Pray To Jesus: The problem of evil:
God exists
God is all good
God is all-powerful
Evil exists
It seems as if there is a logical contradiction built in. Affirm three and deny the fourth.
M: Indeed
P: However, Christianity denies that they are logically contradictory. This can be done if and only if there some ambiguous terms in the common usage.
M: Or if what people call logic is actually defective, that one and one don't actually have to be two.
P: Therefore let begin with definition, real definitions.
Evil:
Evil is not a thing, being, entity, or substance. Where is evil? It is in the will, the choice, which put a wrong order into the physical world of things and acts.
M: This is a fancy way of saying that say murdering a child isn't the actual evil but the decision to murder the child is. But for humans who think they practice justice in law, we don't prosecute people who have evil intentions, but only when they express them in some evil act. Also, we don't say a man who intends to kill group of people A with a bomb but accidentally blows up group B by some mistake in the wiring is innocent because that wasn't what he chose to do. We humans see the act as the evil, not why somebody did it. We analyze things like the age of the perp, his or her capacity to reason, what psychological factors drove the person to do it, whether the person was constantly abused, etc.
P: Evil is the nonconformity between our will and God's will. God did not make evil, we did. The origin of evil is human free will.
M: But we humans have law and judge law breakers and sometimes conclude that certain folk aren't guilty because they don't have what we call free will. They do evil but it's not by choice. And some of us think God created things this way.
P: Why didn't God create a world without evil?
M: I think you are saying He did create such a world, but one in which it is possible, which brings us full circle right back to the original problem again. How does a perfect person in a perfect world manage to decide to do evil? From whence could such a perverse decision come from?
P: Because that would have been a world without humans, a world without hate but also without love. Love, the true love that God wants from us, can proceed only from free will.
M: But this seems to me to be completely counter-intuitive. The real lover has no choice but to love. The lover is loves prisoner, the abnegation of self via surrender. The lover has no will. So, may we not say that we can only do evil if we have free will, a notion that the self is separate and free? And how can a self with free will exist except by imagining it to be, by thinking and believing in those thoughts?
But in a world filled with individuals who imagine themselves separate and in possession of free will, all kinds of logical paradoxes will arise if they begin to imagine they were created by a perfect Being.
P: Is a world with free human being but no sin possible? Yes, it is.
God created such a world in the beginning. But a world in which no sin is freely possible must necessarily be a world in which sin is possible.
This is because genuine human freedom must include the possibility of sin within its own meaning. Real free choice must include the possibility of freely choosing between good or evil.
M: But the good can't choose evil. That wouldn't be good.
P: Even an omnipotent God cannot forcibly prevent sin without removing our freedom.
But if God would not choose evil, why would we. Perfection can only choose perfection it would seem to me just as the lover is love's prisoner.
When the true believer looks at the world he sees sin and evil but he never wills himself to do it himself. He or she will never go out and shoot somebody just to prove his will is free. He is a prisoner of his or her morality.
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So what you have right, I think, is that evil is the absence of good, but not in the way you believe. The absence of good, I think, is the result of separation, separation from the experience of God's love and that the result of being put down as a child by being told one does not deserve it. God loves us all equally and with perfection because we are all one and the same thing, the love of God for us is only our potential to love Him. When that potential manifests the will of God and the will of man is one and the same thing.
Evil exists because we were told we do not deserve to love ourselves as God does and we ceased to love because of that pain. We believe in lies, that we are sinners and unworthy, and by believing we created what we fear. We manifest our evil to get even. Our love was stolen and we steal it now from others. The self died and the monster of the ego was born and all because we were put down with words as children.
And because the source of out problems are psychological any treatment that heals us will work. One can believe in God A, B, or C or no God at all and still be healed.
P: Thus we see that God allows evil to preserve human free will, which is inherent to our nature as human.
M: What is inherent in our natures is that as children we can be hurt by words. Before the Tree of Knowledge of language we could not be convinced that we are worthless.
