If God is supreme, how does the devil rival him?

[Ben Kenobi]

Sorry I missed out on the thread.

Shi's gone to bed, so I guess you have me.


The issue is not about being with God. We're with God already, in the sense that he's with us and around us already. But if you take by "to be with God" as to mean "I disagree with what relgion says about good and sin and I don't want to accept these", then I mean in all religions there are absolute definitions of good and evil, and there's no negotiation about it. Accordingly, the ability to choose operates in those parameters defined by religion.

Those absolutes are defined in terms of their consequences: for example, lying is a sin because it harms somebody

Anacyreon:

Let's combine this statement with the first one. Who can be harmed by sin? Other people for sure. But what about God? One has to recognise that the primary person who is harmed by sin, is God.

Also, by the reverse. Other people cannot forgive us our sins, but God can. As the person we are in most debt to for our sins, he ought to be the one who can restore our credit.

[quote]
Nor does anybody's time in hell to get purified from it changes the nature of freedom.
[/quote

One can of course, choose to reject all. But that's what makes us so special, and no, such people are not cursed, they will reach salvation after they go through the process of maturation. You can shorten it by trying to mature here on earth, or else it'll go on after life.

No. There are a couple of reasons for this. One could even look at an Andy Capp cartoon where Andy gives money to the vicar, and the vicar blesses him. After Andy leaves, the vicar notes to himself, but you would not like it in heaven.

That's the key. People who go to Hell, are those who would not enjoy heaven. Think about this for a minute. If you have lived your entire life, rejecting God, are you going to change your mind when you see him? Unlikely.

Even if a person repents before God, what good is it to believe in what you see, and what is before you? It is too late. You have had ample opportunity here on Earth to confess your sins, and you have declined your opportunities.

We do not get a second chance, after the Second Coming. Once we die, we are either lost or saved, and there is nothing we can do about that.

It does not decline our free will to say that, because we have had the opportunities to repent before God.

[Ben Kenobi]

Anacyreon:

On a higher plane of thought, "goodness" make sense only in the presence of "evil", if there's something to compare it with.

No. God is sufficient. He is good, and he is uncreated. If good requires evil in order to be made sense of, then God could not be good, and the nature of God would have to be equally good and evil.

Suppose one were to look at a two deeds, knowing one was good and one was bad. Without some kind of moral guidance, or knowledge of the good, one would be unable to discern the difference between good and evil. You would be just as likely to call what is bad good, and what is good bad.

So not only is good sufficient, but it is a requirement in order to discern evil. In this sense, evil requires good to corrupt, while good can stand alone.

So, giving us the ability to choose requires that there be something to choose between. Creating a universe in which a choice might lead to either good or evil is different from creating evil as such. If there was no evil, we all would be automatons of uniform behaviour, just like angels.

In giving us the ability to discern evil, through knowledge of the good, it also gives us the ability to choose evil over the good. Hence, in order to promote the good among beings with free will, one must risk the chance that they choose the evil over the good.

Satan is constrained by God. If you read Job, you see that this is the case. God gives Satan power over certain areas of Job's life in order to test Job. He is never the instrument of evil, any more than he may allow evil to occur.

[Ben Kenobi]

You have to consider
the possibility that God doesn't like
you, he never wanted you. In all
probability, He hates you.

Well, not to be trite, but that is impossible. If God ever stopped loving one of us, we would cease to exist. We live through his power, which sustains us. Even when we reject him, God calls us back to him, for if this were not so, than none of us would ever repent.

[DaShi]

Originally posted by Shi Huangdi


Don't take the Old Testament literally.

Yeah, that was before God took Anger Management seminars.

[Ben Kenobi]

Usually don't do this:

Shi, be careful there about the OT. You cannot make such a sweeping condemnation about the books, because the way God works is so different then the way he works now. It is one God, and we ought to interpret the passages literally.

[East Street Trader]

Angels - including the fallen ones - are one of the weaker bits of the whole thing.

The notion that God wanted mankind to have free will is pretty weird but you can just about get it to make some sense. Especially as the notion of sin does not have to be approached in any very metaphysical way, you do not need a complex set of religious ideas to recognise evil actions when you see them.

And then you get all the predestination stuff as raised by numbers of posters in this thread. Again, hard to swallow without the help of faith but I can just about bring myself to the point of feeling that those difficulties are merely rooted in the fact that I want to contain everything within a time frame in which cause always precedes effect - whereas religious notions must traditionally be approached as explaining a thing which is eternal, noot bounded in by time and by cause and effect. Hardly surprising therefore that there may be some apparent anomalies.

But the angels bit of the thing does not fit with any of that. As already pointed out no one seems to suggest that God wanted angels to have free will as well as humankind.

And anyway, angels are not confined, with us, in our time bound lives. They are in heaven or hell, located within eternity.

Making sense of the fall is now pretty tricky. OK you don't have to take the description of the fall literally. Perhaps the story of Luvcifer and some other angels rebelling is just allegorical in some fashion.

But now there is no interface between a time bound bit of creation and the eternal bits (heaven and hell). So how to explain away the proposition that God seems to have elected to create both and to have elected some part of his creation into the good bit and elected another chunk of his creation into the other chunk?

