Tony\'s God (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, November 20, 2011, 22:40 (4730 days ago) @ dhw

Your Honor, since the prosecution has chosen to go with my analogy of a parent, I will try to stick with that analogy, and further it along.

DHW
God could not have planted the tree if he himself had not known the difference between good and evil, and as the “first cause” he could not have known the difference if it had not already been part of himself.

Absolutely correct. In God, all things are possible, great and small, good and evil. What separates him is that he possesses the ultimate knowledge, complete information, and the wisdom to make a proper determination between what is good and evil, and how to avoid doing evil things. Much like a parent who knows the the potential for badness and harm, God is also aware of them. Now, consider for a moment, that God lives in a different plane of existence, or different state of existence(whichever you perfer). In this way, he is also like a parent, who to a childs eyes, lives in a completely different world full of exciting possibilities. Like a parent, God is aware that what is ok for an adult is not necessarily ok for a child. That is not to say that it will never be ok for the child, but rather that before the child should be allowed to do those things, they must be taught the proper way to go about them. For example, playing with electricity. To a child, you do not say anything about moving electrons, insulation, grounding, or live wire, isolation, circuits, transistor, resistor, or anything of the sort. You say, "Don't play with the light socket. That's bad, it will hurt you." Now, a master engineer can take that 'bad' thing of electricity, and do wonderous things with it, and do them safely, because he has the knowledge and wisdom to do so. We are like the children. We think in terms of absolutes. Good, evil, right wrong. God is like the adult, and understands that there is a time and place for things, and a way to do them safely, and how to moderate his actions so as not to unintentionally hurt others. Also, like children, when parents tell us something is 'bad' and we see them do it themselves without the full understanding of why, how, and when that thing is appropriate, we talk crap about them being hypocrites and bad parents and all that, and in extreme cases perhaps even call child services to remove ourselves from their care. After all, the grass is always greener on the other side.

DHW
"..there is a general consensus concerning a number of “evils”." ..".We do not need human interpretations of God’s ideals to establish these codes."

There was also a general concensus that the world was flat, the sun revolved around the earth, and that the atom was the smallest particle. The thing about general consensus is that it is generally wrong, and normally subject to the fatal flaw of incomplete information. As for interpretation, you are absolutely correct in saying that we don't need interpretation, instead, we need observation. The animal kingdom is a fine place to observe those ideals in a manner that needs no interpretation.(That is an entirely other conversation though)

cont..

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What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.