As Tom Waits once said.
“Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, only God when he’s drunk”.
Man, that’s a great line.
To address the OP, I actually think that ProjectOmega has a point.
The only way I could reconcile the idea of an omnsicient God with the awe and horror of the universe is to assume he operates at a level which I am fundamentally incapable of understanding.
Oh and Deathstatstic, have you read Paradise Lost? If not it’s pretty damn fascinating if you can get into it.
Well, ProjectOmega doesn’t make a point so much as repeat the standard joyful fall-back to ignorance that all believers use to explain god’s mysterious ways. If we are going to say that it’s too complicated to understand then why assume it’s “good” maybe it’s “evil” beyond our comprehension.
I don’t think God operates at a level we can’t understand, it’s more like we operate at a level we can’t understand.
We blame God, the devil, the boss, our spouse, and anything else handy for the things we cause. We humans are responsible for the problems in the world today. The main cause is hubris, thinking we know better than anyone else.
We can’t read who/what God is from a book, He is love and lives within us. We must go there to find the truth.
Love
Leroy
And I suppose saying “God is evil/bad/stupid/a big jerk” displays an enormous intelligence capacity, deep thinking and heavy research? Sounds more like an angst-filled teenage outburst to me, laced with misinterpretation and ignorance.
The scenario in the Garden of Eden is metaphorical, in my opinion. Yes, Adam and Eve had no concept of good/evil, but neither does any child at birth (except perhaps Jesus, but he doesn’t count for our purposes). They knew they weren’t supposed to eat the fruit, but they did anyway, tempted by the devil. Only THEN did they understand the ramifications of their actions, and indirectly began to realize what the difference between good and evil is. The Tree didn’t bestow upon them that knowledge. The Tree is irrelevant.
I wasn’t remarking on your intelligence ProjectOmega, merely making a statement of fact. You said maybe God is beyond our understanding and thus we are ignorant of what is really good or evil. It is a very common and IMO insufficient answer to “if god is good why is there evil in the world?”. I’m certainly not saying the question is all that original either.
re: Evil in the Garden of Eden-
I say Eve was the product of bad parenting.
PS- You went to all the trouble of quoting me and you didn’t answer:
**If we are going to say that it’s too complicated to understand then why assume it’s “good” maybe it’s “evil” beyond our comprehension. ** ??
and may I now add why not neutrality beyond our understanding?
Sorry, I was rushed in my response. I knew I forgot something 
Ok, to start, I never said we are ignorant of what is really good and evil, but what is or should be. For all intents and purposes, God adheres to neither good nor evil. Good and evil, in the Biblical sense, is often interpreted as euphemisms for either “walking with God” or “walking against God”, respectively. If that’s true, God can’t possibly be either: he is something of a beacon or a guiding light.
Now, we have come to create new meanings for “good” and “evil”, as it applies to man in itself. Murder = evil. Giving to charity = good. Stealing from an orphan = evil. Helping a blind man across the street = good. So on and so forth. A lot of people have come to think that “good” and “evil” is just some ethereal, innate ruler that all things are judged by, hanging in the mists. If that were true, we might feel obliged to judge God. Such is not the case. As is shown in the Garden of Eden (even metaphorically), we may not always understand God’s rules or agree with them, but we see the effects of disobeying them.
Thousands of years of civilization later (yes, I believe in the theory of evolution), good and evil has become so ingrained into our way of life that we’ve come to believe we’re either born with and evolved with it wired into our brains (I don’t believe this is true) or we invented it in the first place (again, I don’t believe this is true), even when all along, it’s been just God’s (sometimes abitrary) rules.
Think of it this way: Humans aren’t supposed to lie, cheat, steal, murder and so on. We know this and are taught from birth. In the animal world, there are no such things as rules, and such concepts aren’t passed down from mother to baby. Now, when you get a new kitten, she doesn’t inherently know that peeing on the rug is bad, or she isn’t supposed to claw the furniture. You have to train her. You scold her and maybe spritz her with a waterbottle when she’s bad, and soon she forms distinctions between what she’s allowed to do and what she isn’t allowed to do. That, on a basic level, is “good” and “evil”. The rules make sense to us, as humans, but probably baffle the kitten, but she learns that she must live with it. She may even get angry at us from time to time, or feel hurt, but she has to learn one way or another right?
The kitten doesn’t understand the “why” anymore than we understand it as it applies to God. The human with the spray bottle isn’t being good or evil in any sense, he’s just doing what needs to be done. The same goes for God.
**Deathstatic wrote:
Seems like a cop-out to me to say a lot of these things are the devil’s fault when God ultimately knew what was going to happen and created the devil anway.**
You ought to read The Origin of Satan (1995) by Dr. Elaine Pagels. She gives a very convincing argument that the Christian concept of Satan (or the Devil) is nothing but a literary construct used by a small but vocal minority in the Jewish community to excoriate their fellow Jews. This tradition was then adopted by the fledgling Christian community. The Christian concept of Satan is nothing but a myth.