God exists
God is all good
God is all-powerful
Evil exists
It seems as if there is a logical contradiction built in. Affirm three and deny the fourth.
M: Indeed
P: However, Christianity denies that they are logically contradictory. This can be done if and only if there some ambiguous terms in the common usage.
M: Or if what people call logic is actually defective, that one and one don't actually have to be two.
P: Therefore let begin with definition, real definitions.
Evil:
Evil is not a thing, being, entity, or substance. Where is evil? It is in the will, the choice, which put a wrong order into the physical world of things and acts.
M: This is a fancy way of saying that say murdering a child isn't the actual evil but the decision to murder the child is. But for humans who think they practice justice in law, we don't prosecute people who have evil intentions, but only when they express them in some evil act. Also, we don't say a man who intends to kill group of people A with a bomb but accidentally blows up group B by some mistake in the wiring is innocent because that wasn't what he chose to do. We humans see the act as the evil, not why somebody did it. We analyze things like the age of the perp, his or her capacity to reason, what psychological factors drove the person to do it, whether the person was constantly abused, etc.
P: Evil is the nonconformity between our will and God's will. God did not make evil, we did. The origin of evil is human free will.
M: But we humans have law and judge law breakers and sometimes conclude that certain folk aren't guilty because they don't have what we call free will. They do evil but it's not by choice. And some of us think God created things this way.
P: Why didn't God create a world without evil?
M: I think you are saying He did create such a world, but one in which it is possible, which brings us full circle right back to the original problem again. How does a perfect person in a perfect world manage to decide to do evil? From whence could such a perverse decision come from?
P: Because that would have been a world without humans, a world without hate but also without love. Love, the true love that God wants from us, can proceed only from free will.
M: But this seems to me to be completely counter-intuitive. The real lover has no choice but to love. The lover is loves prisoner, the abnegation of self via surrender. The lover has no will. So, may we not say that we can only do evil if we have free will, a notion that the self is separate and free? And how can a self with free will exist except by imagining it to be, by thinking and believing in those thoughts?
But in a world filled with individuals who imagine themselves separate and in possession of free will, all kinds of logical paradoxes will arise if they begin to imagine they were created by a perfect Being.
P: Is a world with free human being but no sin possible? Yes, it is.
God created such a world in the beginning. But a world in which no sin is freely possible must necessarily be a world in which sin is possible.
This is because genuine human freedom must include the possibility of sin within its own meaning. Real free choice must include the possibility of freely choosing between good or evil.
M: But the good can't choose evil. That wouldn't be good.
P: Even an omnipotent God cannot forcibly prevent sin without removing our freedom.
But if God would not choose evil, why would we. Perfection can only choose perfection it would seem to me just as the lover is love's prisoner.
When the true believer looks at the world he sees sin and evil but he never wills himself to do it himself. He or she will never go out and shoot somebody just to prove his will is free. He is a prisoner of his or her morality.
-------
So what you have right, I think, is that evil is the absence of good, but not in the way you believe. The absence of good, I think, is the result of separation, separation from the experience of God's love and that the result of being put down as a child by being told one does not deserve it. God loves us all equally and with perfection because we are all one and the same thing, the love of God for us is only our potential to love Him. When that potential manifests the will of God and the will of man is one and the same thing.
Evil exists because we were told we do not deserve to love ourselves as God does and we ceased to love because of that pain. We believe in lies, that we are sinners and unworthy, and by believing we created what we fear. We manifest our evil to get even. Our love was stolen and we steal it now from others. The self died and the monster of the ego was born and all because we were put down with words as children.
And because the source of out problems are psychological any treatment that heals us will work. One can believe in God A, B, or C or no God at all and still be healed.
P: Thus we see that God allows evil to preserve human free will, which is inherent to our nature as human.
M: What is inherent in our natures is that as children we can be hurt by words. Before the Tree of Knowledge of language we could not be convinced that we are worthless.