Onceler
Golden Member
- Feb 28, 2008
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Hehe. In a thread on religious inconsistency, you have now claimed that God is neither good or evil but created angels intended to fall but by their own choice. That's fine by me that you believe this but it fails to impress me as a logical idea given that God created man in his own image. To my way of thinking you have side stepped an important and crucial religious philosophical issue by pretending to yourself that two mutually exclusive concepts can be true at the same time. You do not logically account for how a being created in the image of perfection by a perfect creator could turn around and do other than his creator.
In my opinion, it is this capacity to sweep things under the rug common to so many religious people that drives rational people away from religion.
And the problem is important, I believe also, because if you can't give a logical explanation for the fall of man that makes some kind of sense, you can't offer the fallen any redemption. They will simply see in the shallowness of your explanation a means to avoid the notion that they need it. If you can't offer some kind of account for the existence of sin, you will have nothing to offer by way of a God of salvation.
For that reason the ideas one can derive from an analysis of the notions presented in the story of the Garden of Eden are important. The notion of eating from the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge indicates to me that those who created that story knew either intuitively or with direct insight that evil exists as an adjunct to the evolution of man's capacity to know. To know is to step into the world of ideas where things can be imagined that do not exist for other animals. Only man has the capacity to create his own suffering by believing in things that do not exist. Men discovered God when they were first taken in by and then escaped from that dream, when they discovered their own perfection. God is a lighthouse that proclaims there is a way back from delusion, a bridge to a different state of consciousness.
No I am saying the God that I worship, not the bible's god made everything both good and evil, in other words it started out that way.