Is God evil - or just lazy?

I never meant to be offensive! Sometimes what I mean to say and what I do say are 2 different things! (Usually, when I speak, there's alot of "umms, likes, and wells...") But I will say that I do believe there is a Devil as much as I do there is a God.

Brian- "You are all individuals"
Crowd- "Yes, we are all individuals"
Brian "You are all different."
Crowd -"Yes, we are all different."
Lone voice- "I'm not"

Genius. Pure comedy genius.

Don't worry Tin no real offence taken your still our Maj! Its a common enough view you espoused so no blame for that on you. And hey, I might be wrong, thats one of the good things about saying you don't know- theres always room for manouvres!

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Don't worry Tin no real offence taken your still our Maj! Its a common enough view you espoused so no blame for that on you. And hey, I might be wrong, thats one of the good things about saying you don't know- theres always room for manouvres!

Just so!

I met God once- I don't realy know why this seems appropriate here perhaps because its 6 in the morning and I always feel the need for a tale at that time. Perhaps because reading this thread back has made me go over the incident again in my own head.
I should first state in my reckless youth I dabbled quite strongly with LSD, magic mushroms and other hallunigens. And if that period of my life taught me anythng it was that the human brain is capable of interpreting information in an almost endless variety of ways. And its also capable of constructing the most covincing states of being, equal to normal conciousness in scope. For this reason I rarelly doubt those who claim to have had some form of revelation or direct expercience of the religous- I just doubt their interpritation of the event. With that in mind here is my own 'vision story'.

I was meditating, in the belief it would provide calmness and possibly insight rather than cramp and a sore back which is what I tended to normally get. And I remembered a technique I had been reading about which involved envisioning somewhere from your youth that was a place of particular contentment or happy memories. In my case this was an old stone hut above the farm on the hill next to the village I grew up in. It had been built as part of the water works serving the old resorvior, long since out of use, that nestled in a glen behind. As kids it had been our den, and a brilliant one, it had an old sofa and chairs we had dragged up from the village. It had a fireplace and we made tea on it in an old blackened kettle. In the summer we sunbathed lying on the roof (which I much later discovered was made of asbetos) and the views were spectacular.
So I envisioned it. And as per the instructions for this I remembered as many tactile things as I could, the roughness of the white painted brickwork, the fibres of the corrugated roof and the sound the rain made drumming on it.
The instructions were to then climb up onto something in this vision, so as I had in life a hundred times I climbed up onto the roof using the half open door (remembering to steady it first with a large stone at the bottom so it didn't swing) and stood on the top, remembering the view as had been in my youth with the loch spakling in the sun and the US naval base in full swing with tannoys echoing over the water and launches skimming back and forth. And then I jumped.
I found myself somehwere largely white and seemingly out of focus. Then I saw what at first I took to be clouds and then realised were more like planes of light, but light with a sense of mass, of substance, as if you could walk on it. It was not quite the tradiitional place of fluffy clouds but I could instantly see how it could be mistaken for it. It had a sense of hight and of scale. The planes of light were all different from each other but what was most striking was the overwhleming sense of a presence. A presence I knew instantly was God. There was nothing visible and nothing tangable, just the light and I could not tell if God was there among the light invisibe or was the light itself. The presence was immense and all all round. And I knew something else too, without thinking, I knew that here, in the presence of God I could ask any question I liked and God was bound to answer. And I thought of them all, "Why are we here?" "What is the pruropse in life?" "What happens after we die?". And as each question came to me, in the face of that presence and in that place, they seemd trivial beyond measure. Meaningless here even. They only made sense as questions from a mean narrow human perspective. From this place, from Gods perspective they had no meaning whatsoever. And in the end I asked nothing but just remained in that presence.
Eventually it all faded and I was back sitting in my room feeling somewhat overwhlemed.

Now if I had been raised say in a highly religous environment and then, for arguments sake went out into the desert and fasted for 40 days and 40 nights and had such an expercience, and assuming I was more presumptoius than I actually am (hard to imagine I know) and I had spoken with God. What might I have thougth he said?
My past experiences with mind altering substances however had prepared me not to take such an event at face value. I was perfectly aware how the mind can create the most convincing constructs. But I can appreciate how for some people such an event might shape their whole future and lead them to claim all sorts of things, and they would be doing it without a hint of a lie. It just doesn't necesserly make it true either.

As I said at the start not really sure why it occured to relate this little tale. Make of it what you will. But maybe even the question of "Is God evil?" only makes any sort of sense from a narrow human perspective of things.

God is dead. Poetry lives! But what if Poetry WAS God?

'In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was made to Rhyme.'

Pettytyrant101 wrote:'In the Beginning was the Word. And the Word was made to Rhyme.'

Or not...

and bear in mind, "word" rhymes with both "heard" (a profound duality) but also, "turd" (a sad reminder of life's vulgarity).

Word and heard? Word and turd yes. But heard? Maybe with an Oz hobbit twang?

Tinuviel wrote:I never meant to be offensive! Sometimes what I mean to say and what I do say are 2 different things! (Usually, when I speak, there's alot of "umms, likes, and wells...") But I will say that I do believe there is a Devil as much as I do there is a God.

Don't worry about it, Tin! We can't always predict for all the different ways people will interpret our words, that's for sure.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:Word and heard? Word and turd yes. But heard? Maybe with an Oz hobbit twang?

