God and Evil

[johnpetrovic]

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.

[Skytiger]

johnpetrovic wrote:
If everything is contained within God, then how can Evil exist?

Skytiger:
God or as I like to say Creator, we are all a part of. Creator IMHO loves to create and will always create. Sometimes creation involves destruction of some things, for the new creation to be created. Why? Perhaps like us, Creator looks at something created and thinks 'I can do better'.
The 'doing better' may involve the destructions of a planet or even a universe. Those who live on the planet or in the universe, would consider their destruction 'evil'.
Yet IMHO we are immortal souls which inhabit 'body suits' when incarnated. Only the body suit is destroyed, the light within our true self continues on. Creator knows this and is only improving creation.
The improvements help us in our developement.

What we may see as 'evil' is in truth only change.

However the evil around us, murder, war, extinction of animals, all negativity...we ourselves have made.
We decide what is evil and what is good.

It's all depends on your point of view.

Just my thoughts.

[MOONBEARSPEAKS]

Why would the term ‘good’ require to be qualified with the adjective ‘pleasant? According to the common understanding, and indeed listed in Webster’s under good #8, ‘pleasant’ is implicit in ‘good,’ and therefore, in this context, ‘pleasant’ is redundant.

Applying the same argument, Webster’s defines unpleasant as ‘not pleasant; offensive; disagreeable. None of these three equates to Webster’s on evil: 1. a) morally bad or wrong; wicked; depraved, b) resulting from or based on conduct regarded as immoral. 2. Causing pain or trouble; harmful; injurious. 3. Offensive or disgusting. 4. Threatening or bringing misfortune; unlucky; disastrous; unfortunate. -adv in an evil, wicked or offensive way. -n 1. Anything morally bad or wrong; wickedness; depravity; sin. 2. Anything that causes harm, pain, misery, disaster, etc.

 

I accept that I am arguing as a semanticist rather than as a spiritualist. Whichever hat I wear, as a human, I see the opposite of ‘good’ as ‘evil.’
I do not know God’s perspective on this – only wish I did. No offence intended, Dr John, but my investigation of spiritualism is well seasoned with the difficulties of linguistic interpretation.

[Skytiger]

You will have to bear with me. I didn't do good in English, and have a Texas Accent which will come tru, so if you don't understand me, please ask what I meant.

[geo97]

The way I see it good has no meaning without evil  and so for good to exist so does its opposite. Considering how we all have our angels and demons and also that man is made in the creator's image I don't think its too crazy to see evil to be just as part of God's nature as it is part of ours.

[Gerhard Botha]

I am with Moonbear , I do not know the Creators or God viewpoint on this. On this plane and earth there is definitely good and evil, in my opinion we all must learn what is right from wrong, I agree that our judgement is faulty and we can not clearly see good from evil sometimes, but that does not meen it do not exist!

what about morals? if there is any truth in ( evil does not exist)

[AnamikaS]

We all are part of a supreme creator ( which we call " GOD ") . But , for some reason , we have been apparently dissociated from our true self which connects us to our creator . What we call good and evil is relative . The more we divert away from our true self , the more we entangled in the illusion of this material existance , the more we create evil ( which stands for all negativity ) and make ourselves miserable. But once we , go deep within ourselves , begin to know our true selves , slowly the evil is replaced by good ( all the positivity ) , . Basically , good and evil signifies , every humans struggle to go to explore their true selves and connect to creator , and both are present in different quantities in EVERYONE of us . Once we conquer the quest we can be elevated to a higher reality , where may be there's no such thing like good or evil or on the other extreme , it may be intensified to a different level that's beyond our conscious imagination at this point .


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[MOONBEARSPEAKS]

johnpetrovic posted:-
 

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.

