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Dionysios Dionou's avatar

Bravo hit the nail on the head. I've said it before and I'll say it again. "God" is not "religion" religion is business an income stream for clerics that want to brand capture the masses. Now is their anything wrong with "religion" not necessarily some people need it, others don't and that's how it should be. "Churchiantiy" I love it! So true Christianity was hijacked and turn into Churchianity tragic but true.

As to evil it damn sure exists. How do I know? I was an orphaned black marketed baby sold to two freaks it's why I'm in the USA today (yeah you read it correctly) and was systematically abused for two decades. I've live among and faced of evil too many times in my life to list. I wrote a memoir details on my substack page. Evil is not the absence of good evil is just that, stand alone evil, evil unto itself. I've face evil and felt my skin crawl, the hair on my neck tingle and my gut telling me I'm in the presence of something very very bad evil. There is good in this world but it's not because evil is absent you've just lucked out and avoided evil for the time being. It's still all around us.

"A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there."

- Mister Eckhart (1259-1328)

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John Carter's avatar

The problem with this interpretation - evil as the work of a dark god - is that it begs the question of why God created him. The whole thing comes down to the conflict between evil and the three omnis. If God is omnibenevolent and omniscient, why did He create evil? The existence of evil seems to require one of those to be dropped. If God didn't create evil, then he didn't create everything, is therefore not omnipotent. Without all 3 omnis, God isn't really God - a god perhaps, but not the God of the philosophers.

If I recall, in the Silmarillion, the creator deity wasn't omniscient, and therefore didn't anticipate Sauron's rebellion.

Actually, there's tension between the omnis and free will, too. Omniscience in particular doesn't seem compatible with it, at least not if it implies perfect foreknowledge. Perhaps a more limited form of omniscience, in which God has perfect knowledge of what has been and what is, but does not have perfect knowledge of what will be, could resolve the issue.

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