Why Did God Create Evil? (souls, church, quotes, Commandments)

[jeffncandace]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

True, but it takes a religion in order for good people to do evil.

For some people, my friend, it takes a religion for them to do GOOD.

Originally Posted by Tricky D

I mean how can the pope be against using condoms especially in Africa were there are many AIDS-victims? And why didn't the Vatican speak up against fascism before and during WWII? Why do religious zealots kill doctors who perform abortions? Why kill people in order to get into paradise, etc?

My response would best be summed up in this quote...

You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand. --Francis Schaeffer

Originally Posted by Tricky D

The road to hell is indeed paved with good intentions.

We absolutely agree on this point.

[GCSTroop]

Originally Posted by jeffncandace

But to turn your arguement back on you, that's great for you, but what about all the examples you gave of injustice and hunger and a miserable existance throughout the world? They live a life in horrific conditions and then die, ceasing to exist?

Well, let's look at it the other way jeff. Most Protestant based Christianity requires the aceeptance of Jesus before you may enter heaven. The problem with that is, that this seems to be a strictly American belief. So, let's look at it another way. We in America are born and by a product of our parents are raised as "Christians". We know nothing other to believe in other than what we have been indoctrinated in. We hold firm that one must accept Jesus, blah blah blah. Here's the problem. In one of the greatest countries on earth, that civilization has ever known, we are mostly born with a silver spoon in our mouth, we are able to glutton ourselves, we live in huge homes by any other standard across the world, and yet a large majority of people in America will be able to go to heaven because they were born into the right demographical area?

Sadly, the starving political and religious refugees across the world who are holding firm faith in their belief of Allah, Abraham's God, or any other religion will not be there. So, I ask, what's more screwed up? Putting people on earth in a place that by any other notion is the simplest life one can have and yet rewarding them with the promise of heaven as a result of their demographics, or taking people and putting them on earth with utter dispair, loss of life, malnourishment, and persecution, only to have them die and go to hell? Well, they both seem pretty sick and twisted to me. And let's not forget how Protestantism became alive and well in this country. For anyone who is interested I would start with the story of Anne Boleyn and read about the next 100 years of English history and how Protestantism made it's trevails over Catholocism both in this country and in England. It really is amazing when you read it.

So Jeff, just because life isn't fair doesn't make an excuse for a higher power. In fact, it seems to detract from it, in my opinion. Life is NOT fair, that's why humans are killed every day, babies are burned to death in cars, deer are shot by hunters, and polar bears are falling through the glaciers. It doesn't mean that there's a higher cause doing it, it just means that you have to be careful with this one life that you have but enjoy it as much as you can at the same time!

[GCSTroop]

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

I'm not offended at all. I just know that I could sit here and answer your question all day long and it still won't be good enough for you. Matter of fact, I expect with a little investigation it could be discovered that your question has been answered more than once. You just don't accept a believers answer. I also know the futility in trying to apply all our 'logic' to God. My car has no idea how I think. My computer responds to my actions, but it doesn't know how I think. My lawnmower just sits there until someone does something.

Creations don't have the capability to fully understand and 'logically figure out' Creators. <---that's a period right there.



I do acknowledge the validity of a sincere question. I don't believe, based on what you said about it not mattering to you, that this is a sincere question. Now, hear me out, that's not an attack on you. I just didn't want to waste time on rhetoric, ya know? I wasn't offended by the question, and I hope you weren't offended by my response. You and I have had more than a few exchanges and I can't think of any that were less than amicable, although we do usually disagree.

Now, take pocono-jane, I do believe she asked a sincere question. That being said, I don't believe she's willing to accept the answer. I went so far as to look up all the threads she's started, her OPs and responses, and she wanted to qualify all her answers. She'd ask a question then say "Don't tell me this.....and don't use that....and don't say this other thing.' Those are all tell-tale signs that she's only looking for an answer that she considers worthy. And that's a tough shoe to fill when you are just trying to convey Truth, no matter how illogical that Truth may seem to someone.

Hope you aren't upset. I think you know me well enough to understand the spirit of my post.

Fine. I shall ask no more questions to those of the religious faith, for it does nobody any good. I mean after all, who would dare do such a thing on a religion forum??

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by jeffncandace

My response would best be summed up in this quote...

You must not lose confidence in God because you lost confidence in your pastor. If our confidence in God had to depend upon our confidence in any human person, we would be on shifting sand. --Francis Schaeffer

But aren't pastors supposed to be the parents to God's children?
How can you as a child learn what love is if you are psychologically abused by your parents? When you are taught that up is down and left is right?
If you as a child cannot trust your parents, then who can you trust?

[Alpha8207]

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

I'm not offended at all.

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

Now, hear me out, that's not an attack on you.

