07-08-2017, 05:54 PM
If everything is contained within God, then how can Evil exist? People have asked this question for millennia. After all, God is presumed to be All-Good. Some even argue that because Evil exists, there can be no God. Here is my viewpoint:
Evil does not truly exist. There is only Good. And what is Good? Good is Love. But there are two types of Good: Pleasant and Unpleasant.
Let's take the Jewish Holocaust of World War II as an example. This clearly is an example of what we humans call Evil. Mass murder of innocent people is clearly Evil. How could God let such a thing happen? Yet consider this. If there had been no Holocaust, there would be no State of Israel today, something that the Jewish people cherish and certainly consider Good. From God's perspective, the Holocaust was Unpleasant Good and the State of Israel was Pleasant Good that occurred as a result. From God's perspective, there is no Evil, only Good. It is only our limited human perspective that perceives something as Evil.
Does an absolute Evil exist, such as the non-physical being Lucifer (in Hebrew, the "shining light-bearer"). No. There are no non-physical beings who are Evil. They (and we) are all "little bits of God", and God is All-Good.
If everything both physical and non-physical exists within God, how can anything be outside of God? If something were outside God, then it would be Not-God, and hence exist in parallel with God and would essentially be equivalent to God because it would have an independent existence. So if something exists outside of God, then it seems to me that this would constitute a polytheistic reality.
God gives the entities It creates free will to choose between Pleasant Good and Unpleasant Good. Perhaps the reason for this is the necessity to have an opposite in order to define a characteristic (e.g. hot/cold, up/down, in/out, young/old, wet/dry, good/"evil"). But both opposites exist within God.
What about phenomena as depicted in the movie "The Exorcist" (which, by the way, was based upon an actual event). Can a person actually be possessed by a devil? I do think it is possible for a non-physical entity to temporarily assume the consciousness of a physical body. And it may display Unpleasant Good.
Evil does not truly exist. There is only Good. And what is Good? Good is Love. But there are two types of Good: Pleasant and Unpleasant.
Let's take the Jewish Holocaust of World War II as an example. This clearly is an example of what we humans call Evil. Mass murder of innocent people is clearly Evil. How could God let such a thing happen? Yet consider this. If there had been no Holocaust, there would be no State of Israel today, something that the Jewish people cherish and certainly consider Good. From God's perspective, the Holocaust was Unpleasant Good and the State of Israel was Pleasant Good that occurred as a result. From God's perspective, there is no Evil, only Good. It is only our limited human perspective that perceives something as Evil.
Does an absolute Evil exist, such as the non-physical being Lucifer (in Hebrew, the "shining light-bearer"). No. There are no non-physical beings who are Evil. They (and we) are all "little bits of God", and God is All-Good.
If everything both physical and non-physical exists within God, how can anything be outside of God? If something were outside God, then it would be Not-God, and hence exist in parallel with God and would essentially be equivalent to God because it would have an independent existence. So if something exists outside of God, then it seems to me that this would constitute a polytheistic reality.
God gives the entities It creates free will to choose between Pleasant Good and Unpleasant Good. Perhaps the reason for this is the necessity to have an opposite in order to define a characteristic (e.g. hot/cold, up/down, in/out, young/old, wet/dry, good/"evil"). But both opposites exist within God.
What about phenomena as depicted in the movie "The Exorcist" (which, by the way, was based upon an actual event). Can a person actually be possessed by a devil? I do think it is possible for a non-physical entity to temporarily assume the consciousness of a physical body. And it may display Unpleasant Good.
The Kingdom of God is Within You