Thoughts on the Problem of Evil, Logic, Science and how it affects our Faith
- Thread starter Dizerner
- Start date
Dizerner
Well-known member
The problem of evil is a tricky problem to navigate I’ve not felt anyone I’ve heard has handled really clearly or well. Basically, it is defined as asking how can God be good and still allow unspeakably horrible things. There are different ways we can try to reconcile or make a picture of God without making God, himself, evil. There are wrong ways to reconcile it that put the desire for evil in God, instead of the desire for the possibility of evil; and there are wrong ways to reconcile God’s character that water down the apparent importance of God’s allowing the possibility of evil, by saying the solution is because all things eventually work out for good or are as minimally bad as possible by God factoring in calculations of the future. (When people subconsciously do not want the possibility itself to be the sole reason for evil there will end up being evils that have no redemptive value, victims that never had a chance with nothing redeemable from their suffering, which makes this logical defense fail). The principle of free autonomous choice in the creation is intrinsic to defending God’s ability to be seen as good, but it will not be a good that may inherently seem to us as good because of the effect of sin on us, which makes humanity the center of valuation instead of God, which is idolatry. Without a source or grounding of value we as humanity or any creation is actually worthless in itself, which if we deny we try to become a source of praiseworthiness, which is pride. The holiness of God involves delegated responsibility and judgment for reasons that we don’t easily see as virtuous or worthwhile to fallen creatures who don’t realize that God is the center of all value, not us. The problem of evil is a tricky problem to navigate I’ve not felt anyone I’ve heard has handled really clearly or well. Basically, it is defined as asking how can God be good and still allow unspeakably horrible things. There are different ways we can try to reconcile or make a picture of God without making God, himself, evil. There are wrong ways to reconcile it that put the desire for evil in God, instead of the desire for the possibility of evil; and there are wrong ways to reconcile God’s character that water down the apparent importance of God’s allowing the possibility of evil, by saying the solution is because all things eventually work out for good or are as minimally bad as possible by God factoring in calculations of the future. (When people subconsciously do not want the possibility itself to be the sole reason for evil there will end up being evils that have no redemptive value, victims that never had a chance with nothing redeemable from their suffering, which makes this logical defense fail). The principle of free autonomous choice in the creation is intrinsic to defending God’s ability to be seen as good, but it will not be a good that may inherently seem to us as good because of the effect of sin on us, which makes humanity the center of valuation instead of God, which is idolatry. Without a source or grounding of value we as humanity or any creation is actually worthless in itself, which if we deny we try to become a source of praiseworthiness, which is pride. The holiness of God involves delegated responsibility and judgment for reasons that we don’t easily see as virtuous or worthwhile to fallen creatures who don’t realize that God is the center of all value, not us.
The devil definitely actively wants to project false pictures of who God is to us to create fear and blasphemy in us. So the two wrong ways of reconciling the character of God are putting the desire for evil in his heart, which would include God deliberately making evil things for any purpose, and also secondly saying that the possibility of evil is only being created for some higher eventual good, which are really attempts at lessening the import of how the possibility of evil offends us. Classically we are told freedom is necessary for love and the expression of moral good, since something forced does not have a god-like creative choice to doing it; that is, a good intention or desire done freely has one more good thing to it than forced good; however there are counters to weighing the good of this over the bad it necessarily allows. The bad choice in original sin ends up in opening almost endless-seeming bad. Where the problem of evil seems difficult is that God could have stopped it, so what possible reason could he have. We can solve this too easily by simply saying God wanted evil to happen. But the Bible is full of God not getting things he wanted. If the Bible is about only God getting his purposes, why is God so often described as deeply sad (even to the point of weeping) or even incredibly angry (to the point of killing) at the free choices of people, even though he didn’t want it and sought intercessors, even sacrificing himself to be the “glue” of redemption. Thus “free will" seems to have a prominent place in the narrative of Scripture itself, because we see permissions and reactions. In fact to understand the goodness of God and correct our ready misperception of the character of God in the Bible where he seems harsh we need to always remember that the evil that was judged was never judged quickly, rashly or when it was a light evil; in every single case there was extreme patience and extreme evil.
Since the intent of the action shows the real meaning and substance of it, there is an invisible world behind just the material things we do; trying to murder someone but ending up saving their life does not make it a good action. The value components behind actions and how we perceive them are spiritual, that is, not readily apparent because they have supernatural value components only discernible with supernatural help. This is why violent/sexual depictions in Scripture can actually be holy, yet similar things can be demonic in a worldly context; the spiritual valuations behind them are different (is God glorified, is God’s creation respected, what is the intent, etc.). Self-righteousness and lack of pure love are the sins all sinners have, no matter how nice they look or good they act. This is why the world system is warped by the occultic to view humanistic deeds as the only sign of virtue while criticizing Christians and God for a perceived lack of humanism, while being blind to the fact that they only think they care, to find something that will make them feel better about themself. All the arguments against trying to disprove the spiritual are not logical, because they are making claims above logic, not able to be substantiated underneath somewhere, and then just hiding that fact to deceive by pretending logic to be their framework. Like saying you are not smart if you believe in something smartness cannot apprehend; that makes no sense, in fact it is self-defeating, it would be stupid. So the first line of defense the devil has is the deception that human logic must be able to confirm truth, and that is false, that is pride, our own salvation and source. When we think about “being nice” as morality it really hides a world of evil underneath, because the niceness in the end is just superficial outward conformity that looks and feels good with no real substance underneath. We cannot measure externally how a person is doing, otherwise healthy would mean happy, but it’s not so, because many have depression and take their lives while perfectly outwardly fine. Harm can be in the spiritual realm as violent as physical harm when there is no physical harm happening.
So seeing that the motivations are intrinsic to the character of an action, what then makes the suffering God inflicts not evil to do? It’s his motivation for it, since suffering is sometimes the result of both judgment and evil combined. Evil wants things to suffer. God does not. Evil always wants to make God seem evil, that is, not doing bad for the purpose of some kind of response to something someone does, but rather just because God likes to make people suffer, the conflation of judgment and cruelty. If some free bad action in some way is a precursor and reason to the evil things that happen, it was not done because God wanted to do evil. We may think judgments can be evil if we think they are too harsh or too strict, but that is a “judgment call” that is difficult for us to make or understand because of the dynamics of how the heart works and measuring its evil towards God. Now morality is not just being a nice or good person according to our own estimation, so in fact we don’t even really know what morality is; in fact, real morality is sourced from holiness towards God alone, some conformance to a kind of spiritual perfection towards God, not just based on humanitarian altruism. We need help to even understand. Our real sinfulness is not just in how nicely we treat other people, but some attitudes of pure valuation towards God and what God values, whatever that is. We can’t even see it without his help. God is the center, not people. God could ask us to do something that seems evil but if we trust his heart we know in the end he means it for good; but society only looks for something that benefits the whole by their common valuations of mutual self-interest. Often apologists point out that without a standard of good and evil we can’t even decry God as evil; but if God is evil, why would God allow any good at all to exist? Our very offense at God over allowing evil shows we are missing something; it first seems because only a God somewhere good could allow good to even exist anywhere at all; but he could be some inconsistent or trickster God. But our real source of offense in God is in either a self-centered idolatry that we don’t want God to have made us victims somewhere; or impure love that is idolizing other humans’ value over God’s ideals of morality and justice based on delegation and free will; or else a lie about God’s character, that everything that happens is what God wanted, which denies God’s creation of autonomy (not seeing what virtue he finds in it). It could be that it’s virtue is reflecting something good about God’s character or glorifies God in some way. It could be desirous and pleasing to God because in the Trinity itself is trust and dependence. It’s difficult to ponder the question from a center other than our own feelings of selfish fear.