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

I wasn't offended by the question, and I hope you weren't offended by my response.

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

You and I have had more than a few exchanges and I can't think of any that were less than amicable, although we do usually disagree.

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

Hope you aren't upset.

Originally Posted by Alpha8207

I think you know me well enough to understand the spirit of my post.

Apparently, I was mistaken.....

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

Fine. I shall ask no more questions to those of the religious faith, for it does nobody any good. I mean after all, who would dare do such a thing on a religion forum??

[btroop]

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

Personally, I don't like closed questions. Your question only has one answer, be it right or wrong. Let me explain. The mere guise of freewill indicates that there is a decision to be made between right and wrong, good and evil, belief or not belief. Therefore, in order to create something with freewill you only have one choice, and that is to throw evil into the mix. So, to reiterate your question, How could I create mankind, giving him freewill, yet having him love me all the same without good and evil? This is a contradictory question because once again, to have freewill you must be given a choice of something.

That is the nature of truth, one answer. A closed question is not a contradictory question.

Where were you born?
How old were you on 09/11/2001?
Do you own a red camaro?

My question is also a truth question: Can God make a totally free, volitional creature (mankind), made in His own image, with the creature loving Him in return by their own free will without there being good and evil?

Answer: No.

Truth can be defined as that which corresponds to its object or that which describes an actual state of affairs. If something is true, it's true for all people, at all times, in all places. You may not like it as you cited above, but all truth claims are absolute, narrow, and exclusive. Allow me to teach you some more about truth:

-Truth is discovered, not invented. It exists independent of anyone's knowledge of it. (Gravity existed prior to Newton.)
-Truth is transcultural, if something is true, it is true for all people, in all places, at all times (2+2=4 for everyone, everywhere, at every time.
-Truth is unchanging even though our beliefs about truth change. (When we began to believe the earth was round instead of flat, the truth aabout the earth didn't change, only our belief about the earth changed.
-Beliefs cannot change a fact, no matter how sincerely they are held. (Someone can sincerely believe the world is flat, but that only makes that person sincerely mistaken.)
-All truth are absolute truths. Even truths that appear to be relative are really absolute. (For example, "I, btroop, feel warm on September 8th, 2007" may appear to be a relative truth, but it is actually absolutely true for everyone, everywhere that btroop had the sensation of warmth on that day.)

You see, contrary beliefs are possible, but contrary truths are not possible. We can believe everything is true, but we cannot make everything true.

But, to answer your question, You cannot do so under the premises that you have given me. Not to play God's Monday morning quarterback or anything but it seems to me mankind would have been a whole lot better off if he only allowed us to do good. Why play mind games with inferior beings?

I hope by now you understand, if we were only permitted to do good, then we'd be robots. We wouldn't really LOVE God. If my wife somehow managed to make me only choose to love her, then it wouldn't be love.

I didn't say that we were only good. I said that if God=Love and God=Good than surely that must mean that if love is god and god is good than love must be good. So to love god would be good.

Correct but again, we are not only good so therefore, we do not only know love for God. When we freely choose to love God, then it is true love.

Well good and since Lucifer was able to make the decision to become a fallen angel from heaven than that must mean sin exists in heaven as well. So, we have free will in heaven too and not just in this world. This is starting to make a whole lot more sense.

Correct, at this present time, there is freewill in Heaven.

No, because murder is morally wrong. What you refer to as evil, I refer to as immoral values. We're really describing the same thing, but I choose to use the word evil lightly because it has a stigma that all works of evil are done by Satan. Although it is in my vocabulary I try not to use it to describe acts of immoral value because I would hate to give the wrong impression that I believe in such a thing.

But you said, "I must declare that both good and evil are merely perceptions of us as humans, and we each have our own idea of what is good and bad."

Murder is morally wrong, murder is evil.

Oh good, since we're on the Ten Commandments which is an OT scripture, I suppose it's ok to murder our children because they misbehaved, kill our spouses for adultery, and commit other acts of violence prescribed as punishments as well. Of course, it's nice to be able to pick and choose what parts of the Bible we want to follow isn't it?

No sir, I don't pick and choose parts of the Bible to follow. God doesn't tell me to murder, to kill my spouse for adultery, or other acts of violence. You see, Jesus is God manifested in the flesh. Jesus said, He came to fulfill the law and He did. Those laws that God made in the time of Moses was simply to demonstrate that the wages of sin is death. All sin leads to death. Ultimately, eternal death. Jesus paid the penalty for sin in full. In the time of Moses, God was still establishing His set apart, chosen nation and people Israel. Which would lead to the coming of the Messiah, Jesus. God manifested in the flesh, Jesus, said there are two laws, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, strenght and to love your neighbor as yourself. If you think about that, if everyone did that, there would be no sin.

