...It Builds Character

Hellooo.

Crash course on freewill and evil and all that jazz coming up...

Okay, so the freewill defence is the Christian excuse for pretty much everything. While an atheist might question why God lets evil things happen to us, Christians just dismiss the whole thing by saying that God has to let these things happen because he granted us freewill.

The basic idea is that, if God stopped a man stabbing another man, it would remove the mans freewill to commit moral evil. If evil didn't exist, people wouldn't have the choice between good and evil and hence no freewill.

And this magnificent argument covers Christians backs for natural evil too - if there was no threat of natural evil and everything was predictable, people wouldn't be able to learn from the consequences of natural evil. Freedom not only means choice, but also the consequences of choice. Things being to predictable would remove the value from life. The unexpected gives us the chance of total disaster and total triumph.

Now then, Karma. It's usually a philosophy found in Eastern religions like Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism. Karma's basically the law of consequences - if you do something bad, then you have to deal with the consequences, and if you do something good, then you get to reap the benefits. These consequences might come tomorrow, next week or in your next reincarnation. If you're especially good, you might get a reward or get to develop certain qualities of your soul.

The idea of Karma and evil is different for the 3 main Eastern religions, so here they are below;

• Hinduism - the challenge is for everyone to achieve moksha and escape the cycle of reincarnation. This is done by not building up any karma, and your soul isn't reborn anymore, so suffering and evil don't matter to you.
• Sikhism - this is super simple... doing good deeds leads to good rewards and doing bad things leads to bad consequences.
• Buddhism - the whole point of being a faithful Buddhist is trying to live a life free of desire, hate and delusion and reach true enlightenment so karma can be left behind.

Now, as I mentioned in my previous post, sometimes we need evil in our lives to help us learn and become better people. We can also become better people through evil by helping others. There's loads of examples of this, like Mother Theresa, the Buddhist monks trying to get rid of oppressive rules in Tibet, Gandhi getting rid of social inequalities in India, fighting discrimination like Mandela did in SA and loads more, like the Salvation Army, Muslim Aid and caring for the needy in the locality of the gurdwara like Sikhs.

Basically, evil brings out the best in people because it gives us all opportunities to over come it and help others in need.

I'm really bored of typing right now, so I'm just going to bullet point all the arguments for the need of evil and suffering -

• People would be selfish if there wasn't people suffering and in need
• Suffering brings home to well-off people how lucky they are and inspires them to help
• Buddhists see suffering as part of life that has to be dealt with
• Jesus experienced all the pain and suffering that humans experience, so God understands suffering
• Muslims have zakat (when they give a percentage of their annual salary).

Wow, thank goodness for that.

Fingers crossed for a good result in RS like last year!

You've Been A Very Bad Boy.

Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?
Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing?
Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing?
Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing?
Then why call him God?

That quote was written by Epicurus, who lived from 341 to 270 bc and this guy seems to have hit the nail on the head when it comes to the problem of evil.

There always has been and always will be evil things or people on earth, and in my opinion, that's the one thing that can fully disprove the existence of God, thanks to that philosophy of Epicurus'.

The above philosophy helps us question the existence of God in relation to the extent of his power and the extent of his love. For example, if God is all-powerful, why doesn't he stop bad things happening to humans, his ultimate creation? Has he just decided not to protect us and use his power, or is he not powerful enough? Not being powerful enough is basically saying that evil is more powerful than God, so God cannot be called all-powerful and hence is not God.

We can apply the same thing to God being all-knowing and all-loving. Does he not know that evil things happen? Does he not love us enough to care about evil things happening? If the answer is no, then why doesn't he stop evil things happening?

Which brings us about to the ultimate question - should God interfere in human life? It's the same principle as a mother interfering in her child. Should she protect her child from everything and cause the child to suffer as soon as she's not around? Or should she allow the child to suffer in moderation so the child can learn and grow?

But then, maybe God should only prevent certain types of evil. We can divide evil into two camps. Natural evil and Moral evil.

Natural evil is exactly that; natural. It's caused by the structure of the Earth and the universe - think of tectonic plates causing earthquakes and volcanoes. These things cause hardship and suffering for humans, so should God get rid of them? But if God removed all of these hazards, earth and the universe wouldn't be able to support life, and therefore we wouldn't exist so God wouldn't have anything to protect.

Moral evil is more complex. It comes from humans and their sin, apparently. Moral evil can range from jealousy to murder. Can God protect us from all these things? The simple answer is no - things used to commit moral evil can also be used for good, such as a surgeons scalpel. But another question can be asked - what is the root cause of moral evil? Guns don't fire themselves and bombs don't appear from thin air, all of these things come from humans. So why do we create and use them in the ways we do?

