Mythological concepts of good and evil in a real world

[St.Roymond]

@heymike3

Is there anything in the NT that describes it this way?

Paul talks much more about battling our own flesh than dealing with Satan, and more about temptations from the world than from Satan.

[heymike3]

I was drawing a blank on warfare language which is used against spiritual principalities ever being directed against the flesh

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

@St.Roymond

This is why I don’t consider it to be a “cosmic battle”: God is in total control of the victory which is not in doubt.

I’m sure you believe this and I’m sure you will have no use for my opinion being that it is completely uninformed by the Bible. But in my opinion, the lust for and illusion of control is the real source of our fallenness. It was what the serpent promised and our only hope now is to change our thinking about that. Easier said than done. God is better than us and does not control outcomes. He creates and supports but does not interfere.

I normally charge 2¢ for such advice but this one is on the house.

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@mitchellmckain

Yes your fault and that is why. I certainly don’t see Christianity as projecting good and evil onto external entities. God is the creator not the personification of goodness. I repudiate the notion that something is good simply because God commands it, God commands something because it is good. And I see the devil is mostly a scapegoat assigned this role because we chose to blame him for our mistake.

Once I got past the figuratively stamped foot, I found that there was something I could react to. You don’t see it, but the way the ‘battle between good and evil’ has been portrayed through history by the church has a great deal to do with how it is portrayed in modern entertainment. It may be a caricature of the church’s portrayal, but that is because the church’s portrayal is itself a caricature of perceived reality. We see goodness typically in loving mothers, grandmothers, and aunts, and how they care for us. We may see goodness in loving fathers and grandfathers, whose lifestyle and perhaps their wisdom impress us. In need, the non-judgemental helping hand that is outstretched, the water for our thirst, the food for our hunger, the tending of our wounds, the visit in solitary, are all experiences of goodness that seem like a candle in the darkness. Of course, there are multiple examples, where people feel they have been loved, gifted, and embraced by providence. But it was people who are moved to do these things, because we are the hearts and hands of providence if we allow ourselves to be.

The opposite is also true. We see evil in malicious forces at work, and when it is a natural phenomenon, we accept that circumstances rather than evil, which for me malevolent intention, has caused it. Rather, it is when we are picked upon, disadvantaged, punched, kicked or driven out, that we experience evil, but more so when it comes over us like a wave of anonymous malice, destroying lives in great numbers and leaving people to thirst, hunger, bleed or die in helpless loneliness. Once again, it was people who were moved to do these things, because we are the blackened hearts and hands of evil if we allow ourselves to be.

We could talk about the malevolence or goodness that is able to change people in this way, and ask what is inherent in people, but the truth is, that both are part of what we are. If we approach the silence and sit, meditating or contemplating, we realise this, which is one reason some Christians have told me they don’t meditate. They assume that the silence invites the devil, rather than realising that they have met the perhaps dormant but real negative side of their personality, which needs to be controlled by the other side, which is able to do that. As the saying goes, “the one you feed is the one that is strongest.”

@mitchellmckain

But it also doesn’t change your essentially hostile and “superior” way of treating with Christianity. The creator is not mythological just because you don’t believe in a creator. And it also doesn’t really change my analysis that pan(en)theism has a problem with making a distinction between good and evil. There is nobody even doing things because they are good. There is only mixtures of good and evil in the world and in people, if even that – more likely there is only the subjective judgments according to how things are perceived to affect us personally. Maybe you can clear that up. Do you even believe in any absolutes with regards to good and evil or is it all relative?

Your calling me “hostile towards Christianity" also reveals a tendency to lump things together and make it an entity. Christianity is people. People are very different, and I have met considerate, loving Christians with whom I loved to be identified with, but I have also met prickly, idealist Christians, whose adherence to the book gave them an impenetrable surface – or so they thought. I have also seen these people break down in tears but bark at the sympathetic hand that attempts to embrace them. They tend to consider such behaviour as condescending.

The curious thing is that the prime and sacred Unity which we traditionally call God, in which we live and move and have our being, is also that which we are in that we are its progenies, or its children, which is why humans have either called it sacred Mother or Father, experiences all this with us. Like Meister Eckhard told us, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.”

We are told that one man knew this, and his call of affection, “Abba!” revealed his unity with the One, which is the language that all mystics use, because as once again Meister Eckhard said, “I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God.”

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@Dale

Yeast is best avoided by walking away.