Some theology resorts to saying God desired the actualization of evil to display his full attributes, others say God valued the possibility of free love even if it necessitated the possibility of evil. Where we find a logical confusion very often is the conflation of possibility and desire. Can you desire the possibility of something without it’s actualization? For what purpose would that be? In the case of allowing the possibility of a freely done good action which necessitates the possibility of choosing something bad, we still run into difficulties, because we can theorize the possibility of choosing good even without the possibility of evil by some kind of virtualization or immediate prevention (like giving us guns that have blanks, we think they are loaded, and immediately killing us if we use them, no other harm is done). If a parent sees a child beating on a fellow sibling they don’t consider it virtuous to let the child keep beating them as long as they want, even if they punish them afterwards. A policeman will stop a rape if it is encountered in progress, even if it requires self-sacrifice. But why would God who in some sense never “leaves home” in his ever-present ability to intervene see fit to put things beyond his own control for awhile as it were, or choose to act contrary to his desire, in essence standing by and watching passively horrific crimes. We give humans a pass for “allowing” it when we deem them in some way “unable” to help. So what God values in free will seems a bit mysteriously hard to quantify or describe the virtue of, and on two levels at that, personally and corporately. (As a bit of an aside some argue that because God knew what they would choose, God in fact chose their choice, but in reality God just forced us to choose; we may not like that we had to choose, but we still choose, we can’t pass the buck, except if you want to see God as co-choosing by allowing our choice.)
After all, what is the virtue of letting people hurt other people? What is the moral or holy positive benefit derived from what all humans would describe as reckless and irresponsible if they were to allow fellow humans that power, especially knowing already the character or outcome is unfavorable? A government law enforcement doesn’t stop all crimes because it can’t stop them all, but God does not have that limitation. Where can we find the virtue in a parent letting one child beat the other to a pulp, while they are sitting in the room watching and being stronger? Can we find a virtue somewhere? In freedom, we instinctively think of ideas of trust, morality, friendship, love, goodness and in some sense I think holiness (God’s specialness). Some people even object to having a choice thrusted upon themselves, as we mentioned, but choosing for someone else seems even more offensive because it seems even more unjust and irresponsible to allow more possibility of harm by this delegated responsibility, since one can effect many (cf. Eze. 18 yet 33). For the origin of evil, the Bible simply says “an enemy has done this” and of that enemy it says he was perfect until iniquity was found in him (Eze. 28) and he then tempted others, who were said to have been “made upright” (Ecc. 7:29) but then “transgressed the covenant” (Hos. 6:7); so then God-granted autonomous freedom is the source of all evil. This brings responsibility home to us in that God requires something of man to do his part for God’s will to be accomplished (thankfully always with the grace of God’s help), and this is why we can say people who never “get a chance” don’t disprove God being perfectly just, because God expects his delegates to maintain and pass on down the knowledge of him and will judge them for not doing it (if unrepentedly, since Christ allows the potential possibility of subsuming all judgment).
God did not want any of this suffering to happen, the actualization of evil, and there we can anchor down. God is love; but not just and only love; maybe even logically and Biblically we could say not predominantly love, but rather firstly holy, or at least equally holy. So it is not our faulty understanding of love that defines God kind of love, and God’s love is influenced and harmonized with his other attributes, character and rules that flow from his character (which we might theorize flow from his will, being omnipotent, and a higher good). Our love in fact turns out somewhere to only be selfish and idolatrous because everything in the end is not actually for another person’s good, but just how another person’s good makes us feel. That is, our feelings about another person’s good, not the other person’s good in and of itself. We actually don’t really care about the suffering of other people the way we think we do, because we are under levels of deception about our own motivations. When we get angry at God for allowing victims we are in fact taking away all real value those victims have by rebelliously exalting our own desire not to feel bad about it, because we wouldn’t want it to happen to us. We think we are actually being “caring” when in fact we are devaluing God. We often don’t believe that’s true, but it is.
The real objection here is not that God is necessarily only evil by allowing evil, but that God punishes in a way I personally find morally distasteful. That is, to me, the principle of delegation is not worth the risk of allowing excruciating casualties, and I don’t like it. Underneath God being necessarily evil is not the reason that I love people more than God. It’s that I don’t like the feeling I get by watching others suffer. Whatever valuation this is, is not a valuation of God as the source of value. If God doesn’t like to watch suffering, why then would God allow something horrific that God hates? Because somewhere God valued the possibility of allowing it more than the potential actualization he hates. God values free delegated choices for some reason hard for us to see. In the end we don’t like the problem of evil for purely self-centered reasons, not anywhere because of love or a cosmic respect and desire for goodness or justice. We become offended/disbelieving because we don’t like the specific valuations involved, not because we don’t like the suffering itself. In fact, one can accept God’s allowance of suffering and still feel compassion for the victims without being offended at God over it! It makes a lot of difference to see the evil in this world as a consequence of free actions and resultant punishment and not a reflection of God's intrinsic initial desire for his creation. What’s hard is understanding why delegation is valuable and virtuous to God, but we can’t rebel against it or we rebel against God.
Why does it hit us so hard with the feeling God is evil and uncaring, and we want to hate and resist God? We don’t really care about justice or the value of people; we just think we do. We really care about how it makes us feel about ourselves; we don’t like being at the mercy of something else or another being, being the source of all value. In regard to this problem of evil the only thing we need to know is, it’s about trusting God’s character not to be desirous of harm and having reasons sufficient to his valuations, and after this we can only be hoping in his mercy as being unthinkably great as our only chance, and add to that our decision God is worth more than any offense could ever be worth, and realizing our offended feelings are just based in making ourself an idol, our source of value, and in the end we don’t really care the way we think we do about justice or people, because our care is completely superficial about making ourselves not feel any bad emotions over someone else hurting, which superficially seems like compassion but is selfishness. Our supposed care for others that fuels our feelings of offense ends up to really just be care about our warped valuation of our own sinful desire to not have to feel bad about something (I feel pain when X happens), and there is no holy valuation of what God himself values at all, when God is the rightful and only source of all legitimate value, not humans. Offense is all how you feel about it, not caring about the actual morality of the action; the way you feel about it is deceitful in that you think you are upset by some cosmic sense of justice, but in actual reality you only care about how it hits you personally to your own chosen values, not relative to any higher pure sense of justice. You want things a certain way because of how it makes you feel valuable, but making yourself the source of value is actually devaluing God, thus an evil thing, since there can be no real goodness without God, only superficial non-violence.
