The Possibility of a God

well said. completely and totally agree with you.

Perhaps you need to think a bit more on the subject. Particularily the ‘evil’ part. Take a bit more time and think about that. The concept of evil. What is it really? Why is it? Tell me what you get out of it when you really think about it…because right now I feel you’re barely looking into the subject at all…there might be things to be learned 😀

It seems like you have some good reasoning there. This article focuses on the same topic. You might find it interesting. http://www.watchtower.org/library/g/2004/3/22/article_01.htm

Your last paragraph… about why a good God would allow suffering… I’ve been thinking about that for at least a week now (not that I hadn’t thought about it before). The best answer I’ve come up with so far: “When we ask, ‘God, where are you & why don’t you do something to help end the suffering’, it seems to be the wrong outlook on the situation. Perhaps… there is suffering because either 1)we somehow caused it on one another or 2) we are here, so why not be as proactive as we want God to be?” My little thought comes to an end when I think of innocent children that have cancer, etc. The incurable and/or the unreachable. Then it truly is up to God to heal or help them. At that point I still don’t have an answer. Funny thing though; a few days ago when I was trying to understand the answer about the incurables/unreachables, a program appeared on television with a voice that said “God takes care of his own”. I believe it was about baptism/dedication. Coincidence, synchronicity, God, or nothing? …I still don’t know, and so I’m still searching for an answer to the very same question…

That argument structure reminds me of my ethics class. Argh. When I have more energy I will say something hopefully more interesting.

4, 5 and 8 are completely retarded . who in the hell writes dumb shit like that?

you can’t prove there is a God any more than you can prove there isn’t a God.

In your last entry you said that you need to work toward being okay being uncomfortable and quiet which is dumb because it hinders you in several areas of your life, and you have a lot to say. So instead you should work on not being so uncomfortable and quiet.

There are flaws here… 1. “Evil” is not opposed to God. Lucifer means light and the Hebrew word “Satan” only means “adversary.” 2. Also, nowhere does it say that God is all-powerful or all-knowing. 3. As you’ve already said, God is not necessarily opposed to suffering. If we run with the Christian idea that God IS all-powerful and all-knowing, it would actually follow that God enjoys the suffering of others. He created man with free will, a gift we are told he did not bestow upon the angels. If that’s the case, He knew that Lucifer would rebel against Him and He in fact created him for the express purpose of suffering the agony of being cast into Hell. 4. Conclusion: God is ineffable, if He does indeed exist. All we really know is that somewhere in the Middle East a sect formed that let fall by the wayside the worship of other gods and took as their leader a thunder god, who, according to His own testaments, is pretty fickle… always destroying the world and starting over.

Ryn- I’m sorry 🙁 I set it to private. I often change my mind on negative sounding entries.

With a heavy backgorund of Philosophy I see some good argument structure. However, remember a basic premise that most of our concepts of God flow from. God created everything If He created everything, then He must exist outside of everything Therefore, God exists outside of time and he does not create with the knowledge something will happen, rather

He create (notice the lack of tense). In the act of creation everything takes place, time exists within creation. We can only measure things within creation. We say God sustains us in existence because this is from our point of view. Also, if God is all good (who says He is not) then what is evil? According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, evil is a privation of Good, namely God.

So why would God allow this privation of Himself? Love. It is in the Love of God that we have freewill. God wants us to be with Him, however he will not force us to be, He loves us to much. So He allows us to choose to be with lesser entities then Himself, in the choice of these lesser things is the privation of Good, or privation of God.

On the notion that God suffers with us, you are absolutly correct. God, being the creator of everything, exists in everything. (not in some Native American Religious sense) He is intimatly tied into every entity. As Christians we see this in the parable with the naked, hungry, and imprisoned. On a philosophical level, God created everything… gave it existence.

So a piece of God, existence, is within everything. When it suffers he feels the pain also. Imagine the agony of Christ on the cross. I have heard it said that Christ bore the pain of the world on His shoulders as He carried the cross. How did he treat the cross? He embraced it, kissed it even. We are called to pick up our cross, our pain. It is by pain that we are cleansed, purified.

Envision Christ in the desert before He began his ministry. He fasted for 40 days, was tempted. That was not pleasent, yet it was neccessary for his ministry. He needed to focus on the work of God, Labora Deus (I think that latin is correct.)