A desire to know truth whatever that happens to be is my current path. Knowing, also that that may be a carrot on a stick in life. Which itself tends to argue for a flawed creator at best. The entire universe is flawed so that whole concept of “made in God’s image” given the reflection we supposedly are, is fairly daunting. I’ve studied …
A desire to know truth whatever that happens to be is my current path. Knowing, also that that may be a carrot on a stick in life. Which itself tends to argue for a flawed creator at best. The entire universe is flawed so that whole concept of “made in God’s image” given the reflection we supposedly are, is fairly daunting. I’ve studied programing and cults and also helped folks who wanted to try to get out of a cult do that. Usually not successfully. Most people switch from one cult to another or to the therapist. If one is lucky the new cult is maybe more benign. And that is if the psyche getting help doesn’t suicide on the way which they often do or try. We ought to be reading the folks who designed our programing and then go stand in front of a mirror and work on un-tweezing our own threads. I’ve done that numerous times and it’s very, very messy.
I read philosophical things like this substack and your recommended book above for fun sometimes but the tendency to twist words around and play with them along with concepts seems to muck things up as much as anything else. To demonstrate one’s facility with language and inject one’s interpretation of it all. It’s good to read. Good to debate a bit.
With regard to human evil, we all have that in us. It seems the dualistic tendencies to do wrong things and to do good things both exist in us. We can justify keeping silent about one’s next door neighbor obviously abusing his child until the cows come home. I’ve heard my share of those justifications in my clinic for decades. But remaining silent and allowing that child to continue being hurt is evil. Conversely, turning the child over to a government based organization that is deeply involved in child trafficking is evil, too. In fact, no matter which way one turns, there are more wrong choices than right ones. And if you stretch out all the philosophical nonsense, you can also run smack dab into the freedom thing where the parent has free choice and can choose to abuse his or her child and neither God nor humans nor anyone else is going to interfere. Unless the karma/balance thing can be seen as interference somewhere down the line. But does that mean God is evil, too, for allowing the abuse and torture? A million dollar question I’ve seen batted around by all sorts of “knowledgable” folks and have yet to see an answer to. In fact, you can circle yourself around, eventually, to wanting a definition of evil vs good. As with the two-headed god, you wind up seeing they sort of flow into and out of each other. Happens in deep meditation, too.
With regard to a devil you have to see the Creator as having created it all. Or starting a spark to see what will happen. So far, either explanation, if you know anything about psychology, leads you into a psyche that isn’t right. And if we are reflections of that Creator, that’s pretty obvious. Psychopaths are just extreme presentations of things that exist in all of us. I would say saints and angels are, too. You get to choose but you also get to choose to learn which one you are at any given moment and what you do about that revelation.
I like these aphorisms when trying to understand the origin and nature of human evil and divine evil, respectively. It seems like absolutely ridiculousness to divorce evil from desire.
Aphorism #1 — “But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth ‘good’; and the object of his hate and aversion, ‘evil’.”
Aphorism #2 — “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”
A desire to know truth whatever that happens to be is my current path. Knowing, also that that may be a carrot on a stick in life. Which itself tends to argue for a flawed creator at best. The entire universe is flawed so that whole concept of “made in God’s image” given the reflection we supposedly are, is fairly daunting. I’ve studied programing and cults and also helped folks who wanted to try to get out of a cult do that. Usually not successfully. Most people switch from one cult to another or to the therapist. If one is lucky the new cult is maybe more benign. And that is if the psyche getting help doesn’t suicide on the way which they often do or try. We ought to be reading the folks who designed our programing and then go stand in front of a mirror and work on un-tweezing our own threads. I’ve done that numerous times and it’s very, very messy.
I read philosophical things like this substack and your recommended book above for fun sometimes but the tendency to twist words around and play with them along with concepts seems to muck things up as much as anything else. To demonstrate one’s facility with language and inject one’s interpretation of it all. It’s good to read. Good to debate a bit.
With regard to human evil, we all have that in us. It seems the dualistic tendencies to do wrong things and to do good things both exist in us. We can justify keeping silent about one’s next door neighbor obviously abusing his child until the cows come home. I’ve heard my share of those justifications in my clinic for decades. But remaining silent and allowing that child to continue being hurt is evil. Conversely, turning the child over to a government based organization that is deeply involved in child trafficking is evil, too. In fact, no matter which way one turns, there are more wrong choices than right ones. And if you stretch out all the philosophical nonsense, you can also run smack dab into the freedom thing where the parent has free choice and can choose to abuse his or her child and neither God nor humans nor anyone else is going to interfere. Unless the karma/balance thing can be seen as interference somewhere down the line. But does that mean God is evil, too, for allowing the abuse and torture? A million dollar question I’ve seen batted around by all sorts of “knowledgable” folks and have yet to see an answer to. In fact, you can circle yourself around, eventually, to wanting a definition of evil vs good. As with the two-headed god, you wind up seeing they sort of flow into and out of each other. Happens in deep meditation, too.
With regard to a devil you have to see the Creator as having created it all. Or starting a spark to see what will happen. So far, either explanation, if you know anything about psychology, leads you into a psyche that isn’t right. And if we are reflections of that Creator, that’s pretty obvious. Psychopaths are just extreme presentations of things that exist in all of us. I would say saints and angels are, too. You get to choose but you also get to choose to learn which one you are at any given moment and what you do about that revelation.
I like these aphorisms when trying to understand the origin and nature of human evil and divine evil, respectively. It seems like absolutely ridiculousness to divorce evil from desire.
Aphorism #1 — “But whatsoever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth ‘good’; and the object of his hate and aversion, ‘evil’.”
Aphorism #2 — “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things.”