BACK TO BASICS!!!.......

by JW72 8 Replies latest jw friends

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  JW72

  I have a problem with the whole beginning of the bible.

  If I was an angel of God, and I was only exposed to really positive ways of life, God was 100% positive.

  The last thing I would think about is turning my back on him.

  Where did Lucifer get his negative way of thinking from???

  Surely, If you are in GOD's company, it's gonna rub off on you that being nice is THE WAY OF LIFE!!!

  It does NOT make sense that he should turn into the ABSOLUTE EVIL that he is!!!!

  Secondly, Eve!!!

  Why would she eat the fruit?? Did she not question Satan's intentions for wanting her to be powerful??

  Was she not thankful to God for creating her???

  None of this makes sense, until someone makes sense of it for me, I CANNOT believe the FUNDAMENTALS!!!

  Please soothe my throbbing brain....

  Chris

  Aaaaahhhh, I remembered, did Eve not think, wait there, if God didn't want me to eat this fruit, why the HELL did he leave it here in the first place?????
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  expatbrit

  JW72:

  Like much of the bible, the first chapters of Genesis are myth.

  Once I recognized this, all of the inconsistencies, impossible happenings, contradictions and sheer stupidity of the stories became explainable, and without jumping through hoops and involving the supernatural to do so.

  The fundamentals are mythical storytelling. Acknowledging this soothed my throbbing brain.

  Expatbrit
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  logical

  It has something to do with outer and inner beauty Chris...

  AGuest did a post on the Bible Research thread, its got serpents and cherubs and stuff in the title.
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  Celtic

  Sometimes its worried me thinking like this, but as time goes by, it seems more logical to me that perhaps for reasons that I do not yet understand, God himself has a dark side to his nature? Who knows? The questions you are pondering twisted my mind inside out, I looked at these points quite deeply and ended up quite close to insanity. The woven lines of truth and light and lies and darkness seem to be very close to one another.

  Well, where would you put a lie, right over there where it would stand out, or, right alongside light where it couldn't be seen, just as simple answers really, are right underneath our noses.

  The problem with this kind of thinking is that you can enter mind labyrinths, upon entering can often take a while to emerge from again. Also unless you are very interested with for the reasons of thinking behind thinking I would give advice from hard experience to err on the side of caution, as some if not many things are a tad incomprehensible.

  There are many other ways of using your healing properties which although inobvious at times, answers might well come from hitherto directions, that is the mysteriousness of life for you. Sometimes it can be beneficial to reach out for an end goal through the indirect route through a reflexive spirit, rather than a more emotionally damaging direct route. You have to be careful with yourself when touching these theoretical dilemmas.

  Stay focussed my friend.

  peace

  Celtic
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  JW72

  What?!
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  Celtic

  Exactly!!
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  Joseph Joachim

  Hello JW72,

  The idea of an evil god in opposition to the good one originated in Persia and apparently found its way into Jewish religion during the Babilonian exile. Note that Satan makes his appearance relatively late in the Bible, not until the book of Job (which was not written by Moses, as none of the other books attributed to him were).

  Also, Genesis does not say that Satan talked to Eve. It says that the serpent spoke to her. That this serpent was Satan in disguise is a later interpretation of the author of Revelation.

  IMHO, this discussion board is not going to be the best source of information for questions like these. Why don't you go to a library or bookstore and get some books written by serious scholars? Christianity and religious studies are 2000 years old and many valuable things have been written. Don't waste your time trying to re-invent the wheel.

  Hope this helps
  JJ

  PS: I like your new pic. And I was born in '72 too.
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  Introspection

  Hi Chris, I guess that question is basically why is there evil. As you know, the explanation for where Satan got it from is that he got it from himself because there's free will, though I suspect that is not a sufficient explanation for you. I do recall an interview in Parabola magazine with the Islamic scholar Seyyed Nasr where he basically said that though God is all good, he is also infinite, and in that there would be every possibility including the possibility of negating itself. I think the idea is that it is just a possibility or potential, though if you have free will in there sooner or later it'll pop up I guess according to Murphy's law.. Anyways, though that guy is not of the Judeo-Christian tradition I don't think there would be any arguments against it from those camps, it's probably something the big three western religions would pretty much agree on.

  "It is not so much that you use your mind wrongly--you usually don't use it at all. It uses you. This is the disease."--Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
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  Francois

  Your question has been around a long time, long enough for lots of people to reflect and decide.

  For me, the idea of a free will choice makes no sense unless I am free to decide to do evil. If there is no evil counterpoint, then free will means nothing.

  But what is evil? Perhaps its in the definition of evil that the problem arises.

  If evil is defined as transgression of the divine law, the Father's will, I think it's easier to understand. In this way of thinking about evil, it does NOT have any existance unless and until a conscious being brings it into their personal reality. Thus, evil isn't something that God created. He created all that's good. Evil is brought into being as a contrastive choice by a sentient being.

  Does this help?

  Something else - I personally think the the Genesis story and most all else in the OT is either myth, fancy, or outright fiction, combined with the secular history of the Jews tricked out as some story of the magical relationship between a wandering tribe of bumptious Hebrew savages along with their wild and crazy antics and their primitive God Jehovah, a stern, angry, judge accoutant chiefly interested in making damaging entries in his "book of life" about his admittedly sinful, but ignorant, children on this planet so that he could see to it they were properly punished later.

  Hope this additional perspective is helpful.

  F