The devil definitely actively wants to project false pictures of who God is to us to create fear and blasphemy in us. So the two wrong ways of reconciling the character of God are putting the desire for evil in his heart, which would include God deliberately making evil things for any purpose, and also secondly saying that the possibility of evil is only being created for some higher eventual good, which are really attempts at lessening the import of how the possibility of evil offends us. Classically we are told freedom is necessary for love and the expression of moral good, since something forced does not have a god-like creative choice to doing it; that is, a good intention or desire done freely has one more good thing to it than forced good; however there are counters to weighing the good of this over the bad it necessarily allows. The bad choice in original sin ends up in opening almost endless-seeming bad. Where the problem of evil seems difficult is that God could have stopped it, so what possible reason could he have. We can solve this too easily by simply saying God wanted evil to happen. But the Bible is full of God not getting things he wanted. If the Bible is about only God getting his purposes, why is God so often described as deeply sad (even to the point of weeping) or even incredibly angry (to the point of killing) at the free choices of people, even though he didn’t want it and sought intercessors, even sacrificing himself to be the “glue” of redemption. Thus “free will" seems to have a prominent place in the narrative of Scripture itself, because we see permissions and reactions. In fact to understand the goodness of God and correct our ready misperception of the character of God in the Bible where he seems harsh we need to always remember that the evil that was judged was never judged quickly, rashly or when it was a light evil; in every single case there was extreme patience and extreme evil.
Since the intent of the action shows the real meaning and substance of it, there is an invisible world behind just the material things we do; trying to murder someone but ending up saving their life does not make it a good action. The value components behind actions and how we perceive them are spiritual, that is, not readily apparent because they have supernatural value components only discernible with supernatural help. This is why violent/sexual depictions in Scripture can actually be holy, yet similar things can be demonic in a worldly context; the spiritual valuations behind them are different (is God glorified, is God’s creation respected, what is the intent, etc.). Self-righteousness and lack of pure love are the sins all sinners have, no matter how nice they look or good they act. This is why the world system is warped by the occultic to view humanistic deeds as the only sign of virtue while criticizing Christians and God for a perceived lack of humanism, while being blind to the fact that they only think they care, to find something that will make them feel better about themself. All the arguments against trying to disprove the spiritual are not logical, because they are making claims above logic, not able to be substantiated underneath somewhere, and then just hiding that fact to deceive by pretending logic to be their framework. Like saying you are not smart if you believe in something smartness cannot apprehend; that makes no sense, in fact it is self-defeating, it would be stupid. So the first line of defense the devil has is the deception that human logic must be able to confirm truth, and that is false, that is pride, our own salvation and source. When we think about “being nice” as morality it really hides a world of evil underneath, because the niceness in the end is just superficial outward conformity that looks and feels good with no real substance underneath. We cannot measure externally how a person is doing, otherwise healthy would mean happy, but it’s not so, because many have depression and take their lives while perfectly outwardly fine. Harm can be in the spiritual realm as violent as physical harm when there is no physical harm happening.
So seeing that the motivations are intrinsic to the character of an action, what then makes the suffering God inflicts not evil to do? It’s his motivation for it, since suffering is sometimes the result of both judgment and evil combined. Evil wants things to suffer. God does not. Evil always wants to make God seem evil, that is, not doing bad for the purpose of some kind of response to something someone does, but rather just because God likes to make people suffer, the conflation of judgment and cruelty. If some free bad action in some way is a precursor and reason to the evil things that happen, it was not done because God wanted to do evil. We may think judgments can be evil if we think they are too harsh or too strict, but that is a “judgment call” that is difficult for us to make or understand because of the dynamics of how the heart works and measuring its evil towards God. Now morality is not just being a nice or good person according to our own estimation, so in fact we don’t even really know what morality is; in fact, real morality is sourced from holiness towards God alone, some conformance to a kind of spiritual perfection towards God, not just based on humanitarian altruism. We need help to even understand. Our real sinfulness is not just in how nicely we treat other people, but some attitudes of pure valuation towards God and what God values, whatever that is. We can’t even see it without his help. God is the center, not people. God could ask us to do something that seems evil but if we trust his heart we know in the end he means it for good; but society only looks for something that benefits the whole by their common valuations of mutual self-interest. Often apologists point out that without a standard of good and evil we can’t even decry God as evil; but if God is evil, why would God allow any good at all to exist? Our very offense at God over allowing evil shows we are missing something; it first seems because only a God somewhere good could allow good to even exist anywhere at all; but he could be some inconsistent or trickster God. But our real source of offense in God is in either a self-centered idolatry that we don’t want God to have made us victims somewhere; or impure love that is idolizing other humans’ value over God’s ideals of morality and justice based on delegation and free will; or else a lie about God’s character, that everything that happens is what God wanted, which denies God’s creation of autonomy (not seeing what virtue he finds in it). It could be that it’s virtue is reflecting something good about God’s character or glorifies God in some way. It could be desirous and pleasing to God because in the Trinity itself is trust and dependence. It’s difficult to ponder the question from a center other than our own feelings of selfish fear.
Some theology resorts to saying God desired the actualization of evil to display his full attributes, others say God valued the possibility of free love even if it necessitated the possibility of evil. Where we find a logical confusion very often is the conflation of possibility and desire. Can you desire the possibility of something without it’s actualization? For what purpose would that be? In the case of allowing the possibility of a freely done good action which necessitates the possibility of choosing something bad, we still run into difficulties, because we can theorize the possibility of choosing good even without the possibility of evil by some kind of virtualization or immediate prevention (like giving us guns that have blanks, we think they are loaded, and immediately killing us if we use them, no other harm is done). If a parent sees a child beating on a fellow sibling they don’t consider it virtuous to let the child keep beating them as long as they want, even if they punish them afterwards. A policeman will stop a rape if it is encountered in progress, even if it requires self-sacrifice. But why would God who in some sense never “leaves home” in his ever-present ability to intervene see fit to put things beyond his own control for awhile as it were, or choose to act contrary to his desire, in essence standing by and watching passively horrific crimes. We give humans a pass for “allowing” it when we deem them in some way “unable” to help. So what God values in free will seems a bit mysteriously hard to quantify or describe the virtue of, and on two levels at that, personally and corporately. (As a bit of an aside some argue that because God knew what they would choose, God in fact chose their choice, but in reality God just forced us to choose; we may not like that we had to choose, but we still choose, we can’t pass the buck, except if you want to see God as co-choosing by allowing our choice.)
