, by contrast, represents a principle that in itself is given over to endless replication. And indeed every form we know in nature that is clothed in matter is in principle reproducible (as distinct from the question whether, in light of the laws of nature, someone does or does not happen to have the ability to do so).

It seems that Maimonides held that immaterial beings such as angels do not possess a Cartesian “I” or any other principle of individuation (like Aristotelian matter) distinct from their essence, and therefore he argued at the beginning of the Laws of the Foundations of the Torah that their essences must differ from one another in accordance with the number of angels. In other words, every angel is identical with its form (every “who is this angel” is identical with “what is this angel”).

In our case the claim is even stronger, because one way or another it has been proven by various arguments that there cannot be more than one necessary being. That is to say, there is no possible world in which the principle of individuation of the necessary being is realized in a different essence, or a world in which His essence is clothed in a different principle of individuation. God is absolutely identical with His form. God’s nature is God Himself. And consequently it follows that it makes no sense to speak of relations of priority or posteriority between them.

The fact that the Ideas follow necessarily and are therefore “imposed” may, in my opinion, be misleading. For, as noted before, there is no other element in God distinct from His nature, for which His nature appears as a prior given; and second, this is not compulsion but will: God כביכול apprehends His nature and knows that it represents the supreme good in itself, and immediately wills it, and it is impossible to will otherwise.

That was the serpent’s cunning claim—that God knows good and evil. And to prevent confusion about the meaning of this, we would need Onkelos to translate it as “great wise ones” (see Nietzsche).
And against this background one must understand what “And God saw that it was good” means. The plain sense is that the good precedes God. Alternatively, one can avoid being too exacting here and say that the Torah merely speaks in human language. Or perhaps it is good for human beings.

But in truth there is certainly no point at all in speaking about God’s nature, and it makes no sense whatsoever to subordinate God to laws or rules of intellect, morality, reason, logic, or any other X whatsoever. Any god with a nature is another god.

Copenhagen, this is interesting—you really think you are carrying out an analysis of God’s nature, and that you are allowed to do so because you are speaking in abstract concepts.

In practice, you are simply talking about yourself. About the “I.” And with all due respect to you, I do not recognize your divinity.

Point,

On the contrary: what I argued is that the standard analysis—which distinguishes between an individual and his nature—cannot be applied to God; that one cannot speak of relations of priority or posteriority in Him; that there is no possible world in which there is more than one God; and that it is not correct to say that He might have been different from what He is.

What remains to be asked is how exactly you managed to derive from those remarks that “in practice I am simply talking about myself.”

Copenhagen,
Even after these arguments, at the bottom line you are still assuming something that Yosefon asked about. You assume that the Holy One, blessed be He, is bound to a certain nature, except that you explain that this is not compulsion in the ordinary sense because He and His nature are one. That changes nothing. The question of whether He could have been otherwise still stands. You answer no, but your explanation is not really an explanation; it is just a restatement of your assumption in different words. Instead of saying that He could not be otherwise, you say that He cannot be defined as something else. But that itself is exactly what Yosefon asked—whether that is indeed so.

As for your claim itself, I do not really understand it. I do not understand the meaning of the expression that He and His nature are one. The nature of something is its character. If He and His nature are one, then there is no nature, only Him. Either way, this is an empty expression. In effect you are saying that there is a nature imposed on Him and only presenting it in different words.
As for the angels, I am not sure one can speak at all about their nature and about them. Some defined angels as forms (as distinct from entities in our world, which are form and matter). That brings us back to my first remark. When one says that He and His nature are one, one is saying that He is form and not a being. But this is unclear to me, because in what sense can one say that He exists and acts? The same applies to angels, of course.

To the Rabbi,

There were thinkers who argued that the “compulsion” on a person to desire happiness is not considered compulsion. Is that an absurd claim?

The prophets say that the Holy One, blessed be He, is bound by His promises; He cannot violate them and cannot change His mind. Theologians will explain that this follows from some necessity, from the impossibility of doing evil, because that is the opposite of who He is as a necessary being. What is the problem with that? In principle it seems that if we have shown that we have arrived at a logical necessity, that satisfies any need for further causal explanations and silences any rational possibility of raising the question “why” once again—we have in fact reached the ultimate explanation.

The statement “He and His nature are one” relies on the Aristotelian assumption according to which a thing’s nature is an actual component of the thing (and not some Idea in which the thing participates), even though it does not reflect the reality of the thing in its entirety. The humanity of Socrates and Aristotle is an actual component in Socrates and Aristotle themselves, which receives particularization through the different bodies in which it is realized and through their private contingent properties. If He and His nature are one, then what remains is only a self-instantiating nature without other principles participating in it (or one could say there is only an individual absolutely identical to his nature and there is no logical distinction between them).

When one views nature as an actual component of the complete thing, there is no problem saying that there could be a boundary case in which only the nature exists without the joining of additional ontological aspects. Similarly regarding angels as forms, the question how they can exist and act is relevant only within a Platonist metaphysics, but not with respect to an Aristotelian metaphysics, which sees form as an actual component in the being of concrete entities with capacities for causal action.

As for compulsion regarding something I would have done anyway, that is a dispute among medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). See the Talmudic Encyclopedia, entry “Ones (duress).” But as far as I am concerned this is a semantic question (depending on whether you define duress as compulsion to do something I would not have done, or as the application of coercion, period).

There is no problem at all with His being bound to what is in His nature. I myself agree with that. He is also bound by the laws of logic.

It is not for nothing that in Aristotelian metaphysics there are no Ideas (they are not entities, but perhaps categories).