In short, the new has superseded the old. The actual has come to replace the symbolic. The principle that our sins are worthy of death, and can only be absolved by a substitutionary atonement, is still in play. Indeed, it is the reason that Jesus came into the world: to be, as John the Baptist said, "The spotless white lamb who takes away the sins of the world." In light of this it is an outright denial of the work of Christ to continue with the OT law.

And yes, there are what I call moral absolutes. But, I think they come from an evolutionary need to benefit as a group. Rape, murder, etc.. do not help the species cohabitate and survive.

I think that goes against natural selection, survival of the fitess. Why shouldn't I rape for my sexual enjoyment? Why shouldn't I murder for my own gain? Why did we need to benefit as a group? Survival of the fitess baby. Rape, pillage, steal for my own gains, my families gains. Families? Why should we be faithful to our families? Who said we should help people? Is helping people a universal moral obligation, or is it just true for you and not for me? And to what end should you help them: Financially? Emotionally? Physically?

If there is no objective standard and an objective standard giver (God), then life is nothing more than a glorified game. Aquire lots of stuff, but when the game is over, it's all going back to the box. Is that what life is all about?

Your acknowledging moral absolutes is correct but you have no way of justifying it. Why do you think we should help people? Where do you get such an idea?

The reason why you gcstroop and I believe we should do good rather than evil--the reason we believe we should help people--is because there is a moral law that has been written on our consciences. There is a prescription to do good that has been given to all of humanity.

You can call it whatever you like, but whatever you call it, the fact that a moral standard has been prescribed on the minds of all human beings points to a Moral Law Presciber. Every prescription has a presciber. The moral law is no different. Someone must have given us these moral obligations.

Premise:
1. Every law has a law giver.
2.There is a moral law.
3.Therefore, there is a Moral Law Giver.


Do you see your conundrum? You say morals are supposedly the product of evolution, then everything that we are and do would be attributed to it. But evolutionary ethics are meaningless in the end, since there is the problem of why we "ought" to act in the way that evolution proposes that we "should" act. It is not a moral process and its goal is not to make moral creatures, only successfully reproducing creatures. And the fact that this same evolution seems to have created beings who lie, steal, and rape, as well as love, self-sacrifice, and nurture, is something of a riddle. Just what is it that evolution is trying to tell us to do anyway, and where is the higher moral law that tells us it is better to plant our seed one way over another? Evolutionary ethics does not escape relativism. For the atheist, all moralizing is just so much emoting, and when he complains about his pet causes and condemns evil, I hear only the sounds of a gorilla beating his chest.

Yes, but under the guise of religion man has done some pretty wicked things. I'm merely trying to point out the fact that man will substitute in his mind what he believes is good in the name of God. Want examples? I've got at least a good 6000 years of religious persecution, strife, and brutality to back it up. You're right, it's still murder, but for some reason, man seems to think that murder in the name of God is ok.

Again, you are "begging the question." I don't think that murder in the name of God is okay. Where does it say that? Jesus never said that. You are correct in that many bad things have been done under the "guise" of religion. These many bad things were done by mankind and mankind is fallible and therefore can be wrong.

I hate to answer a question with a question but what evidence has science given us FOR a god? None. In fact, every day it detracts from it.

You are the one that stated, science gives us a much more plausible answer than God created. So I asked you what plausible answer. But, okay, I'll give you one. That the universe had a beginning. This is not debated anymore among science. There are five lines of scientific evidence that have been discovered that prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the universe did indeed have a beginning. And that beginning was what scientists now call "The Big Bang." Following the laws of logic:

1. Everything that had a beginning had a cause.
2. The universe had a beginning.
3. Therefore the universe had a cause.

I know that you're quite new to the board, and I can almost assure you that I have addressed each and every one of these particular thoughts in my own words. You can look up my previous posts if you like, but I'm not going to sit down and rewrite my beliefs on each one of these topics. I'm already suffering from mild carpal tunnel, to address each of these issues would cripple me

Well, you are the one who posed the question and started this thread. Did you not expect some Christians here who know how to articulate what they believe why they believe it? There are many Christians who are ignorant of systematic theology and being able to articulate, but it is not a systemic problem of Christianity in general.

Just because people have been sitting there for centuries with their beliefs doesn't make them right, it only makes it harder to break through the real ignorance.

It is all about presuppositions my friend. You view everything through your lenses and we view the evidence through our lenses. I examined the evidence 4 1/2 years ago and took a step in the direction where the evidence pointed. I was once an agnostic, although it was an ordinary agnostic not the ornery kind.