After all, what is the virtue of letting people hurt other people? What is the moral or holy positive benefit derived from what all humans would describe as reckless and irresponsible if they were to allow fellow humans that power, especially knowing already the character or outcome is unfavorable? A government law enforcement doesn’t stop all crimes because it can’t stop them all, but God does not have that limitation. Where can we find the virtue in a parent letting one child beat the other to a pulp, while they are sitting in the room watching and being stronger? Can we find a virtue somewhere? In freedom, we instinctively think of ideas of trust, morality, friendship, love, goodness and in some sense I think holiness (God’s specialness). Some people even object to having a choice thrusted upon themselves, as we mentioned, but choosing for someone else seems even more offensive because it seems even more unjust and irresponsible to allow more possibility of harm by this delegated responsibility, since one can effect many (cf. Eze. 18 yet 33). For the origin of evil, the Bible simply says “an enemy has done this” and of that enemy it says he was perfect until iniquity was found in him (Eze. 28) and he then tempted others, who were said to have been “made upright” (Ecc. 7:29) but then “transgressed the covenant” (Hos. 6:7); so then God-granted autonomous freedom is the source of all evil. This brings responsibility home to us in that God requires something of man to do his part for God’s will to be accomplished (thankfully always with the grace of God’s help), and this is why we can say people who never “get a chance” don’t disprove God being perfectly just, because God expects his delegates to maintain and pass on down the knowledge of him and will judge them for not doing it (if unrepentedly, since Christ allows the potential possibility of subsuming all judgment).
God did not want any of this suffering to happen, the actualization of evil, and there we can anchor down. God is love; but not just and only love; maybe even logically and Biblically we could say not predominantly love, but rather firstly holy, or at least equally holy. So it is not our faulty understanding of love that defines God kind of love, and God’s love is influenced and harmonized with his other attributes, character and rules that flow from his character (which we might theorize flow from his will, being omnipotent, and a higher good). Our love in fact turns out somewhere to only be selfish and idolatrous because everything in the end is not actually for another person’s good, but just how another person’s good makes us feel. That is, our feelings about another person’s good, not the other person’s good in and of itself. We actually don’t really care about the suffering of other people the way we think we do, because we are under levels of deception about our own motivations. When we get angry at God for allowing victims we are in fact taking away all real value those victims have by rebelliously exalting our own desire not to feel bad about it, because we wouldn’t want it to happen to us. We think we are actually being “caring” when in fact we are devaluing God. We often don’t believe that’s true, but it is.
The real objection here is not that God is necessarily only evil by allowing evil, but that God punishes in a way I personally find morally distasteful. That is, to me, the principle of delegation is not worth the risk of allowing excruciating casualties, and I don’t like it. Underneath God being necessarily evil is not the reason that I love people more than God. It’s that I don’t like the feeling I get by watching others suffer. Whatever valuation this is, is not a valuation of God as the source of value. If God doesn’t like to watch suffering, why then would God allow something horrific that God hates? Because somewhere God valued the possibility of allowing it more than the potential actualization he hates. God values free delegated choices for some reason hard for us to see. In the end we don’t like the problem of evil for purely self-centered reasons, not anywhere because of love or a cosmic respect and desire for goodness or justice. We become offended/disbelieving because we don’t like the specific valuations involved, not because we don’t like the suffering itself. In fact, one can accept God’s allowance of suffering and still feel compassion for the victims without being offended at God over it! It makes a lot of difference to see the evil in this world as a consequence of free actions and resultant punishment and not a reflection of God's intrinsic initial desire for his creation. What’s hard is understanding why delegation is valuable and virtuous to God, but we can’t rebel against it or we rebel against God.
Why does it hit us so hard with the feeling God is evil and uncaring, and we want to hate and resist God? We don’t really care about justice or the value of people; we just think we do. We really care about how it makes us feel about ourselves; we don’t like being at the mercy of something else or another being, being the source of all value. In regard to this problem of evil the only thing we need to know is, it’s about trusting God’s character not to be desirous of harm and having reasons sufficient to his valuations, and after this we can only be hoping in his mercy as being unthinkably great as our only chance, and add to that our decision God is worth more than any offense could ever be worth, and realizing our offended feelings are just based in making ourself an idol, our source of value, and in the end we don’t really care the way we think we do about justice or people, because our care is completely superficial about making ourselves not feel any bad emotions over someone else hurting, which superficially seems like compassion but is selfishness. Our supposed care for others that fuels our feelings of offense ends up to really just be care about our warped valuation of our own sinful desire to not have to feel bad about something (I feel pain when X happens), and there is no holy valuation of what God himself values at all, when God is the rightful and only source of all legitimate value, not humans. Offense is all how you feel about it, not caring about the actual morality of the action; the way you feel about it is deceitful in that you think you are upset by some cosmic sense of justice, but in actual reality you only care about how it hits you personally to your own chosen values, not relative to any higher pure sense of justice. You want things a certain way because of how it makes you feel valuable, but making yourself the source of value is actually devaluing God, thus an evil thing, since there can be no real goodness without God, only superficial non-violence.
Dizerner
Well-known member
God loves the victims with a purity and intensity we couldn’t even dream of or ever produce, and we are in fact deceived when we think we love victims more than God does, because we are not seeing our real motives, and we end up in complete self-righteous blindness about what is really love and what we are really valuing, and our evil heart adds one more evil in thinking it is good to pridefully make itself the source of value, to avoid judgment for sin, and to perpetrate one more evil thing in hypocrisy, and we really think we are more good than God is, because we would let everybody avoid suffering, yet by doing so we reject God as the only and real source of all value thus accepting the only thing left, a source of evil values that really ends up giving humans no actual value at all, because real care can only come from a source that is capable of giving it, and humans laterally valuing themselves end up worthless with no real source of value, in fact they are connected to evil because of original sin, which ends up in their being completely self-destructive in their deception about what is good. God loves the victims with a purity and intensity we couldn’t even dream of or ever produce, and we are in fact deceived when we think we love victims more than God does, because we are not seeing our real motives, and we end up in complete self-righteous blindness about what is really love and what we are really valuing, and our evil heart adds one more evil in thinking it is good to pridefully make itself the source of value, to avoid judgment for sin, and to perpetrate one more evil thing in hypocrisy, and we really think we are more good than God is, because we would let everybody avoid suffering, yet by doing so we reject God as the only and real source of all value thus accepting the only thing left, a source of evil values that really ends up giving humans no actual value at all, because real care can only come from a source that is capable of giving it, and humans laterally valuing themselves end up worthless with no real source of value, in fact they are connected to evil because of original sin, which ends up in their being completely self-destructive in their deception about what is good.
Fighting God because he seems evil feels superficially just, but is building our own sense of right and wrong and making it our god (some connect this to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but that’s askew, because it’s not wrong to know what is evil, only to think you can determine it). Moralism, socialism, altruism, humanism, niceness, being and doing good, all end up actually being evil because of the deception of the real motivations in doing it not having any real referent to what is truly valuable, for all valuation that abandons God as the source ultimately ends in something Satanic and sinful, something that devalues God and underneath will not be a genuine care, no matter how much the mind is persuaded it is by a powerful deception, because it will always end up in a destructive over-valuation of our own feelings of self-valuation that lead to destruction on all levels because this is all that’s left without a source, deception and devaluation, all the while thinking we are caring where we don’t, and thinking God is evil and we are good. This is why the Cross is the center of the universe by having all redemptive value, and the complete focus of the expression of value from God by using the only currency that has value: God, himself; we are, in fact, spiritual beings polarized around God, for or against. And all the negative things we experience are all sourced in the original sin of Satan and Adam in a cascading, snowballing effect, even things like natural disasters and toothaches. (It seems likely natural disasters never happened before the fall, because they can not be considered “very good.” Maybe the earth was kept in a kind of artificial stasis.)
