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Author Topic:   Confession of a former christian
LinearAq
Member (Idle past 4676 days)
Posts: 598
From: Pocomoke City, MD
Joined: 11-03-2004


Message 33 of 219 (465613)
05-08-2008 3:50 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by iano
05-08-2008 12:18 PM


Knowledge of Good and Evil?
It seems that an interesting philosophy results from the realizations of your statement.
iano writes:
Your 'sense' of God having done evil arises out of an attempt to bring God down to man-sized levels so as to be able to compare his actions with those of other men. Hence daddy-killing-puppy analogies. Understandable but problematic. You are trying to compare an infinitely large apple with a fairly puny pear.
In your killing of a baby we can find nothing good in you to speak of. In God's case, God knows that his action (or inaction in the case of his not preventing you killing a baby) will result in pain and loss for the parents involved. But if Gods intention is to leverage this pain for a potentially greater gain then his action/inaction is good.
See pain this way perhaps. There are only two states a person can be in - they can either be "lost" or they can be "found". If lost then pain can be used as a tool by God in his attempt to bring a person to the found position. That would be a good thing God would have done. Once found, God can use pain in the process of sanctifying (making holy) a person. That too is a good thing God will have done (based on the defintion of what is good given earlier). The western worlds philosophy on pain is that it is to be avoided and masked and removed. The fact of the matter is that pain is always a way of telling us that there is something wrong.
So you are saying that there is no way of telling if something that hurts you is wrong or evil, since you cannot know if God caused it or if the human hurting you is being led by God or not.
In fact, since God is in control of everything (doesn't stop the baby's killing, by your example) then nothing that hurts you can be classified as wrong or evil. It is only the act of disobedience (sin) that is evil.
So if you are killed by someone, your death is not evil even if it was murder. It is only the action by your murderer (unless God told him to do it) that is evil. Your murder is actually good because God let it happen.
Furthermore, you cannot even tell if the person doing the murder is acting at the behest of God. So, you cannot even tell if his action is evil. I don't see how you can approve of laws to punish him then.
What knowledge were we supposed to have gotten from that fruit in the Garden? Darn! cheated again!

This message is a reply to:
 Message 30 by iano, posted 05-08-2008 12:18 PM iano has replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 35 by iano, posted 05-08-2008 8:39 PM LinearAq has not replied

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