Wyrdsmyth

luvluv,

Everything you've said above applies to goodness as well as to evil. You can't have good without evil, much as you can't have north without south or heat without cold. They are both relative terms. Can you imagine a world without darkness, where everything is pure light? Without the different shadows and gradients of "light to dark" you wouldn't be able to see anything. If we eliminated many of the major "evils" of the world -- even if we could -- then the old lesser evils suddenly become the new major evils. In a world of beautiful people, the person with the smallest blemish is the ugly one.

"Big problems have little problems
upon their backs to bite them,
Little problems have lesser problems
and so ad infinitum."

[ September 13, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

hinduwoman

God is omnipotent and omniscient. Then why did he not from the begining create what he wanted?Free Will won't wash because man screwed up everything because the conditions were not created perfectly to begin with.

Wyrdsmyth

I've often had similar thoughts. And actually, this isn't too far from certain Taoist or Hindu conceptions of the divine, from what I've read. However in those philosophies, we are not so much talking about God as a person, but as the divine force which flows through the heart of everything (the Tao or "Way"), or the "True Self" (Atman). And in some conceptions, the central idea is that what you really are is God -- not Yahweh, not the God of the West that is ontologically separate from and the designer of Creation -- but that what you are is fundamentally the same as what everyone and everything else is -- Deo, the divine -- and that what enlightenment is is just you realizing it. It's like when you wonder "What am I? Really?" and you can't quite define yourself, because there's no essential trait you have which if you took away, you wouldn't be you anymore. You end up thinking you are the blackness in the pupil of your eye. You are the Void. And everything comes out of the Void, it's not essentially black, or of any color -- it's clear, and can't be seen. What that blackness in the pupil of your eye really is, isn't a Something -- a black spot -- but is colorless, and what you see through.

No, I think they are good thoughts. However, they just don't reconcile well with the creator-designer-old lawgiver God who stands aside from Creation holding his chin and declaring it is all good... like a 4D painting, with moving toy parts. It is hard, if not impossible, to reconcile an omnipotent, omnibenevolent being with the existence of pain and suffering of those little free willed toys (ahem, us), that supposedly mean so much to him. It's especially difficult trying to fit him into this mold of the Supreme Aesthete. But if it's fundamentally God doing all this to himself, then, well... that's different.

[ September 15, 2002: Message edited by: Wyrdsmyth ]</p>

Marz Blak

wyrdsmyth--

Just curious-- Do you ascribe to this sort of pantheistic worldview? I don't rule it out, but....

Anyway, I like your screename. Very clever, given the topics up for discussion here.

Wyrdsmyth

Let's just say I have an aesthetic appreciation for it. I find it more palatable that traditional Western Theism. I find it hangs together better, and it just feels like it makes more sense to me. But ultimately I have to call myself an agnostic or atheist... Agnostic, because when it comes down to it, I have to admit I really don't know for sure (I don't have it in me to play the knowing guru), and atheist, because I just haven't seen any evidence for anything that I would call "god," beyond the rather abstract ruminations I've already given. As a general rule, I lump gods, daemons, fairies, spirits, etc. all in the same category which is "stuff that is made up." I'm generally pretty hard-headed, and if I can't see the proverbial burning bush for myself, I just shake my head and laugh. I have to call the bluffs of the gurus.

Thanks!

tronvillain

luvluv, it's simple - not only does God know what is going to happen, he set the entire system in motion in a specific way knowing what was going to happen. He is, in other words, the cause of everything that happens, not merely a passive observer.