That is also the best way to avoid learning …

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Did the Sadducees have anything to teach us? I don’t think so, except by counterexample.

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@Dale

by counterexample

At least that. The problem is that we need an opposite to know who we are, but also to hold up a mirror so that we can see ourselves as another sees us. Avoiding mirrors doesn’t take away a blemish.

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

Have you a mirror?

[Rob_Brewer (Robert Brewer)]

@Dale

Have you a mirror?

Many, you are one …

[Dale (evolutionary providentialist)]

But you do have to know how to interpret what you’re seeing correctly, and we have good reason to doubt. As someone well-known once said, “You are badly mistaken.”

[Christy (Christy Hemphill)]

@knor

Christus Victor is a rational interpretation but does not include everything told in the NT scriptures.

Of course not, because all the atonement models are just pictures and they focus in on certain metaphors for sin. There are a whole bunch of metaphors for sin, so it makes sense that to understand how the atonement deals with sin, there would need to be multiple pictures. I don’t think any of them are intended to be used like scientific models that explain all the “data.”

[MarkD (A Whateverist, not a Christian)]

Nice to see we can have thoughtful replies here that are succinct without reducing to one line zingers.

[heymike3]

@Christy

I don’t think any of them are intended to be used like scientific models that explain all the “data.”

Take the divinity of Jesus for example. If all the data is allowed to bear weight on the issue, certain views of Jesus can be considered heretical or cultish. If the full counsel of Scripture is considered, an incomprehensibly rich view of Jesus emerges as one who knew no sin, and yet became sin.

Because he was truly God he could do things only God could do, and because he was truly man, he could do things that only a human being could do.

[adamjedgar (adam james edgar)]

@St.Roymond

@SkovandOfMitaze

After all if we know that God did not make us, but instead we evolved just like everything else, why would Angels be magically made.

An interesting question. The usual response is that angels were made to function/live without sin(ning), but that runs aground on the proposition that Lucifer for a third of the angels to follow him.

I think that is a dilemma that only has a single answer…and it has nothing to do with evolution and time…or the claim that God was learning (because there is biblical evidence that angels sinned before Adam and Eve did so God could have modified Adam and Eve so they did not sin)…

The answer is, every intelligent creature with the power of reason in the universe can choose to disobey and sin.

All have free will.

Satan clearly tried regularly to convince other planets (if you like) that they should disobey as evidenced by his unwelcome attendance at the meeting in Job Chapter 1

6One day the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satana also came with them.

7“Where have you come from?” said the LORD to Satan.

“From roaming through the earth,” he replied, “and walking back and forth in it.”

8Then the LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered My servant Job? For there is no one on earth like him, a man who is blameless and upright, who fears God and shuns evil.”

9Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10Have You not placed a hedge on every side around him and his household and all that he owns? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. 11But stretch out Your hand and strike all that he has, and he will surely curse You to Your face.”

12“Very well,” said the LORD to Satan. “Everything he has is in your hands, but you must not lay a hand on the man himself.”

Then Satan went out from the presence of the LORD.

Its just that Adam and Eve chose differently from the other beings and we are now the battleground for the “Great Controversy” (as Adventists put it)

[mitchellmckain (Scientist and Christian)]

@Rob_Brewer

You don’t see it, but the way the ‘battle between good and evil’ has been portrayed through history by the church has a great deal to do with how it is portrayed in modern entertainment.

Well I certainly think it is more entertaining when we do that – a rather tame version more suitable for family entertainment. But we also draw examples from history in the people who have horrified us a great deal more than that.

@Rob_Brewer

Eckhard told us, “The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me;

I say something similar in many ways when I explain how my identification of the spiritual with the subjective aspect of life applies to God. Since God is infinite our perception of God is in many ways more a reflection of our own finite desires, interests, and capacities – and God interacts with us accordingly, reaching us where we are at.

[St.Roymond]

@Dale

Did the Sadducees have anything to teach us? I don’t think so, except by counterexample.

Copying the text of the scrolls correctly – they were insistent on that.

[St.Roymond]

@mitchellmckain

Well I certainly think it is more entertaining when we do that – a rather tame version more suitable for family entertainment. But we also draw examples from history in the people who have horrified us a great deal more than that.

In one Greek class we read Greek plays. The professor chose almost nothing but tragedies; his reason was that those were the plays that showed just how deeply fractured our human world is by demonstrating that there are many times that there just is no good choice.