[btroop]

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

Well, let's look at it the other way jeff. Most Protestant based Christianity requires the aceeptance of Jesus before you may enter heaven. The problem with that is, that this seems to be a strictly American belief. So, let's look at it another way. We in America are born and by a product of our parents are raised as "Christians". We know nothing other to believe in other than what we have been indoctrinated in. We hold firm that one must accept Jesus, blah blah blah. Here's the problem. In one of the greatest countries on earth, that civilization has ever known, we are mostly born with a silver spoon in our mouth, we are able to glutton ourselves, we live in huge homes by any other standard across the world, and yet a large majority of people in America will be able to go to heaven because they were born into the right demographical area?

Sadly, the starving political and religious refugees across the world who are holding firm faith in their belief of Allah, Abraham's God, or any other religion will not be there. So, I ask, what's more screwed up? Putting people on earth in a place that by any other notion is the simplest life one can have and yet rewarding them with the promise of heaven as a result of their demographics, or taking people and putting them on earth with utter dispair, loss of life, malnourishment, and persecution, only to have them die and go to hell? Well, they both seem pretty sick and twisted to me. And let's not forget how Protestantism became alive and well in this country. For anyone who is interested I would start with the story of Anne Boleyn and read about the next 100 years of English history and how Protestantism made it's trevails over Catholocism both in this country and in England. It really is amazing when you read it.

So Jeff, just because life isn't fair doesn't make an excuse for a higher power. In fact, it seems to detract from it, in my opinion. Life is NOT fair, that's why humans are killed every day, babies are burned to death in cars, deer are shot by hunters, and polar bears are falling through the glaciers. It doesn't mean that there's a higher cause doing it, it just means that you have to be careful with this one life that you have but enjoy it as much as you can at the same time!

gcstrrop, you are pulling a red herring here and you know it. I really enjoy conversing with you but I can see, you are in need of some serious education. Christianity is not limited to the U.S. There are christians all over the world, last I heard over 2 billion, including India and China. God in His providence can reach people anywhere, anytime. And He will judge righteously. Jesus died for the whole world.

[jeffncandace]

Originally Posted by GCSTroop

Well, let's look at it the other way jeff. Most Protestant based Christianity requires the aceeptance of Jesus before you may enter heaven. The problem with that is, that this seems to be a strictly American belief. So, let's look at it another way. We in America are born and by a product of our parents are raised as "Christians". We know nothing other to believe in other than what we have been indoctrinated in. We hold firm that one must accept Jesus, blah blah blah. Here's the problem. In one of the greatest countries on earth, that civilization has ever known, we are mostly born with a silver spoon in our mouth, we are able to glutton ourselves, we live in huge homes by any other standard across the world, and yet a large majority of people in America will be able to go to heaven because they were born into the right demographical area?

Sadly, the starving political and religious refugees across the world who are holding firm faith in their belief of Allah, Abraham's God, or any other religion will not be there. So, I ask, what's more screwed up? Putting people on earth in a place that by any other notion is the simplest life one can have and yet rewarding them with the promise of heaven as a result of their demographics, or taking people and putting them on earth with utter dispair, loss of life, malnourishment, and persecution, only to have them die and go to hell? Well, they both seem pretty sick and twisted to me. And let's not forget how Protestantism became alive and well in this country. For anyone who is interested I would start with the story of Anne Boleyn and read about the next 100 years of English history and how Protestantism made it's trevails over Catholocism both in this country and in England. It really is amazing when you read it.

So Jeff, just because life isn't fair doesn't make an excuse for a higher power. In fact, it seems to detract from it, in my opinion. Life is NOT fair, that's why humans are killed every day, babies are burned to death in cars, deer are shot by hunters, and polar bears are falling through the glaciers. It doesn't mean that there's a higher cause doing it, it just means that you have to be careful with this one life that you have but enjoy it as much as you can at the same time!

Well, we are in complete agreeance with the last sentence!

Let's just say that Protestants don't have Christianity all sewn up. As you know, in my belief, which I believe to be correct obviously, everyone will make it to heaven eventually. If things were as you described here--which is what I used to (sadly and depressingly) believe--then I would feel as you do.

But that is not the end of the story.

[jeffncandace]

Originally Posted by Tricky D

Originally Posted by jeffncandace
But aren't pastors supposed to be the parents to God's children?
How can you as a child learn what love is if you are psychologically abused by your parents? When you are taught that up is down and left is right?
If you as a child cannot trust your parents, then who can you trust?

People WILL AND DO fall away because of bad pastors (and others in leadership) and that is sad, and these pastor's will be held responsible by God.

What I am saying is that it shows spiritual immaturity for someone to throw away Christianity based on what another fallible human being does or doesn't do.

We are God's children, not the pastor's.

[Tricky D]

Originally Posted by jeffncandace

We are God's children, not the pastor's.

True, but is it not the parent's responsibility to keep their children safe from harm? If our parents already abuse us as a child, who will then teach us that we are God's children? Or that God is a loving God?