Think about it this way. You have a dog. You know that unless you get your dog vaccinated againt Bigandscary syndrome, it will die. So, you take it off to the vet and get it vaccinated. The dog will think, “OMG, why is my master doing this to me? He is a big jerk/not very intelligent!” But when it doens’t get the illness, it won’t notice anything either. It never recognizes that its master did it a kindness.
Of course, this works both ways. If a master regularly beats a dog, its thinking that the master is doing it good beyond its comprehension would still survive.
Although the kitten/vet analogy is clearly flawed; I don’t entirely rate the rebuttal, which seems to make a number of its own assumptions.
Well fair enough ProjectOmega. That does sound a lot to me like “Neutral beyond our comprehension” but YMMV. My opinion is that we have some moral hard-wiring that is quite subject to societal change, the old nature/nurture combo. 
Good and evil, in the Biblical sense, is often interpreted as euphemisms for either “walking with God” or “walking against God”, respectively. If that’s true, God can’t possibly be either: he is something of a beacon or a guiding light.
I don’t know, sounds more like a strong wind and I have no trouble deciding which would be the “good” direction to be walking. Again, YMMV.
Ah, if only somone had spritzed Hitler in 1920…
Give me a break. First of all we are talking about a GOD, not a person. If I knew how to stop Bigandscary disease in the first place it wouldnt be here and hence no shot in the first place. I would never want any of my children to go through any pain if I had the choice (not that I am saying I am a proud parent of a dog). From what I read in the Bible, our “all powerful” God had the choice. Seems like he is having trouble keeping chaos in check or just hates us.
Given the choice, you would seriously shelter your children from all forms of pain? Your kids would grow up to be emotionally retarded and incapable of functioning on an adult level, much less in any real-world scenario. Pain lets us grow. A world without pain and potential for more pain is pretty useless indeed. God does have the choice and power to prevent or cause as much or little pain and suffering as he likes, and the levels we see now is the balance he’s found for this time. If God was a sadist, he would have every baby born deformed and regularly send swarms of eyeball eating bugs to every corner of the world. He doesn’t do that, though. He allowed terrible things (“terrible” relative to us) to happen to test the resolve of every individual. Through these experiences, we grow and mature and let our faith fall where it may.
ProjectOmega, God had the choice not to give us pain at all. that is my argument. Things could be different because IT IS GOD! How do you know what a life without pain would be like? Have you lived it? God is “all powerful”, “all knowing,” surely it could have come up with a better scenario than what we are given. Just because you can’t understand a life without pain doesn’t mean our abusive supernatural father figure can’t see a way around it. So, yes, God is a sadist, if it is real, because it does let us suffer.
Some things are great, don’t get me wrong, I love life, but we could do without things like cancer, AIDS, west nile virus, and the list goes on that your God created. We are unnecessarily abused if your God is real. He doesn’t love us. If God did love us, * it would have found a way around bad things*. Any way would have been better than death, hatred, anger, fear, etc., etc., etc., etc.
Hell yes, especially if I could magic emotional intelligence and responsibility into my children as god could without having to beat them with large sharp things.
If God wants us to grow emotionally, He can make us grow emotionally. And of what use is the world to God anyway?
First, the true sadist offers hope, only to snatch it away; offers health, only to create plagues, offers life, and kills you. (IMHO). Next, is it bad for me to drown you? If yes, is it not also bad when God lets a freak hurricane rip through your town, which drowns you?
And again, if God wanted grown and matured people, He would have made them. Instead, He made things which A) mature us, and B) hurt like hell. The fact that He could do A, B, AB, or neither implies that God wants us to suffer, as he could acheive any goal without suffering but chooses to leave it in/
Yes, and for that we rail against Him, forgetting that He wants us to mature, and focus on the hurt.
God is not a big stupid jerk. People are selfish stupid brats.
Hey, I’m mature. I can focus on things. I don’t think I need any more life-lessons involving dead relatives or pets, thank you very much.
God’s a schmuck. Hence, I don’t believe in revering him though house o’ worship rituals.
Since the number one question on both Deathstatic’s and robertliguori’s mind seems to be “Why is there suffering at all?”, I’ll answer that rather than breaking down both your guys’ posts individually, if that’s ok.
Now, YES, God created pain. He creates suffering, torment and everything else human beings must endure every day. This is wholly intentional. There is no “work around” or “fix” to this, because it’s not a problem, per se. It’s a facet of life that everyone HAS to endure.
Why? Without those things, joy, happiness, love and so on would mean nothing. You need the bad to feel the good. If you lived in a world without shadows, light would mean nothing to you. Everyone has a favourite season, right? Without the other, less favourable seasons, you would find no pleasure in the one you truly love. If every person was the exact same, even if that person was truly wonderful, would you have a best friend?
No, variety is necessary in everything, and with variety comes both good and bad. The bads make us appreciate the goods, and hopefully the goods make the bads seem not so bad. Loneliness is the essential opposite for love, apathy for compassion, depression for happiness and so on. Do you see what I mean? I’m not sure how well I’m explaining it, but a world without pain is a world without love, when it comes down to it, and that’s exactly what God intended.