Which brings us nicely along to the origins of all evil. We can look at the story of Adam and Eve. They were told not to eat from the tree, and the serpent encouraged them and they did. God gave Adam and Eve freewill to choose whether or not to eat from the forbidden tree, and they did so despite his warnings. Because of this, God punished Adam and Eve - he made humans and serpents enemies, gave women the pain of childbirth, made men dominant over women, and he made it hard to harvest the land. Then God cast Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden, but he couldn't take away their knowledge of good and evil, which they'd gained from the forbidden tree.

Another origin of evil might be the story of Ibilis. In short Ibilis was an angel who refused to bow down to God's greatest creation - mankind. So God banished Ibilis from paradise, so Ibilis vowed to persude humanity not to follow God. So God said that he'd fill hell with Ibilis and all his followers. It's then apparently Ibilis who leads Adam and Eve astray.

Overall, religious stories of the origin of evil very rarely put the blame on God, and evil is considered to have come from the misuse of freewill and goes against God's will. The main idea is that God allows evil to go ahead, but doesn't will it.

The next question I'm going to look at is whether or not we need evil and suffering.

A central answer to this question would be that was need evil and suffering as a contrast to help us appreciate good things. If all things were good, we wouldn't be able to appreciate them, so by having evil too, we can appreciate the good and bad things in life in relation to each other.

Another argument would be that God only created good, and evil came from the misuse of freewill and denial of God. God couldn't have created evil as it's apparently not in his nature, so evil must have come from elsewhere and spoilt God's image.

We can also look at evil and suffering as important learning experiences in this life, as this life can be regarded as a preparation for our next life. This is called soul-making, and evil can be looked upon as a learning tool for this life. It can also be a learning tool for this life, as we can learn from mistakes made by ourselves and others to improve this life.

And that's all I'm going to write on tonight, and my next post will hopefully be on the Free Will Defence, Karma, believer's responses to evil, and whether or not people need evil and suffering.

Boom, job done.

Oh, Hello God. You Exist After All!

Okies, hello again Blogger. I can't believe I'm back here already. This time for my actual GCSEs. Whoopie.

I'm here to waffle about Isaiah's Commission, which is some biblical text about some dude called Isaiah getting a vision and becoming a prophet.

The text I'm supposed to study is on page 68 of my textbook, but here's a link to a slightly different version because I can't find the exact one.

http://www.bibleinsong.com/Song_Pages/Isaiah/Isaiah6/Isaiah6.htm

Yeah, I know, what a loadddd of mumbo-jumbo. I can't believe I'm actually analysing the Bible on the internet. Oh the shame. Anyway, right.

Basically, the story starts off the same year some King called Uzziah died. God was sitting on a throne and the train of his robe was filling the whole temple (some people might argue that it was Solomon's Temple). Above God there were two Seraphs, which are these winged mythical creatures that appear in Hebrew and Christian texts. So these two Seraphs had six wings each, two covering their faces, two covering their feet and two they were using to fly.

These creatures are representative of praise and they were all "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth was full of his glory". Basically, they were bigging up God's ego even more than it already was.

And when these Seraphs started speaking, the door posts started shaking and the room was full of smoke. There's also a quotation in Exodus, which goes "for no man shall see me and live". So naturally, Isaiah started freaking out big time. He goes on about having unclean lips and that he lives among other people who have unclean lips. No, all of Isaiah's household don't need a good wash, apparently this 'unclean lips' is a metaphor for having sin, which everyone has.

So after Isaiah started freaking out, one of the Seraphs wanted to chill him out. But rather than give him a good pat on the shoulder, the Seraph grabbed a burning coal from some alter and shoved it on Isaiah's lips. To be honest, that would have freaked me out more, but it chilled Isaiah out, so that's all that matters. So then the Seraph tells Isaiah that his sin and guilt is gone.

Then God starts asking for a prophet, so Isaiah offers himself up. God then tells him to go and tell everyone to "be ever hearing, but never understand; be ever seeing, but never perceiving". Then God talks about how this will effect people and says stuff about their hearts being calloused and their ears dull and their eyes closed. Which all basically means that even though Isaiah is apparently preaching the truth, many people won't listen. But there will be the handful of headcases who will listen. And Jesus will deal with the ones who don't wanna listen and make some of them into headcases too.

Sounds like I just analysed God's plan for world domination and some poor guy with too much on his mind as it is, without some high-and-mighty-supernatural-being telling him to go preach to people who won't listen.

What a fucked up religion Christianity is. No offence, ofc.

Oh, I almost forgot.

http://executableoutlines.com/isa/isa_04.htm

^ That's the site I used to get my head around the whole extract :)