Yep! That's God's punishment.

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HMS White Star (your local friendly agent of Chaos:-) )

Once again, if you accept the Theory of Omniscience, God knew Satan was going to go bad from the get-go, and created him that way, so it's His own damned fault. He put the spark and the potential for evil there.

Opposites exist in this world for a reason. There is day, and night; The Moon has it's fullness and then it's darkness; There can be no Order without Chaos; There can be no dark without light, no good without evil. The reason I give for this is the reason of balance. The Universe stays in a constant precarious balance and if one side had all the power, it would unravel everything else. Anyone ever see that movie, Legend?

Anyways, as Tora was saying ... We _CANNOT_ know what light is unless we have also experienced the darkness. We can't know Joy unless we've known Sorrow .... we cannot know our good unless we have looked upon our evil.

Now then.... the definition of Good is "the opposite of evil" and the definition of Evil is "the opposite of good". This puts us in a very tough position.. WHAT is good? and WHAT is evil? ....... I say they are all relative. Every persons good and evil is going to be different ... the trick is knowing within yourself what you feel to be good, and what you feel to be evil.

Is there some huge big bad guy who lives in Hades and draws our souls to "the dark side"? Satan is a christian creation, invented to scare the people they were converting INTO converting. I don't believe in Satan, or the Devil, or any of that nonesense. But that doesn't mean that I don't believe in Evil. For me, it is "the dark side" itself that is the evil in this world.

In my religion, we are taught that the universe was split in half, one half to the God, the other to the Goddess, and that these halves converged together to create the one whole that was "The source" ... something that others would call God. "the source" teaches us to do good for eachother, help eachother, and harm no one with any of our actions. The general rule of the universe states that anything you send out from you comes back threefold as powerful .... I'm sure you've all heard "What goes around comes around".
It is when people get power-hungry and start hurting their fellow planet-dwellers (trees and such included), when these people use the power the source has given them to cause only pain and sorrow and darkness, THEN they become evil. But it is not because the devil made them do it, it is because they were silly enough to be seduced into thinking that they could cause only darkness in this world: and their payment for causing darkness is BECOMING DARKNESS. It is not the actions (as some would call "sins") of these people that alone are to blame. It is simply the thoughts that are to blame, for when they start thinking that they can do whatever they want, and hurt whatever they want, and NOT MAINTAIN BALANCE of the good and evil within them - THAT's what's to blame.

So.... God exists and is Omniscient, and he knows there is evil in this world, and it exists because there has to be a balance between good and evil.

Good does not need to exist in order for evil to, or vice versa. For one thing, the terms are supplied by an observer. Only the concepts must exist. I can, for instance, think up hundreds of evil thoughts a day and never act on them, never make them a physical reality. And if no one but me knows they ever existed...

Why do we think of Good and Evil as two separate entitites? To take from Taoism, a better method (and more scientifically explainable in metaphors) would be to consider Good as an entity and Evil as the absence of that entity. That would be a better way ot explain the "coexistence" of the two in the world. Consider hot and cold. Cold does not exist. It is merely the absence of heat. In this way, Satan is not defending a specific point, but rather tearing down the other into chaos.

Now, the next leap is to ask why God can't fill the whole world with Good so that nowhere is it absent.

William of Ockham criticizes the seeming lack of action on God's part (especially in regards to Grace) saying God can do anything he wants directly; I, however, believe God freely has decided not to intervene over the will of humans when committing acts that increase the absence of Good. A. J. Benedetto writes, "...out of respect for human freedom God does not, though absolutely speaking and by an extraordinary intervention could, prevent the sin" [Encyclopedia of Catholocism, 4-126].

Not to make light of it all, but I think God is in a self-imposed struggle. He created a universe that he thought was Good, and he wishes to see it resolve itself through his grace and that grace influencing (but not controlling) the universe's mechnisms.

Maybe it's only me, but I think this makes a lot of sense. God could have obliterated Satan and the fallen angles, but he has chosen not to impose his omnipotence. Yes, things get messy down here, but this is God's choice, and one day, if he is truly a being of love, he will make good on his promise and bestow on us the joy that comes with heaven/nirvana/etc.

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"Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Tao to survivial or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."

"...attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."

I don't know about any of you, but the inability to choose a course of action does not strike me as a characteristic of a "perfect" creation (perfect idiot, perhaps ). It is quite possible that what we think of as "perfect" is not perfect in God's eyes.

