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This may be sort of long... sorry. now before i start, i don't apply this philosophy to my daily living, i am more trying to understand the person on the other side of the fence. this is only an idea i had, not preaching against religion; think of it as more of a question.
anyhow, i notice that when people ask "how can an all loving god allow evil to exist?"
they reply is usually something along the lines of "well, without evil, one wouldn't know what good really is (if all you ate was cake, you wouldn't really appreciate cake as much as someone who only ate onions)"
so then this lead me to ask....
could good even exist without evil? or rather, does the existence of good depend on the existence of evil and vice versa?
as i thought about this i kind of got to a fork in the road. fork A) if they are reliant on each other, neither is superior to the other (which would change our expected representations of god and the devil and all that ensues) and one will lead to the other from time to time. if they are not i look towards path B) which leads me to believe that the necessity of evil to contrast and therefore understand and appreciate good is more of a convenient excise than an answer.
so keep in mind that i am no philosopher, and i am sure that my reasoning could have a few holes in it. and again, this is more of a question than an assertion of fact.
Good and evil are relative terms, only labels without definitions. What is good to one person, may be evil to another.
well. that is the way i see it myself, although there are some things that are "evil" without a doubt (rape, murder, you know the usual). but yeah, i am a gray area type of guy.
mostly i was trying to get to the bottom of this by the terms and definitions of the people who apply this.
This may be sort of long... sorry. now before i start, i don't apply this philosophy to my daily living, i am more trying to understand the person on the other side of the fence. this is only an idea i had, not preaching against religion; think of it as more of a question.
anyhow, i notice that when people ask "how can an all loving god allow evil to exist?"
they reply is usually something along the lines of "well, without evil, one wouldn't know what good really is (if all you ate was cake, you wouldn't really appreciate cake as much as someone who only ate onions)"
so then this lead me to ask....
could good even exist without evil? or rather, does the existence of good depend on the existence of evil and vice versa?
as i thought about this i kind of got to a fork in the road. fork A) if they are reliant on each other, neither is superior to the other (which would change our expected representations of god and the devil and all that ensues) and one will lead to the other from time to time. if they are not i look towards path B) which leads me to believe that the necessity of evil to contrast and therefore understand and appreciate good is more of a convenient excise than an answer.
so keep in mind that i am no philosopher, and i am sure that my reasoning could have a few holes in it. and again, this is more of a question than an assertion of fact.
Isn't this a bit like saying that the default setting of the universe is darkness, which is only penetrated occasionally by light? If it is, your argument is flawed by analogy, because your world is basically bad, unless good intervenes. Likewise human beings.
Is this really the way god created things? Anyway, good and evil are human concepts, and as such are meaningless in Universal terms.
How come? Why wouldn't an absence of good just be...neutral?
Hey Jez, good to see you back. Because there is no middle ground here. You must make a choice, if you sit on the fence, you'll fall off on the wrong side every time.
Just think of it this way. You literally would have no idea what good is until you've seen what bad is. And you have no idea what bad is until you've seen it. Although ultimately good and bad is just a philisophical thing that varies between people, there is always the universally agreed upon things, such as rape or murder being bad. In one way or another, good can't exist without bad and vice versa, simply because you don't have anything to compare it too. Just like when you complain about something you've never tried before, you simply don't have any true imput because you yourself have never tried it before.
Ultimately it comes down to the variation of good and bad. Like, allergies. Prescribed Medicine could be good for someone, while bad for some people. Or a job, like working at a office all day. To some, this is bad, because they simply find working in a office all day to be very unfulfilling.
The lack of one or the other automatically makes a paradox. You wouldn't know about either until you've experienced both, and sometimes it comes down to the variation of people, and sometimes, theres a universal agreement.
God put evil in the earth and limited evil in the earth, as a challenge for His people who follow him, as God's blessing will protect His people, ..... As for the people who are not of God and will not follow Him God uses evil to lean people against wicked leaders who are evil .... so if nothing working for a leader then God is not helping that leader, and this leader is lead by him self with the devil which would be a kind of wrath of God against evil
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