So we conclude it's naturally offensive that one person's sin might affect another innocent person, and this is why people reject original sin. If we just look around and are actually honest we have to conclude there is something offensive about God to our normal feelings. Regeneration is the only thing that can cure these feelings. When we discuss any problem of evil, it always gets emotional and that's the real problem. Even angels weren’t cursed without their own individual choices, and the feeling of fairness and justice is strong in us to drive us away from Scriptural teachings on hell and original sin. We will always have a natural revulsion to such teachings. Once we see God allows evil to even exist, we've crossed the line to an offensive God. So many objections you hear even from Christians can sound like atheists. Yet can we just take Scriptures and proclaim they are true even if we can't logically justify them? Maybe the point of Job is that God transcends logic; many atheists think even with the "behind the scenes" information, it's still just as evil and immoral of God. I think it would help to boil the problem of evil and suffering down to simply looking at it in an equation rather than using emotive pictures. If the Biblical hell exists, it's by far the most offensive thing, and far worse than even the very worst life on earth. After all, original sin teaches both the victim and the bully are both sinners, and will suffer in hell without receiving the bread of life. Scripture simply says "without revelation and regeneration you will not have a proper attitude toward God," despite the fact that we all seem like victims in so many ways
Why would God treat humans so poorly if they are so special? I don't know but does God really owe us anything (pointing to value source again)? I certainly don't think he can be all-loving in the sense that some people mean, because although I think you can show that he can be fundamentally desirous of all things to prosper, if that were the only desire he had, there would never be anything imperfect allowed to exist. Heaven is really what we all are looking for, and the Bible says it only comes in one way. Christ said those on "whom the tower fell," although perhaps very unlucky in life, really had one main problem above all others—their personal sin against a holy God. How can we factor in all things everywhere and whether God acts justly or whether something happens we don't like? And really suffering is just defined by "that which I do not like." Evil, on the other hand, is the desire to steal, kill and destroy. If God's judgments are just holy retribution but not something he desired to happen, they become an “evil” qualitatively different than an evil that simply wants to get right to the destruction without any testing or care for morality. Perhaps the lesson of Job is that the paradoxical and offensive logic that God could allow something we don't like is less important than the fact that we need to find some way to be found right with God, to please him and be holy. And just as the Father taught this in the Old Testament, so did the Son teach it in the New. If I'm right with God, I can have peace in a hurricane, volcano, tornado, nuclear war, torture, or sickness. As for victims, it may in the end be impossible to understand why God offers a choice to some that he doesn’t offer others, or why he can use a supernatural miracle at one time but not another, because the fall made a dynamic of grace being affected by free will in a way even beyond our ability to understand, with grace reaching people unequally.
The real trap here seems our insatiable desire to be able to understand and logically see and explain the reasons for all our beliefs, as some kind of illusory ground of certainty, instead of direct revelation from God, the only way we could know something supernatural. It’s humility to start with what we are revealed to know and not insist that we must connect the logical dots behind to fully understand it before we will really put our trust in it. We lose the ground of starting what we know and building off of that, into looking at the million things we don’t know or are difficult to explain or understand. For example, understanding how people were spiritually saved under the Old Testament is very, very difficult, yet under the New Testament we are given clear explanations of trust and belief in Jesus as a substitutionary Savior bearing our sinfulness. Because we can’t understand easily the former, should we begin to doubt the latter? The foundation of logic and reason being incapable of grasping spiritual things, is a deceitful security that panders to our pride and fear in wanting to be the source of our own security, and there is no doubt this opens us to the evil spirits wanting use all the unknowns to try to deceive and distract us from the knowns, and hide inside those logic traps where our own understanding falls short. The right foundation is that the Bible is somehow supernatural and above the understanding and the Spirit of God uses it to communicate, enlighten and enliven us. We start with the knowledge there is a spiritual realm and God is by our faith directly interacting with us, and with that as a check and balance we can trust our experiential walk with God, confirmations, voices, feelings, perceptions, and see what spirits are not of God. This is why the apologetics ministry as a whole seems invalid, although God can still use it; we don’t have to know everything or explain our beliefs in the natural; “giving a reason” as Peter said is not intellectual justification, but being able to explain what the Gospel means in its simplicity.
Logic and words are impossible to be the basement of reality, because we don’t even know how our minds, souls and spirits interact with them; because any word can mean anything in a person’s thoughts, and logic is limited by the unknown limitations of understanding what it even says or means. Consciousness, being only personally experienced, is unable to be explained, externally confirmed, or seemingly shared. Logic can’t justify or defend itself by its own rules because it would be circular reasoning, without an outside source of validation, unless we just throw in random exceptions to make it work, and then we can’t define it. It is logically possible to illustrate its own limitations and recursive paradoxes. If there is something beyond logic/science how could logic/science ever address it? What these acknowledgments do is put us into the realm of trust where we need help from God and to constantly check our integrity towards him. In this sense, because every human has real limitations and there is no way to apprehend ultimate reality on our own, everyone necessarily has blind faith in the unknowns until God reveals it to him or her. On our own we can only guess whether there is something more. Although regularity is observable we could never know all the rules. You can’t just hold in your mind what you have to hold in your heart; there is an actual spiritual substance to truths. Our human pride and fear doesn’t like not understanding how something works and not making sure everything adds up in our own estimation. Supernatural things are not possible to fully understand and that frustrates our sinful tendency to rely on ourselves. We should rather turn to trust and relationship, experience and prayer, to learn how God would guide us.
But the real hub then becomes all about original sin and it’s solution in faith in the Cross-work, and our real fundamental nature being a spiritual thing we are blinded to without outside help. And in that we will feel threatened that science can actually interact and threaten our very faith by disproving the possibility of one original man and woman or an instantaneous creation. Although science seems to point to creation having an initial point where the laws of physics as we know them can no longer apply, and also humans at one point having two original ancestors, both of which accord with the Bible’s record, there is a very big logical difficulty in the order of sin and creation, because death and suffering would be around before human beings existed to bring in the curse. The meta DNA of the universe consisting in the laws and materials it was made of would have eventuated in everything we see because we can see no causal break in the chain of events projecting into the past. This makes it hard to take a literal interpretation of the creation account because everything would not be made very good, but in fact with sickness, violence, mutations and other imperfections and suffering. Original sin is a necessary truth for the Gospel to be true because the whole point of Christ is to undo the curse of our sin nature and the curse upon all creation. Original sin requires that all humans have an original ancestor they derive from that sinned and passed down that disconnected evil nature to all of them. How could this happen then?
