Hi,

Did God create evil as a way of realising goodness?? God is supreme and the ultimate in accountability for good and evil is his (The buck really really stops with him)

Why did God stand back and do nothing during the holocuast?

Why does God permit natural catastrophes like the tsunami that killed 250 thousand people recently?

Why does God create an entity like a virus that does nothing but kill its host?

Etc Etc

Alan

Why do you say "him" when you refer to God? I don't see God as a person, like a father who stands with his arms crossed over his chest deciding who to smite and who not to smite. Nor, who to "allow" to die in a tsunami, or not. I don't see a 'figure' presiding over everything like a king. I see us as very unique parts of an ever-growing whole, with twists and turns to our existence that we simply don't understand. But I don't see God somewhere in the clouds smoking a pipe in his armchair. It bothers me to keep saying 'he she it all that is' etc etc when that just doesn't describe creation to me.

Why is death seen as a bad thing?

Let's assume a soul exists over several incarnations, and it knows about its immortality, and death is just a transition for it - would even the soul think about death is a bad thing from its discarnate, less limited perspective?

Why is always God responsible for what happens to anybody? Or are souls chosing the destinies of their incarnations?

Or is anything predestined at all or random, chaotic?


Some religions and philosophies postulate that we have free choice. It might even be that spirit does not interfere with our free choice.

If we have free choice, the very humans on this planet, why would we blame God for the Holocaust? If God honors our free choice in general, is God then to blame for what we do with that?

Maybe even good and evil are just our choices. If we have free choice, we could have done different. A person is hard done by by others. And reacts with sourness, bitterness, starts to hate its fellow beings. Or the person works through the pain, tries to stay open, does not let bad experiences push itself around. A decision, a choice, thousands of choices, interwoven with millions of choices of other people in every moment.

Wait a minute!! There IS a God???? REALLY? Show me some solid proof.... Burning talking bush would work... bush must be right outside my house and I must be present.......

God created virus's so you stupid people would stop taking being healthy for granted!!!!!!

LOL!!!!!! LMAO!

According to the esoteric heart of various ancient philosophies (Hinduism, Buddhism) there is no such thing as good or bad in the ultimate context.  Those are just two ways human categorize things that are happening to them or that they are doing.

Experience is experience. Good and evil are labels to identify an experience in what actually amounts to a digital process. Someone else's opinion of what good and evil are will not make my path any shorter. It is simply yes and no, 1 or 0, when it is boiled down to its truth.

Oops, I forgot to mention that only 1 exists. 0 is an illusion that makes the perception of 1 possible. There is only "on". Off does not exist. It is merely a result of resistance.

Hi Alan,

I don't believe God interferes in our lives, yet through the Holy Spirit can and does nudge us to choose love for the purpose of benefitting our consciousness and the whole of consciousness as well.

I think freewill choice is an intrinsic aspect of God Consciousness and therefore it is intrinsic to us as well. Having freewill choice requires the freedom to choose from any probability that exists within our consciousness even if that probability is toward what we might term evil. It is only through dualism/knowledge of good/evil, pain/pleasure that we are able to learn and understand what love is and how that affects the evolution of our being. In this way we might be able to understand pain as being helpful to us as learn and evolve.

Kathy

I think Love is the natural state for a mind at rest. It is about loving the moment as it is alive within one, not in anyway romantic or even friendly. Directing love to others may merely be metaphorical. I haven't really thought it through but it just came to me while reading Kathy's comment.

yours,
Beau

If this is the best God can do, I'm not impressed.

Good and evil come down to choices.  Free will allows both.  Without choice we are not free, we are robots.

Hi Allan,

Bad choices by humans create bad situations for humans.
God is allowing us to be responsible for our own actions so
we can learn what ways are better.

Bets

I offer these 3 points as food for  thought:

(1) Would our world be a morally superior school of growth without danger, want, or suffering?  There is no courage without danger, no generosity without want, no compassion without suffering.  Several of our most admirable moral virtues are pain-dependent.

(2) Suppose that suffering were fairly distributed on the basis of merit.  Then there would be little incentive to make choices that are selfish and evil.  But the value of our freedom to love is directly proportional to the intensity of our incentive to choose otherwise--i. e. to make unloving choices. 

(3) Also, if pain were fairly distributed, this would be overwhelming evidence for a just God.  But that would surely be bad.  Why? 

A Russian parable demonstrates why.  A king wanted to find a bride.  So he disguised himself as a peasant and wandered the countryside in search of that special maiden.  When he found her, she initially resisted his advances because he seemed to offer almost nothing in the way of financial security.  Finally, he won her love through prolonged exposure to his character and personality.

But then he had to convince her father to allow the wedding.  The father wanted a more financially secure arrangement for his daughter; so he declined the king's request.  But the king volunteered to work hard on his farm to demonstrate his personal initiative.  Finally, the Dad consented, charmed by his guest's warmth and loyal service. 

The king then revealed his true identity and arranged for the wedding at his castle in St. Petersburg.  The Dad was incensed. "Why didn't you tell me who you were?  I wouldn't have put you through all this trouble. Oh, I'm so embarrassed!"  The king replied: "Because I wanted you to love me for my character and personality, not for my rank.  If you knew I was the king, you would have consented out of fear, honor, and a sense of duty, not out of love that must detect character through an intuition that gropes in the dark.  Even so, God must be detected through the eyes of faith groping in the dark to be loved in the way He approves.

Don

betson wrote on Nov 6^th, 2009 at 10:14am:

Hi Allan, Bad choices by humans create bad situations for humans. God is allowing us to be responsible for our own actions so we can learn what ways are better. Bets

Hi Bets,

Now that is a sensible quote!!

Love

Alan

I think an all-inclusive holiday offers an analogy: a trouble-free life is fun for a while but becomes ultimately boring. In his book 'The Bridge Across Forever' Richard Bach described how he struggled to understand the vicissitudes of life until he learnt partnered exploration with Leslie Parrish. From his new perspective he saw that 'difficulties' tragedies even were opportunities for different experiences.

Dave