="Dominic Bunnell, post: 60821, member: 840"]Traditional theists make the extraordinary claim that this world was created by an all-loving, all-powerful being, and so they have an awful lot of explaining to do.
Why is that such an extraordinary claim ?.
That God is all -loving, all -powerful does not exclude His other attributes such as the truth, justice,mercy, accountability, judgement, beauty, perfection....
Let's consider this 'analogy" :
Your parents can love you dearly , but can and should also be tough with you whenever necessary : there is no contradiction in that .Their love or tough love for you does not mean that they should let you do whatever you want.
That's no accurate "analogy" (we are not kids , in the eyes of God , so to speak , otherwise , we wouldn't be "worthy" of the burden of responsibility) , but i have just used it to make you see the fact that God is all -loving and all -powerful does not mean that God should erase all pain and suffering from this planet.
"God made us to His own image " , so we should try to live up to that , by trying to approach "perfection, truth", beauty , justice, goodness...through pain and suffering , through pleasure , sadness, joy, ups and downs, through creativity, hard work .....by accepting our imperfection as such and by trying to go beyond it .
We are spiritual beings who have to live in the human state and surpass it.
We can't do the above if we let our false and illusory ego/mind be our "god".The ego thinks and wants to be a 'god" anyway, a false and an illusory one.
Say, you were responsible for a business to run , for example, you have to be held accountable for that , either way.
God created man for a purpose , i guess,so all individual and collective human actions do have an impact on the rest of humanity as well as on the rest of the universe,since the whole universe , including ourselves , is interconnected,which means that man must be held accountable for his/her actions in this world,simple.
Man was foolish enough as to accept that responsibility or burden and hence has to face the consequences accordingly.
The bottom line is , once again , to the point of boring you , is as follows:
That was just your illusory false ego/mind speaking of which you have to let go ,if you wanna know your self and therefore God.
Pagans, atheists, Taoists, Buddhists and others don't make this kind of claim, and so the existence of so much evil in the world is not so puzzling for them. It's just the way the world is.
Prior note :
Those above mentioned forms of ancient wisdom ( except atheism thus that's a lower or a degenerate form of religion,a secular one, as Nitezsche said regarding humanism , in the sense that the latter is just a degenerate form of christianity.Atheism does not even exist as such in fact : each one of us does 'worship " one form or another of "deity or god ", be it power , ego, lust , money ...) do also say that one has to try to let go of the falser and illusory ego/mind to attain enlightenment.
Don't be shopping selectively thus.
Having said that :
When they claim what you described above, does that make them right ?
Don't forget that all ancient forms of wisdom had influenced each other, like all cultures did/do to each other, and that they have almost the same essence, deep down, despite their apparent and real differences.
Not to mention that even religion itself does 'evolve", in accordance with man's knowledge , with the degree of development or "progress" of man , with the experience of man ....with the spiritual growth of man...
Even religion itself thus is not a static entity , it is a dynamic process , otherwise it cannot claim to be timeless and universal.
That does not mean that religion changes in order to adapt to man's new situations , it just means that man is able to approach what religion says , in accordance with man's above mentioned stages of development : the more man is knowledgeable, the more man passes through experiences ....the more is man able to approach the "truth" or remain blinded by his/her own ego that prevents him/her from 'seeing the truth".
Real blindness is not that of the eye or brain , it is that of the heart thus.The latter as not the biological organ or emotions...but the heart as the highest form of "intellect ", as the highest form of human intelligence or intuition: trained experienced enlightened informed intuition, that is , not the ordinary intuition which is not really reliable.
Of course we all struggle with evil and suffering in our own lives, regardless of our belief system, but only traditional theists have THE problem of evil, i.e. why the hell would an all-loving, all-powerful God allow all of this evil to exist.
Why would God not allow all this evil to exist then, momentarily , that is ? God is all -powerful, remember.
There is also what can be called tough love where the Beloved has to make the lover go through some sort of ordeals , ups and downs, joy and sorrow, pain and pleasure ....to attain higher levels of being or enlightenment through those kind of experiences.
When you try to have a "perfect " body , for example, you have to work out , experience pain as well as gratification as a result....
You can't say , why do i have to go through all that pain , hard work , suffering ...to have a "perfect" or fit physique, can you ?.
Let alone that you can say : why is there so much pain and suffering on the road to a "perfect body " ?, can you ?
Well, your spirit has also to be "perfected" through pain and suffering , ups and downs, joy and sadness , pleasure.....through enlightenment...
I think what you might be getting at is that more and more people are coming to believe in an all-loving, all-powerful God through direct experience, for example through NDEs, psychedelic drugs and mystical experiences, rather than through scripture and tradition.
What makes those experiences more reliable than scripture or tradition then ?
Mystical and other similar experiences ,as mentioned above, can easily be just illusions or wishful thinking sometimes, that's 1 of the reasons why mysticism, NDE , psychedelic drugs and drug-induced mystical experiences are not fully reliable .
What makes the old mystical experiences of prophets, "saints" , "high priests " such as those of Paulus, for example, less reliable than your above mentioned mystical experiences then ?
Perhaps such people have something new to add to the debate about evil and suffering. Perhaps they won't keep bringing up the same old desperate explanations like the free-will defence, the soul-making theodicy, the 'God is mysterious' line, and so on.
Let's hope so then .Any human insights on the subject are welcome of course.
What makes the mystical experiences of the above mentioned people more reliable than the old ones of "priests", 'saints" ....prophets ...?
Just remember that man is not the measure of all things and that some forms of alleged mystical experiences , enlightenment,NDE ....can turn out to be just wishful thinking, delusions, illusions or self-deceit.
Beware of the self-deceit intrinsic capacity of the human mind thus.
We're not "gods" ,we're not "perfect , all-knowing , all-powerful ...", that's why we do need a divine guide in the form of the divine within that can be approached only through letting go of the false and illusory ego ,as the first step to the real enlightenment , whatever the latter might be indeed.
Prophets and other real 'saints" were closer to the divine within than the rest , so there is no harm to learn from them on the subject.
But to claim that one can attain enlightenment all by oneself without any kind of "outside help" is yet another form of self-deceit.
The following quote from "The Prophet" book by the US-Lebanese philosopher and poet Gibran Khalil Gibran says it all :
"...
And i say that as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you ,
So ,the wicked and the weak cannot fall below the lowest which is in you also ..."
My own view is that there will never be a solution to the problem of evil and that the God of traditional theism almost certainly does not exist.
You do sound like Dawkiins here .I thought you could do much better than that dogmatic bigot. All forms of scientism are just dogmatic beliefs or ideologies, so , no science. Cheers.