We could posit several scenarios that meet this criteria but none of them will fit the literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3; it would become more symbolic and allegorical in most parts, just conveying to us fundamental true ideas. Adam and Eve could have existed in some garden in a heavenly dimension apart from this creation and their fall then was the catalyst that started the big bang. This way creation would include elements of sin and redemption from its very onset. Creation could have been made with imperfections because God used his foreknowledge to see that humans would indeed sin and so applied the curse proactively before humans ever came around. Or another possibility is two were treated specially and by some emergent properties develop an awareness of higher things and have the capacity to know about God, perceiving spiritual things. These two could have been in a kind of protected bubble sheltered from the suffering in the rest of the world until they were kicked out by their sin. This could be supported by the passage they were expelled to till the ground from which they came, which might imply they did not actually come from the ground of Eden. (Some argue that they had not eaten the Tree of Life yet which would have propelled them to some further heavenly state, however it’s also possible they were already eating of it to stay alive which would make more sense if life was connected to fellowship with God. Making the garden a means for man to choose and improve himself smacks of some kind of self-enhancement of man’s glory, after all there is nothing better and higher than intimate fellowship with God.) Evolution itself then could be a result of the fall and curse of sin, in some clever creative way. This seems reinforced when one thinks that the principles of evolution—competitive selfish dominance of the gene pool, suffering and violence, a seeming lack of care and meaning for life—that evolutionists love to use as an argument against a loving God, could in fact, be the punishment of sin in some way, and illustrative of what sin even represents at it's core, the banishment to evil and futility that still contains within it redemptive elements—given us in the picture of the death and resurrection of Spring, the night and morning of the circadian rhythm, the metamorphosis of the lowly caterpillar in "resurrection," the nurturing spirit of mothers towards the innocent young, the rewards of love and reproducing. And we have signs of our origin itself being cursed—our reproductive system itself being inextricably tied in with our toxic waste system, our painful birth and inevitable death. Perhaps creation itself is telling us more of a story that aligns with Sin and Redemption than we might at first perceive, intense suffering and selfishness combined with a longing and a hope for a better existence. The knowledge of good and evil then might be thought to contain within the evil of that rebellion and exile the good of a redemption in Christ—and put us into an experience and a creation the essence of which, where the heaven of redemptive hope in Jesus marries the hell of our rebellion, and has a baby; where justice is hard to discern in that all men are born from the dirt of the ground as sinners and victims to arbitrary suffering, yet given a hope in the Great Seed of Christ's death for sin, a transformation from the common, the lowly, the sinful, the painful, into something more glorious than our lowly existence could even imagine, as the amoeba could never begin to fathom our own feelings, for as C. S. Lewis said, if we find within us a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, we might well conclude we weren’t made for this world. We are, after all, the scientists tell us, the very dust of the stars, our elements being formed in their pressure and explosion—within the oven of past saints and sinners tested lives, exploded the autonomous sin, righteousness and faith of redemption that created the very elements of the Story of Redemption that are the components that make up our spiritual life. It no longer seems that evolution as a belief in and of itself is necessarily combative to Biblical doctrines, and we can still believe in original sin, the grace of the incarnation, evil and good spirits, and an afterlife with judgment.
To get back to our source of offense towards God, practical illustrations can show our framework is wrong, because we think our own determinates of value are the ultimate. God’s holy love may have a value system we don’t easily see the value of. If I let someone take responsibility for another for a time, we generally don’t see it as evil unless we know the outcome. Our lack of knowing and power make us unable to monitor everyone, and thus we consider it an adequate excuse for allowing others to harm others; but in reality we don’t exhaust ourselves trying to stop it, so we give ourselves some excuse and expect far more of God without compunction. In what context is giving a person responsibility over others morally wrong or unloving and how can I determine it? For what purpose would it really offend me that someone did that? How could I logically demonstrate it as an unloving thing to do? My definition of love would have to extend beyond just caring into how the care is applied. But if we redefine caring beyond anything I can relate to as caring, such as being cruel, how can it be considered caring? When is love no longer caring? But God could delegate responsibility and still care immensely. The question is what is the virtue of delegation and why is it so hard for us to see? Why did God just not create those who will freely reject to spare them? If what they do is evil, then they don’t deserve that consideration anyway, so why not just create them? Love seeks not its own; meaning not that God does not seek his own glory and laws to be enforced, but that God seeks that others be persuaded to conform to his own laws and glory for their benefit. God being selfless cannot mean he gives up some fundamental valuations of himself. In this case, would it be unloving of God to not create things and not allow them to self-express as evil? We only want to somehow spare them the punishment and think that is loving to do, but in fact, it seems like in the end it is a loving thing to not love evil, because evil is completely against real love so its existence is always contrary to the purposes of love. Therefore perhaps it is virtuous to allow evil self-expression to ultimately be destroyed because this freedom is somehow a virtue of God’s goodness, and freedom expresses something important about and to God, the possibility of being like him in some way, expressing something of him. We might think that if we were humble we would admit both that we cannot and should not determine valuations anyway, and just be more overwhelmed that in light of our intrinsic feeling and knowing of doing or being something wrong somewhere God could possibly have anything to do with us at all. But there’s an element of scariness in the trust level this entails, and it seems our most basic motivations are wrapped up in pride and fear, especially when we see a very huge evidence that seems to require too big a level of faith; and in fact, it seems God does not even require this ultimate level of faith from us, just using the best our faith can do and asking for his help in humility.
In the end, once we see this problem does not make God unloving even though it reminds us of his more reverential and fearful attributes, we realize it is evil to focus on evil itself, because all good is focused in the redemption from evil and eventual freedom from it, so we need to forget all the casualties that evil has left behind and only focus on that good that Christ has brought us that will last forever.
Fighting God because he seems evil feels superficially just, but is building our own sense of right and wrong and making it our god (some connect this to the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, but that’s askew, because it’s not wrong to know what is evil, only to think you can determine it). Moralism, socialism, altruism, humanism, niceness, being and doing good, all end up actually being evil because of the deception of the real motivations in doing it not having any real referent to what is truly valuable, for all valuation that abandons God as the source ultimately ends in something Satanic and sinful, something that devalues God and underneath will not be a genuine care, no matter how much the mind is persuaded it is by a powerful deception, because it will always end up in a destructive over-valuation of our own feelings of self-valuation that lead to destruction on all levels because this is all that’s left without a source, deception and devaluation, all the while thinking we are caring where we don’t, and thinking God is evil and we are good. This is why the Cross is the center of the universe by having all redemptive value, and the complete focus of the expression of value from God by using the only currency that has value: God, himself; we are, in fact, spiritual beings polarized around God, for or against. And all the negative things we experience are all sourced in the original sin of Satan and Adam in a cascading, snowballing effect, even things like natural disasters and toothaches. (It seems likely natural disasters never happened before the fall, because they can not be considered “very good.” Maybe the earth was kept in a kind of artificial stasis.)