Anti-Semitism. Persecution of the Jews, or simply religio-racism; call it what you will; in its simplest terms, the holocaust can be regarded as the culmination of a more than a decade of racist fanaticism as demonstrated by thousands of Aryans following their self-elected leader. The Holocaust is the term usually accepted as identifying the gassing, burning or otherwise murdering some six million individual human beings, on the basis that their very existence contravened one man’s concept of a ‘pure’ white race; the only form of human being that, in his mind, had any right to exist. In addition to that principal episode, there are other examples scattered across Europe, within the same couple of decades, of whole communities being murdered by Nazi troops as an act of revenge or punishment for the acts of a few members of the community committed as resistance against the invaders. In the course of our travels, Joyce and I visited a number of such locations. There was one in particular, a small village in the Peloponnese area of Greece. Here, in the 1940’s the German military commander ordered the shooting of the entire population of the village as an act of retribution against an act of ‘patriotic resistance’ carried out by a few of the villagers. On a hill overlooking the village, there now stands a colossal marble mausoleum, erected to commemorate that extremely evil event. (I think we have to acknowledge that there are degrees of evil-ness.) Because we had been ‘guided’ to this location, of which we had no prior knowledge, Joyce and I understood that it was yet another situation where we should sit in meditation, connect with our guides and wait for their guidance. This was over twenty years ago and I seriously regret that the notes we made at the time have been inadvertently destroyed. In brief, what we were ‘given’ is that these few hundred villagers, none of them Jewish, were nevertheless, members of a ‘soul-group’ whose purpose in that life-time, was to be voluntarily, in a spiritual context, part of the whole scenario of mass murder, so as to demonstrate to the rest of humanity, the extremity of the level of depravity to which their perverted beliefs and elitist appetites would take the perpetrators.

Members of this particular soul-group, several millions in number, have repeatedly dedicated many of their life-times, over thousands of years, (read your history books) to voluntary acts of unconditionally-loving-sacrifice, in order to bring to the attention of the rest of us, the world community, the fact that out of extremes can come balance; that for every act of ‘evil’ however major or minor, there is a balancing act of ‘love.’  Also, that every evil or offensive act provides an opportunity for forgiveness – in itself one of life’s greatest lessons.

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[MOONBEARSPEAKS]

johnpetrovic posted:-

 

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. 

Lucifer, Yahweh, Moloch and other names can be found among references to the ‘fallen angels’ of the Old Testament and contemporaneous writings. The implication is that these were angels who were cast out of Heaven by God – see Wikipedia – referred to in New Testament 2 Peter 2:4, "For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment ..."

Here, I find myself in difficulty. From research in Old Testament, as well as some of the contemporaneous writings I refer to above, such as the Books of Enoch and Noah, I am led to conclude that there exists much confusion between the nature of angels as non-physical (i.e. spiritual) beings which, it is supposed have never incarnated, and angels as referred to in the Old Testament, Enoch, Noah, etc., which are interpreted by many scholars as extra-terrestrial beings with very humanoid characteristics such as cannot possibly be attributed to the Un-knowable which is God/Creator/Source/Ultimate Intelligence/Ultimate Consciousness. As I said in my earlier post my view of spiritualism is well seasoned with the difficulties of linguistic interpretation. To which I would add cultural and sociological influences, varying as they do, over millennia.

 

The following is an extract from one of my earlier posts on the subject of spiritual evolution.

{In astronomical terms, our solar system and therefore planet Earth, is in an elliptical orbit around the centre of our galaxy, Milky Way. Currently, we are near one of the two points in that orbit that take us farthest from the physical centre, and thus farthest from the centre of galactic energy from which our solar system derives its supportive energy; that is the sub-form of Cosmic Energy pertinent to Milky Way or any other galaxy. They say this occurs over several hundred thousand years. Actually, we have, recently in cosmic terms, (Age of Aquarius) passed the farthest point and have already begun re-approaching the centre. This, we are told, accounts for the way in which virtually every aspect of our existence is speeding up, or gaining impetus in terms of vibratory influence. I guess many of us are becoming more and more aware of this. God, and perhaps his angels, know what will happen if and when we get too close!}

 

I am led to believe, as an outcome of other meditation/channelling episodes with my late wife Joyce that, along with the vibratory changes we are experiencing as a result of the astrological progression to which I have referred elsewhere (i.e. see above re the passing of the elliptical extremity of the solar system cycle within the Milky Way Galaxy) the vibratory status of the so-called fallen angels (Lucifer was named specifically during that meditation/channelling) is concurrently subject to that influence, as a result of which, IN DUE TIME, THEIR CONDITION WILL BE REVERSED. (…but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment ...") That is to say that, at the time, in few hundred thousand-odd years of that cycle, when we are at the closest position in that half of the elliptical progression, there will be a period when all the various aspects of energetic existence will pass through a state of balance/near balance. This is the time of ‘the judgement’ insofar as it relates to our particular chapter in the book of existence of the world.

SEE YOU THERE, GUYS.

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[MOONBEARSPEAKS]

johnpetrovic posted:-
 
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.
 
I agree with what you express here, Dr John. However, since the apparent consensus among Spiritualists is that nothing is outside of God, then there can be no polytheistic reality. My suggestion would be that such periods of polytheism of which we are aware, are/were symptomatic of man’s intellectual and spiritual efforts to understand who, what and where he is/was.
 
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