As far as I can see this only makes any sort of sense if you adopt the attitude that human beings are the central point of everything. You have to have a heaven and a hell for no better reason than that without them humankind cannot be put into a situation where they get to make a free choice.

Which does not sit with my intuition at all. I am afraid what it does sit comfortably with is the notion that if you ask a puzzled individual to come up with some explanation for the eternal questions which simply being alicve poses it will not be surprising if that puzzled individual comes up with an egocentric answer.

[Elok]

Er, angels are free to move between Earth and Heaven, but they are NOT omniscient, have shown no ability within scripture to transcend time and space entirely (which is IMO a facet of omniscience, not another attribute), and if capable of rebellion they must have some form of free will. Heaven and hell are not magical lands outside time. Transcending time is simply an aspect of God's own existence. He can voluntarily extend that "extratemporality," but it isn't intrinsic to His presence.

I've said this before, but it's a mistake to think of free will as a theological equivalent to the right to free speech. Free Will is simply human consciousness, without which we would not be humans at all.

Sava: Imagine you were a sociopath who, through immense amounts of therapy, had somehow acquired normal human morality. Would it be wrong for you to have a child if you knew it would inherit your original predilections, and didn't want to force the kid to go the way you did?

[Guest]

Originally posted by Shi Huangdi


Don't take the Old Testament literally.

Once you start doing that, you start to question the Bible.
Maybe you shouldnt take many passages literally.
Thats how many people end up not taking any of it literally or not (like most in this thread as I can see).

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by Sikander
Tyler's take on the matter:

----------------

TYLER
Shut up. Our fathers were our models
for God. And, if our fathers bailed,
what does that tell us about God?

JACK
I don't know...

SHOT OF EMBERS POURING FROM THE HELLISH FOREST FIRE. RESUME:

Tyler SLAPS Jack's face again...

TYLER
Listen to me. You have to consider
the possibility that God doesn't like
you, he never wanted you. In all
probability, He hates you. This is
not the worst thing that can happen...

JACK
It isn't... ?

TYLER
We don't need him...

JACK
We don't... ?

I am Jack's raging bile. Now pass the Vinegar.

[East Street Trader]

Originally posted by Elok
Heaven and hell are not magical lands outside time.

Er, do you care to explain?

Are you saying that there are clocks in Heaven and Hell?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Hmmm,

Not up on my Old Testament but does the OT ever describe God creating Angels?

Similiarly does the OT give credence that there may have been other supernatural entities from the beginning times?

Could the existance of Angels be that in the beginning there were numerous supernatural beings of which God is the creator of the Universe the other lesser ones were along for the ride. God being the (assumedly) most powerful of these other beings had the other lesser beings in his corner as it were until such time as Lucifer decided to part ways.

Seems to me that there is evidence that other supernatural effects were capable of being done through sorcery etc. Refernce the magicians of the Pharoah albeit significantly weaker than the magiks performed by Moses.

If these beings co-existed with God it would explain their ability to show independent action. I realize Judeo-Christian teachings say their is only one true God the creator, but that IMO does not rule out coexistance of supernatural beings from beginning times that did not play a part in the creationof the universe.

[Bereta_Eder]

But if God is one?
Couldn't angels be perceived as a part and a manifastation of Him? And not as separate entities? Following this logic a part of God rebeled against Himself.

[pchang]

Pachingko

Life is a giant pachingko machine. We are the balls that dumped into the top of the machine. Wehther or not we get saved depends upon which bucket we fall into at the end. Satan/evil/good are the pins along the way that force us to make decisions to move one way or the other.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by Sikander
Tyler's take on the matter:

----------------

TYLER
Shut up. Our fathers were our models
for God. And, if our fathers bailed,
what does that tell us about God?

JACK
I don't know...

SHOT OF EMBERS POURING FROM THE HELLISH FOREST FIRE. RESUME:

Tyler SLAPS Jack's face again...

TYLER
Listen to me. You have to consider
the possibility that God doesn't like
you, he never wanted you. In all
probability, He hates you. This is
not the worst thing that can happen...

JACK
It isn't... ?

TYLER
We don't need him...

JACK
We don't... ?

From what I can tell Tyler isn't really talking about God here. He's just trying to bring out the existentialist in the narrator.

Back on topic.

I think the main conundrum here is that it is generally thought that angels, and Satan, were not gifted with free will. This is an attribue of man only. If this is the case, how is it that Satan had the ability to reject God?

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

Originally posted by paiktis22
But if God is one?
Couldn't angels be perceived as a part and a manifastation of Him? And not as separate entities? Following this logic a part of God rebeled against Himself.

That my point is that God isn't necessarily the only one. He is from the perspective that He is the One that created the Universe, yet others co-existed with Him before He did this. The assumption is He is the most powerful of them and they were solidly in His camp until the rebellion.

The idea that they are a manifestation of Him is another line of thought that I wasn't proposing. Going down that road leads to the logical inconsistencies broguht up before that suggest how are Angels allowed to rebel if they have no free will.