So we conclude it's naturally offensive that one person's sin might affect another innocent person, and this is why people reject original sin. If we just look around and are actually honest we have to conclude there is something offensive about God to our normal feelings. Regeneration is the only thing that can cure these feelings. When we discuss any problem of evil, it always gets emotional and that's the real problem. Even angels weren’t cursed without their own individual choices, and the feeling of fairness and justice is strong in us to drive us away from Scriptural teachings on hell and original sin. We will always have a natural revulsion to such teachings. Once we see God allows evil to even exist, we've crossed the line to an offensive God. So many objections you hear even from Christians can sound like atheists. Yet can we just take Scriptures and proclaim they are true even if we can't logically justify them? Maybe the point of Job is that God transcends logic; many atheists think even with the "behind the scenes" information, it's still just as evil and immoral of God. I think it would help to boil the problem of evil and suffering down to simply looking at it in an equation rather than using emotive pictures. If the Biblical hell exists, it's by far the most offensive thing, and far worse than even the very worst life on earth. After all, original sin teaches both the victim and the bully are both sinners, and will suffer in hell without receiving the bread of life. Scripture simply says "without revelation and regeneration you will not have a proper attitude toward God," despite the fact that we all seem like victims in so many ways
Why would God treat humans so poorly if they are so special? I don't know but does God really owe us anything (pointing to value source again)? I certainly don't think he can be all-loving in the sense that some people mean, because although I think you can show that he can be fundamentally desirous of all things to prosper, if that were the only desire he had, there would never be anything imperfect allowed to exist. Heaven is really what we all are looking for, and the Bible says it only comes in one way. Christ said those on "whom the tower fell," although perhaps very unlucky in life, really had one main problem above all others—their personal sin against a holy God. How can we factor in all things everywhere and whether God acts justly or whether something happens we don't like? And really suffering is just defined by "that which I do not like." Evil, on the other hand, is the desire to steal, kill and destroy. If God's judgments are just holy retribution but not something he desired to happen, they become an “evil” qualitatively different than an evil that simply wants to get right to the destruction without any testing or care for morality. Perhaps the lesson of Job is that the paradoxical and offensive logic that God could allow something we don't like is less important than the fact that we need to find some way to be found right with God, to please him and be holy. And just as the Father taught this in the Old Testament, so did the Son teach it in the New. If I'm right with God, I can have peace in a hurricane, volcano, tornado, nuclear war, torture, or sickness. As for victims, it may in the end be impossible to understand why God offers a choice to some that he doesn’t offer others, or why he can use a supernatural miracle at one time but not another, because the fall made a dynamic of grace being affected by free will in a way even beyond our ability to understand, with grace reaching people unequally.
The real trap here seems our insatiable desire to be able to understand and logically see and explain the reasons for all our beliefs, as some kind of illusory ground of certainty, instead of direct revelation from God, the only way we could know something supernatural. It’s humility to start with what we are revealed to know and not insist that we must connect the logical dots behind to fully understand it before we will really put our trust in it. We lose the ground of starting what we know and building off of that, into looking at the million things we don’t know or are difficult to explain or understand. For example, understanding how people were spiritually saved under the Old Testament is very, very difficult, yet under the New Testament we are given clear explanations of trust and belief in Jesus as a substitutionary Savior bearing our sinfulness. Because we can’t understand easily the former, should we begin to doubt the latter? The foundation of logic and reason being incapable of grasping spiritual things, is a deceitful security that panders to our pride and fear in wanting to be the source of our own security, and there is no doubt this opens us to the evil spirits wanting use all the unknowns to try to deceive and distract us from the knowns, and hide inside those logic traps where our own understanding falls short. The right foundation is that the Bible is somehow supernatural and above the understanding and the Spirit of God uses it to communicate, enlighten and enliven us. We start with the knowledge there is a spiritual realm and God is by our faith directly interacting with us, and with that as a check and balance we can trust our experiential walk with God, confirmations, voices, feelings, perceptions, and see what spirits are not of God. This is why the apologetics ministry as a whole seems invalid, although God can still use it; we don’t have to know everything or explain our beliefs in the natural; “giving a reason” as Peter said is not intellectual justification, but being able to explain what the Gospel means in its simplicity.
Logic and words are impossible to be the basement of reality, because we don’t even know how our minds, souls and spirits interact with them; because any word can mean anything in a person’s thoughts, and logic is limited by the unknown limitations of understanding what it even says or means. Consciousness, being only personally experienced, is unable to be explained, externally confirmed, or seemingly shared. Logic can’t justify or defend itself by its own rules because it would be circular reasoning, without an outside source of validation, unless we just throw in random exceptions to make it work, and then we can’t define it. It is logically possible to illustrate its own limitations and recursive paradoxes. If there is something beyond logic/science how could logic/science ever address it? What these acknowledgments do is put us into the realm of trust where we need help from God and to constantly check our integrity towards him. In this sense, because every human has real limitations and there is no way to apprehend ultimate reality on our own, everyone necessarily has blind faith in the unknowns until God reveals it to him or her. On our own we can only guess whether there is something more. Although regularity is observable we could never know all the rules. You can’t just hold in your mind what you have to hold in your heart; there is an actual spiritual substance to truths. Our human pride and fear doesn’t like not understanding how something works and not making sure everything adds up in our own estimation. Supernatural things are not possible to fully understand and that frustrates our sinful tendency to rely on ourselves. We should rather turn to trust and relationship, experience and prayer, to learn how God would guide us.
But the real hub then becomes all about original sin and it’s solution in faith in the Cross-work, and our real fundamental nature being a spiritual thing we are blinded to without outside help. And in that we will feel threatened that science can actually interact and threaten our very faith by disproving the possibility of one original man and woman or an instantaneous creation. Although science seems to point to creation having an initial point where the laws of physics as we know them can no longer apply, and also humans at one point having two original ancestors, both of which accord with the Bible’s record, there is a very big logical difficulty in the order of sin and creation, because death and suffering would be around before human beings existed to bring in the curse. The meta DNA of the universe consisting in the laws and materials it was made of would have eventuated in everything we see because we can see no causal break in the chain of events projecting into the past. This makes it hard to take a literal interpretation of the creation account because everything would not be made very good, but in fact with sickness, violence, mutations and other imperfections and suffering. Original sin is a necessary truth for the Gospel to be true because the whole point of Christ is to undo the curse of our sin nature and the curse upon all creation. Original sin requires that all humans have an original ancestor they derive from that sinned and passed down that disconnected evil nature to all of them. How could this happen then?