Hear'd? Is that Scottish? Not hurd?

That's just a linguistic trick, that, get to the real philosophy I say!

I admit that I am a pretty religious person with the LDS church. Many of our beliefs are quite different than the traditional Christian beliefs. For example: we don't blame Adam for anything, we believe the Fall was part of God's plan. We also believe that when someone does something wrong, they are not just going to automatically burn for it. I also believe that He is a God of love. He sent us to earth so that we can gain bodies and become like him. Everything is a trial, living in poverty, having children and other loved ones die, our children or us being physically or mentally ill, living in an unstable planet, etc. They are all trials that we must endure in order to be with him again.

if thats the case Lorient how does your religion deal with those who are born badly impaired? They hae no chance. Or those born into such conditions they will be lucky to survive more than few days? Not much of a meaningful trial- born-suffer horribly - die. Why put a living thing through that at all? In fact is it not a sort of cruel God that puts us through so much potenial pain and unpleasantness just to test us? Like a cat with a mouse seems to me.

Pettytyrant101 wrote:if thats the case Lorient how does your religion deal with those who are born badly impaired? They hae no chance. Or those born into such conditions they will be lucky to survive more than few days? Not much of a meaningful trial- born-suffer horribly - die. Why put a living thing through that at all? In fact is it not a sort of cruel God that puts us through so much potenial pain and unpleasantness just to test us? Like a cat with a mouse seems to me.

What you say does fit the evil God idea quite snugly, Lorient. Why create an imperfect being, or damaged being, in the first place? Some cruel joke?

Those people, from what I can understand, have already earned the right to live with god again. They don't have to go through the normal trials that everyone else does. They automatically get to go to the highest degree of heaven. The only reason they needed to come here was to gain a body. Because of the way their bodies are, they are incorruptible from Satan. Yes they may suffer for a short time but they get to be happy for the rest of eternity..

Lorient Avandi wrote:Those people, from what I can understand, have already earned the right to live with god again. They don't have to go through the normal trials that everyone else does. They automatically get to go to the highest degree of heaven. The only reason they needed to come here was to gain a body. Because of the way their bodies are, they are incorruptible from Satan. Yes they may suffer for a short time but they get to be happy for the rest of eternity..

God is queer chap then, don't you think? I guess he has his motives, but all I see is the pain he causes to the innocent, I don't see the promise you refer to, not through the pain (and my anger at it).

There is also the idea of the soul. The stronger the soul, the harder the life.

The promise is to live with him and to be like him. We have to go through trials and pain to test our spirits.

"We have to go through trials and pain"-Lorient

Not too keen on a God that makes you flawed then tests you, with threats of eternal damnation, to see if you are still flawed. Why not make us unflawed in the first place and save everyone all that suffering?
And as for using pain? Really? Thats the choosen method of your God of Love? To cause pain and suffering and death as their test? I think we may have a different notion of 'loving'.
And what about something like a tsunami? Whats the trial there? Can you survive being hit by a 50ft wall of water? Are we supposed to learn something from it, like buy a mountain condo?

If he created us in his own likeness, then why go through a trial
All these diseases we wouldnt have if Adam n Eve never opened pandora's box
All that incest
All those wasted fig leaves.
All those lives wasted because you didnt believe in THERE god
All these wars we wouldnt have
All those perverted priests molesting young boys.

chris63 wrote:
If he created us in his own likeness, then why go through a trial
All these diseases we wouldnt have if Adam n Eve never opened pandora's box
All that incest
All those wasted fig leaves.
All those lives wasted because you didnt believe in THERE god
All these wars we wouldnt have
All those perverted priests molesting young boys.

God started all that? Now I'm really pissed off with Him! Sounds more like Satan... though God created Him too, I hear...

Hey! God, Jesus and Satan - that makes more sense as a Holy Trinity. Reflects reality better in my opinion...

God doesn't do the bad things to us, we do. And sure, he doesn't intervene most of the time, but partially that's because we don't listen to him or notice he's even there. Also, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, for sure! He can't hold our hands through everything.

If God had not made a universe as violent, bloody and horrible as this one He would not have to hold our hands. Why make the place so nasty in the first place?
According to Christian belief after God finally defeats the Devil there will be paradise in which the Lion shall lie down with the lamb. Well why not start off that way? Why begin with the lion ripping the lamb to shreds and eating it alive? Thats just sick.
Or why did he make things that impregnate other living things with their larvae so they grow inside the host consuming it alive from the inside out- thats pretty grim for a loving God- bad day was it when He came up with that stuff? And then there are all the diseases-what was He thinking of there? As if humans don't have enough to worry about He decides to make deadly stuff so small we wont even know its there for thousands and thousands of years whilst disease kills millions in horrible ways- thats real friendly. I can feel the love.
If this place is all down to a God we must have got the Norman Bates of Gods.

Tinuviel wrote:God doesn't do the bad things to us, we do. And sure, he doesn't intervene most of the time, but partially that's because we don't listen to him or notice he's even there. Also, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, for sure! He can't hold our hands through everything.

Also, Tin, did you read the first post on this Thread? Allowing people their Freedom to Express themselves (and be penalized, perhaps, in Hell after death?) is one thing, to allow the innocent to be tormented without God's loving intercession is surely another.