I have more to say on this subject, but haven't chosen the right words yet.

--Baloo

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I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
www.geocities.com/Area51/Shire/8641/

Is fragging a guy because he touched your "ark" while attempting to prevent it from harm an act of "good?"

Is sending false and confusing prophecies in order to mislead folks an act of "good?"

Is ANYTHING that happened to Job "Good?"

Is sending bears to devour 42 children because some of them teased your pet prophet an act of "good?"

Could slaying every firstborn son of Egypt REALLY be justified as "good?"

I think we all know who had a hand in the above.

The Ark was being carried in a manner other than that dictated by God. You don't do what God says, and he's got every right to fry you to a crisp.

"Is ordering your followers to obliterate all human life (men, women, children) in a city (in several cities, actually) an act of "Good" in any way, shape, or form?"

Again, same answer.

"Is sending false and confusing prophecies in order to mislead folks an act of "good?""

Name one.

"Is ANYTHING that happened to Job "Good?""

Well, let's see. He became a better person, he ditched those guys that called themselves his friends, he got back what he lost several fold, and God taught Satan a lesson.

"Is sending bears to devour 42 children because some of them teased your pet prophet an act of "good?""

Well, it taught the kids a lesson for a minute or two. Again, the country had fallen away from God. He would have been perfectly justified in wiping out the lot of them (well, He'd have to leave a few, as He promised that the Christ would come from their line).

"Could slaying every firstborn son of Egypt REALLY be justified as "good?""

It taught the Egyptians not to mess with the God of Isreal, and got Pharoah to let the Isrealites go.

This is all consistant with free will. You can do whatever you want, but if you don't do what God tells you to, there will be consequences.

Dead men learn no lessons.

"Again, the country had fallen away from God."

According to your definition, name me one country today that hasn't "fallen away from God." Does God just not care anymore?

"You don't do what God says, and he's got every right to fry you to a crisp."
"He would have been perfectly justified in wiping out the lot of them."

Sounds an awful lot like REVENGE to me.

"This is all consistant with free will. You can do whatever you want, but if you don't do what God tells you to, there will be consequences."

Hold it right there! We've been discussing on the first page that God does not interfere with free will, which is why God let Adam and Eve choose whether or not to eat the apple, which is how they fell from the Garden. But the interference of God in the events that humans *choose* to disobey him is a DIRECT VIOLATION of the Prime Dir--er, Free Will! It's not consistant with Free Will. Far from it.

On another point, I sure noticed a lot of people not doing "what God told them to" in this world. Surely you don't need me to site examples, do you?

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"I told you. You're dead. This is the afterlife. And I'm God."
--Q to Picard, "Tapestry".

To my way of thinking, God of the Old Testament was essentially a child. His toy humans misbehave, so he slaughters them all. A city or two doesn't do what he wants, he has them burned to a crisp. A group of people is living where he wants the Israelites to be, so he orders them all killed. In the Old Testament, human life is exceedingly cheap.

To make a crude analogy, this is the same as catching your child writing on the wall and chopping their arm off for it. Even if I had spent the whole day telling my child "Don't write on the wall or you'll be in trouble" I don't think I'd resort to maiming or killing him or her.

What does this all mean? Again, people have been arguing that point for a long long time. The idea that God can do anything God wants is common, as Omega indicates. But this always reminds me of a quote from Richard Nixon during Watergate. "When the President does it, that means it isn't illegal." I reject that concept. Yes, I'm a godless heathen. But I think that there are absolute rights and wrongs in this universe, and they apply to every thinking being in it. Even God.

Evil is for balance dumbass. You humans think you are so special. Really, you are not. You are machines. Biology is the final evolution of nanotechology. You are merely an experiment I'm conducting.

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"I came upon a wedding, good old families had contribed.
Bethlaham the bride-groom, Babylon the bride.
Great Babylon was naked, ah she stood there trembling for me.
And Bethlaham enflamed us both, like a shy one at some orgy.
And when we fell together, all our flesh was like a veil.
But I had to draw aside to see the serpent eat its tail.
Some women wait for Jesus, and some women wait for Cain.
So I hang upon my alter, and I hoist my axe again.
And I take the one that finds me back to where it all began.
When Jesus was the honeymoon, and Cain was just a man.
And we read from pleasant Bibles, that are bound in blood and skin,
But the wilderness is gathering all its children back again."
excerpt from the song "Last Year's Man"
By Leonard Cohen.