We could posit several scenarios that meet this criteria but none of them will fit the literal interpretation of Genesis 1-3; it would become more symbolic and allegorical in most parts, just conveying to us fundamental true ideas. Adam and Eve could have existed in some garden in a heavenly dimension apart from this creation and their fall then was the catalyst that started the big bang. This way creation would include elements of sin and redemption from its very onset. Creation could have been made with imperfections because God used his foreknowledge to see that humans would indeed sin and so applied the curse proactively before humans ever came around. Or another possibility is two were treated specially and by some emergent properties develop an awareness of higher things and have the capacity to know about God, perceiving spiritual things. These two could have been in a kind of protected bubble sheltered from the suffering in the rest of the world until they were kicked out by their sin. This could be supported by the passage they were expelled to till the ground from which they came, which might imply they did not actually come from the ground of Eden. (Some argue that they had not eaten the Tree of Life yet which would have propelled them to some further heavenly state, however it’s also possible they were already eating of it to stay alive which would make more sense if life was connected to fellowship with God. Making the garden a means for man to choose and improve himself smacks of some kind of self-enhancement of man’s glory, after all there is nothing better and higher than intimate fellowship with God.) Evolution itself then could be a result of the fall and curse of sin, in some clever creative way. This seems reinforced when one thinks that the principles of evolution—competitive selfish dominance of the gene pool, suffering and violence, a seeming lack of care and meaning for life—that evolutionists love to use as an argument against a loving God, could in fact, be the punishment of sin in some way, and illustrative of what sin even represents at it's core, the banishment to evil and futility that still contains within it redemptive elements—given us in the picture of the death and resurrection of Spring, the night and morning of the circadian rhythm, the metamorphosis of the lowly caterpillar in "resurrection," the nurturing spirit of mothers towards the innocent young, the rewards of love and reproducing. And we have signs of our origin itself being cursed—our reproductive system itself being inextricably tied in with our toxic waste system, our painful birth and inevitable death. Perhaps creation itself is telling us more of a story that aligns with Sin and Redemption than we might at first perceive, intense suffering and selfishness combined with a longing and a hope for a better existence. The knowledge of good and evil then might be thought to contain within the evil of that rebellion and exile the good of a redemption in Christ—and put us into an experience and a creation the essence of which, where the heaven of redemptive hope in Jesus marries the hell of our rebellion, and has a baby; where justice is hard to discern in that all men are born from the dirt of the ground as sinners and victims to arbitrary suffering, yet given a hope in the Great Seed of Christ's death for sin, a transformation from the common, the lowly, the sinful, the painful, into something more glorious than our lowly existence could even imagine, as the amoeba could never begin to fathom our own feelings, for as C. S. Lewis said, if we find within us a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, we might well conclude we weren’t made for this world. We are, after all, the scientists tell us, the very dust of the stars, our elements being formed in their pressure and explosion—within the oven of past saints and sinners tested lives, exploded the autonomous sin, righteousness and faith of redemption that created the very elements of the Story of Redemption that are the components that make up our spiritual life. It no longer seems that evolution as a belief in and of itself is necessarily combative to Biblical doctrines, and we can still believe in original sin, the grace of the incarnation, evil and good spirits, and an afterlife with judgment.
To get back to our source of offense towards God, practical illustrations can show our framework is wrong, because we think our own determinates of value are the ultimate. God’s holy love may have a value system we don’t easily see the value of. If I let someone take responsibility for another for a time, we generally don’t see it as evil unless we know the outcome. Our lack of knowing and power make us unable to monitor everyone, and thus we consider it an adequate excuse for allowing others to harm others; but in reality we don’t exhaust ourselves trying to stop it, so we give ourselves some excuse and expect far more of God without compunction. In what context is giving a person responsibility over others morally wrong or unloving and how can I determine it? For what purpose would it really offend me that someone did that? How could I logically demonstrate it as an unloving thing to do? My definition of love would have to extend beyond just caring into how the care is applied. But if we redefine caring beyond anything I can relate to as caring, such as being cruel, how can it be considered caring? When is love no longer caring? But God could delegate responsibility and still care immensely. The question is what is the virtue of delegation and why is it so hard for us to see? Why did God just not create those who will freely reject to spare them? If what they do is evil, then they don’t deserve that consideration anyway, so why not just create them? Love seeks not its own; meaning not that God does not seek his own glory and laws to be enforced, but that God seeks that others be persuaded to conform to his own laws and glory for their benefit. God being selfless cannot mean he gives up some fundamental valuations of himself. In this case, would it be unloving of God to not create things and not allow them to self-express as evil? We only want to somehow spare them the punishment and think that is loving to do, but in fact, it seems like in the end it is a loving thing to not love evil, because evil is completely against real love so its existence is always contrary to the purposes of love. Therefore perhaps it is virtuous to allow evil self-expression to ultimately be destroyed because this freedom is somehow a virtue of God’s goodness, and freedom expresses something important about and to God, the possibility of being like him in some way, expressing something of him. We might think that if we were humble we would admit both that we cannot and should not determine valuations anyway, and just be more overwhelmed that in light of our intrinsic feeling and knowing of doing or being something wrong somewhere God could possibly have anything to do with us at all. But there’s an element of scariness in the trust level this entails, and it seems our most basic motivations are wrapped up in pride and fear, especially when we see a very huge evidence that seems to require too big a level of faith; and in fact, it seems God does not even require this ultimate level of faith from us, just using the best our faith can do and asking for his help in humility.
In the end, once we see this problem does not make God unloving even though it reminds us of his more reverential and fearful attributes, we realize it is evil to focus on evil itself, because all good is focused in the redemption from evil and eventual freedom from it, so we need to forget all the casualties that evil has left behind and only focus on that good that Christ has brought us that will last forever.
Rockson
Well-known member
I guess I have some reservations when you use a term like if one looks around and is actually honest they'd conclude A, B, or C. That would lead a person to have to defend that they're character has integrity having a position different than yours. Normal feeling needs defined. Sure children don't like to have their hair brushed or other things necessary to have their lives in order. But if you're saying there's nothing in natural man at all that has any inclination to want to have good I wouldn't say that would be correct. But that asks the question what does mankind's position of being depraved have to mean and what doesn't it have to mean.
Only in the minds of some. Not all. If that's what you're thinking perhaps you are projecting.
civic
Well-known member
And original sin came from augustine with his gnosticism, paganism and greek philosophy. the previous post was filled with such gnostic thought which came from augustine who married his false teaching with Christianity. What a mess.
e v e
Well-known member
in prophets the region just north of eden (in the other reality, not on this earth)
is called Bashan and the Ezekiel chapter phrases it, “the oaks of Bashan”.
the name ‘Bashan’ appears as “shameful” and can be compared to the register
on the book of gates of the damaged sarcophagus of pharoah Seti I, where is discussed
when translated properly, which mostly it is not, what the demon-entities of bashan!
do to the females of eden after the fall. And they (demon entities) do indeed find it holy,
because to them it is a way of hurting God!
In Amos, is mentioned this same region ; … both the start of Amos 6
and Amos 4 are about this satanic and evil theme.
The point is, just as with PSA related to Christ is impossible and God will never hurt Christ,
in the same way God will never approve violating us or torturing or hurting us.
That is an evil for which the blame falls on the satanic realm and its
esaus.
God Hates Esau for what he does.
Esau and the evil realm are the torturers.
Last edited:
