If God was the Devil, would he let us in on it?

@Pusyphus,

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Haven't you heard? God is dead. (O_O)
Laughing

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@Sekiko,

Seeing as how evil does definitely exist, is there much point in positing an idea where it doesn't? It's like trying to comprehend infinity, just something the human mind can't reason.

@Sekiko,

Sekiko wrote:

Haven't you heard? God is dead. (O_O)

Well that explains alot.

And here I was thinking god was just a monumental coward. Whew!

When did this happen? and is everyone alright?

Does this mean satan has the upper hand now, or just that everyone had fallen hook line and sinker for a pack of lies?

Long live the king. :perplexed:

Kolbe wrote:

Seeing as how evil does definitely exist, is there much point in positing an idea where it doesn't? It's like trying to comprehend infinity, just something the human mind can't reason.

You may be right, Kolbe. But, that doesn't mean we can't have (or deal with) the truth now, does it?

@Kolbe,

Kolbe wrote:

Seeing as how evil does definitely exist, is there much point in positing an idea where it doesn't? It's like trying to comprehend infinity, just something the human mind can't reason.

It definitely does...? That may depend hugely on what you mean by evil. If you are thinking in moral terms about good and evil, read Nietzsche's 'beyond good and evil' (if you haven't already). He kind of does away with the notion of 'good and evil'.

But if by evil you mean simply something that causes harm.. I don't really think that's as complicated as infinity.

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

In other words, is it necessary to have bad to appreciate good?

In other other words, do I need to know Iraqies are dying before I can enjoy my Big Mac?

More importantly, if god was the devil, SHOULD he let us in on it?

We will always have concept of good and evil. Nowadays little children that attack others are considered naive. If we someday achieve an utopic state where most people never received a punch, a little children that attacks others will probally be considered freaking evil Smile

I didnt understood what you meant with the end-post question.

Pusyphus wrote:

Well that explains alot.

And here I was thinking god was just a monumental coward. Whew!

When did this happen? and is everyone alright?

Does this mean satan has the upper hand now, or just that everyone had fallen hook line and sinker for a pack of lies?

Long live the king. :perplexed:

Have you ever killed an ant or other little insect, or let one die, or let one kill itself, or not watched upon it to prevent any of this from happening? Yes? Well, then, you are as bad as god! Smile

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

In other other words, do I need to know Iraqies are dying before I can enjoy my Big Mac?

How on earth does this elaborate the fact that if God were the devil, would he "let us in on it." This just seems kind of harsh, no?

@VideCorSpoon,

For many to justify why god lets bad things happen, like war, it's been said that god thinks it is necessary.

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

For many to justify why god lets bad things happen, like war, it's been said that god thinks it is necessary.

Pusyphus, perhaps you should change your name to "Sisyphus". I think it would be more appropriate. If you don't know who sisyphus was, look it up. "Sisyphean can be used as an adjective meaning that an activity is unending and/or repetitive. It could also be used to refer to tasks that are pointless and unrewarding". As per wiki.
William

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

For many to justify why god lets bad things happen, like war, it's been said that god thinks it is necessary.

By who? Is it the grand and general "them," "that one guy," or " a scholar from I forget where mentioned that..."

And who is to say that God lets bad things happen? In one respect, is that even his problem to begin with? Has God gone from being conceived as something other than what his namesake implies... omnipotent? Last time I checked, if you use the moniker of God and attach any negative connotation to him, the only thing you do is create an indirect logic syllogism from which anything can follow.

@VideCorSpoon,

Good and evil necessarily coexist. You can't have one without the other. If God should exist, He could not be truly good nor totally evil; He must be beyond good and evil--beyond the concepts of good and evil.

@hammersklavier,

hammersklavier wrote:

Good and evil necessarily coexist. You can't have one without the other. If God should exist, He could not be truly good nor totally evil; He must be beyond good and evil--beyond the concepts of good and evil.

See, this is what I mean. I'm not sure I understand it.

Regarding war, for instance, is it necessary for some other country to suffer, so I can be happy?

With an omnipotent god, I think the answer is obvious. And, for those who believe in an omnipotent, but allow themselves to fracture when they see unecessary evil, without a valid explanation, I offer an alternative way of thinking. To them I ask:

Have you ever considered the possibility that god is a deceiver, who lies about being a decent individual?

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

See, this is what I mean. I'm not sure I understand it.

Regarding war, for instance, is it necessary for some other country to suffer, so I can be happy?

With an omnipotent god, I think the answer is obvious. And, for those who believe in an omnipotent, but allow themselves to fracture when they see unecessary evil, without a valid explanation, I offer an alternative way of thinking. To them I ask:

Have you ever considered the possibility that god is a deceiver, who lies about being a decent individual?

Some people indeed have notions of god that make no sense, and usually claim that evil happens because its part of god's good plan and his plan is too big and great for humans to understand, or something like that. But for people who are open-minded for the nature of god, an omnipotent god can let evil happen for many reasons, such as not even acknoledging it as such.

@Pusyphus,

god is good and bad.
as everyone here in the world, we can be goog or bad people.
being a bad person is not bad, inside i think get that in the world should exist the xtremes...and as GOD is all...so, god is good and bad.

@manored,

Manored, do you mean god may not view certain things as evil?

Or, do you mean god may let evil happen to those who do not recognize [him] as god?

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

See, this is what I mean. I'm not sure I understand it.

Regarding war, for instance, is it necessary for some other country to suffer, so I can be happy?

We must by fiat define peace as the absence of war, and conversely war as the absence of peace. For us to understand those terms, we must hold them up in opposition. They are a dichotomy. Should all the inhabitants on this world ever decide to get along without killing one another (which I think is coming sooner than we think, so long as we don't manage to kill ourselves), there would be no war, and in such a state of continual peace, the word peace itself would be forgotten. Thus would this world move beyond war and peace (but in a state we would recognize as "peace"). So too think of God as beyond good and evil. He cannot be conceived of as omnibeneficent, because that would imply omnimalfeasance, which would imply the nature of an entity other than God as powerful as God (in fact, this is what the Zoroastrians and the Cathars believed); because the balance of the opposite is not in His nature, He could be said to be "beyond" it.

Quote:

With an omnipotent god, I think the answer is obvious. And, for those who believe in an omnipotent, but allow themselves to fracture when they see unecessary evil, without a valid explanation, I offer an alternative way of thinking. To them I ask:

Have you ever considered the possibility that god is a deceiver, who lies about being a decent individual?

Descartes proposed and then discarded that idea. Also, what you're describing is the Gnostic perception of God. Since this idea is anathema to most people, other, more compelling workarounds have been developed.

The Jewish God allows what we may consider as "evil" for the purpose of continually "testing" our goodness (see the Book of Job). This idea is inherently interesting, but not IMO as compelling as the following theories (because a tester must by nature act ex mundi and I am not satisfied this is the case).
In Indian thought, it is not God (or Brahman) that is evil, for even in creating illusion Brahman-saguna is not violating dharma (sacred purpose); instead it is our mind promulgating and increasing illusion that itself creates the illusion of evil and causes us to break dharma, which of course manifests as true social evil. Controlling, not being controlled by, these forces of the self, is the key to moving beyond the petty evils of the world.
Buddhist thought is at the most extreme. Anatman not only states there is no enduring soul, but that the myth of the enduring soul is a sort of original sin, the fallibility that lies at the heart of all evil.

These theories are more compelling to me, but not so compelling as my own idea of the nature and origin of evil: the lie. In reading the Book of Genesis, what do you notice to be the first transgression? The serpent's untruth. And when you think about it, when you do an evil act, what is the ultimate cause and the ultimate effect of this evil? They are one and the same: lying. We lie to ourselves and say we need something more than we really do; we act on this false impulse; and once acted upon, we feel we must lie some more to cover up this transgression. It is a positive feedback cycle: lying begets transgressions begets lying begets more transgressions begets yet more lying and so on and so forth ad infinitum, and it is the causes and effects of this cycle that we recognize as evil in this world.

@hammersklavier,

Well stated, hammersklavier.

I also believe that deception is the core of just about any evil act. Either the act requires deception or amounts to it, in almost every case. It's interesting what you've said. Many people gloss over the impact of deception, even when it can be shown as the root of all evil, contrary to popular belief.

We have the wonderful powerful thing called language. One could say our species has evolved to lie, with all of our facial expressions and vocal inflections. I wonder if it was intended...

If god called seeking truth the first transgression, would that not make him evil by nature, for witholding what would be understandably and fairly sought...for taking that which was not his to give?

In a sense, god was the first to lie. Would that not be the original sin?

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

If god called seeking truth the first transgression, would that not make him evil by nature, for witholding what would be understandably and fairly sought...for taking that which was not his to give?

If God called seeking truth the first transgression, you would have a good argument. However, according to the mythology, God does no such thing. Assuming we're still talking about Genesis, that is.

@Didymos Thomas,

BibleGateway.com - PassageLookup: Genesis 3

Quote:

The Fall of Man

1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God really say, 'You must not eat from any tree in the garden'?" 2 The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, 'You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.' "
4 "You will not surely die," the serpent said to the woman. 5 "For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it. 7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man, "Where are you?"
10 He answered, "I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid."
11 And he said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?"
12 The man said, "The woman you put here with me-she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it."
13 Then the LORD God said to the woman, "What is this you have done?"
The woman said, "The serpent deceived me, and I ate."
14 So the LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this,
"Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring [a] and hers;
he will crush [b] your head,
and you will strike his heel."
16 To the woman he said,
"I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you."
17 To Adam he said, "Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, 'You must not eat of it,'
"Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return."
20 Adam [c] named his wife Eve, [d] because she would become the mother of all the living.
21 The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the LORD God said, "The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever." 23 So the LORD God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side [e] of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.

This is the first transgression I can find in Genesis. Nothing previous to it.

Also, Pusyphus, if you're using the ontological argument in your proof of the existence of God, a corollary of "perfection" is that He could not create a system in which we are all deceived. Indeed, it seems that's why Descartes dropped his theory of a deceptive God: his argument doesn't allow it.

@Pusyphus,

Pusyphus wrote:

Manored, do you mean god may not view certain things as evil?

Or, do you mean god may let evil happen to those who do not recognize [him] as god?

I mean that if an intelligent being controlling the world exists, it doesnt needs to be anything like us. Its objectives, as well as its concepts of good and evil, can be completly different from ours. Basically this means that its behavior is completly unpredictable, it can go from good to evil and back in a blink.

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