The Nature of God

The way I look at it is that man obtained free will, and then just went out on the road to sights unseen. God is not a personal God to me, worried about every personal good or bad event in town. He is far more distant. Omniscience would require a certain distancing given Heisenberg's Principle. As much as one would gain, one would lose as much in the bargain. To the extent where his perspectives and thinking would not be easily knowable or learned by man. Which is why I doubt humans back in 25 A.D. could write down the words of Jesus Christ or God himself, with such scant understanding of humanity and the universe at large. They were children compared to what we are today, and yet they were supposed to be the prophets who wrote the books of the Bible? There is a possibility that the vice a versa is possible and applicable, God may understand humanity but humanity would not understand God in the same way.

If humanity is imperfect in our design, I attribute that imperfection as an opportunity given to humanity. Giving humanity something better, would not serve a purpose, if humanity had not earned that. This way we can temper ourselves and our descendents by our own hands and minds, to know that we alone are responsible for our failures and successes. This would not have been so without the knowledge of good and evil, without free will, and yes without telling God that we must be free to succede or die independent of the power of God. Regardless of whether he is the God in Revealed Religion or whether he is the impersonal God of Deism.

Man cannot be evil for the very purpose that something of free will cannot be either wholly good or wholly evil, therefore the classification rings false. Evil, in fact, is only present because of free will and choice. A dog that kills is not evil nor good because instincts chose for him, genetics did a long time ago, what his actions would be given certain stimuli. FOr humans, that is not the same. The general label cannot be very accurate, if evil and good is based upon individual choice and actions.

There's a motivation in emphasizing evil in mankind, in order to show the rarity of good, but the definitions are pretty strict and if you redefine the definitions then evil isn't evil anymore, Phil.

As for the shaking of faith, that was the plan of the MSM in the first place. One of the most effective ways to demoralize humans is through false hope. That shatters belief in a brighter future, and thus allows a population to be more easily controlled and harnessed.

What I don't get is how you can say God hasn't given us what we earned. To use a string of logic, if we have to have knowledge of good and evil to be free, and to be free we have to rely upon our own powers and not God's, then how is it God's place to give humanity anything that we have earned? It is definitely not. If the personal God of Christianity wants to give humanity something, that is the choice of the omnipotential that is God. Not a human decision or wish at all. And any gift by God, is still a gift. Not something earned at all. Either we are apart from God, in your view Phil, or we are not apart from God but instead are working for him and recieving a salary. Can't be both at once. In that sense, God cannot choose to arbitrarily give out whatever he decides and still be called what has been earned. What we obtain is ours by right of action and knowledge.

I don't attribute man's imperfection to the Fall, which sounds faintly fantastic and science fiction (Wheel of Time had the fall, John Ringo had the fall, etc). Rather, if man pulled himself up from the mire, it was because of his own actions. Not something that God decided to withdraw or implement. If it was something of the will of God, then it wasn't Man's fall by man's actions, but God's fall by God's actions. The epistemology doesn't seem congruent concerning how you tie in the Fall, man's imperfection due to it, and God. Assuming the Garden of Eden setting, that which was given by God unto humanity, then if we fell from that state, it was a falling from things unearned. Humanity might indeed frown upon charity.

The thing with Redemption, of course, is the fact that Humanity may not be the one that needs redeeming. God started out as perfect, so he has no understanding of imperfection. This is diametrically opposite. If he created imperfection, it may only be to study it and to learn from it. But an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipotential being cannot learn from imperfection. What makes us human is free will, mortality, and imperfection. God, being what he is, doesn't have free will. Nor is he imperfect, which means he cannot improve. And he certainly does not have mortality. This would be the same were he the God of Deism or Christianity. In the end, for his plans to succede, he would have to understand humanity as humans understand humanity. To know the position and velocity of mass at the same time, to circumvent Heisenberg. In that vein, there is a distinct possibility that the redemption is not for mankind but for some greater extent and/or purpose. Perhaps he is seeking managers for this galaxy, and hopes to create the best and most well suited race for the job of galaxy rennovation by pitting the galaxy's races through a stringent interview and test. The lesser it is, the better we could see it, but my odds say that it leans toward the greater in scale.

Redemption would then be reached only by human means and efforts. Since it would not be a return to the state of grace under God, but a similar situation but that which was not given as a gift.

As for God's designs going awry. That does not make a lot of sense considering God is omnipotent. He could not fail unless he chose to fail to accomplish an unstated goal. And if he chose to fail a stated goal, that would be to further a higher purpose. Again, God doesn't appear to have free will, he cannot choose an imperfect solution when he could choose the perfect one.

Therefore it follows that whatever designs of God or Chaos, it is derived from the fact of humanity's imperfection. God must have needed humans to be imperfect and the way we are for a reason, and that reason probably had something to do with the fact that humanity possesses the opposite traits of God.

Whatever Fall may be responsible for humanity's current state, it surely did not have the power to thwart God's will. God could change the physical parameters of the universe to fit in paradoxes and contradictions, there is no Fall born of human free will that could thwart such power and knowledge.

Man would not be man and women would not be women had we not done as we did, whether we walked away from God as you state or anything else we did to accomplish the current end result of time.

What purpose is in that causality chain, is still manifest. Since no Fall or action of man could thwart the will of God. A Fall could thwart the will of man against man, and that's exactly what I think happened. Whatever age of prosperity once existed, it was shattered because of humanity's actions.

I think it is patently obvious humanity could have been designed better. But the point is we weren't, we did not evolve that way, no meteroids landed to give us superpowers. It is simply obvious because it is within humanity's power to uplift our bodies to prosthetics, to steel, to plastic and regenerative limbs and organs. The micro-purpose of God appears to be whether we can succede or not. He watches and waits, and helps or hinders on his own plan as per Christianity, or does not help or hinder at all per Deism. Or it could be even that he could help and hinder at will, and also at the same time not help or hinder at all. Such contradictions do exist when considering omniscient, omnipotent, omnipotential immortal entities such as God.

The double standard probably does apply to Christians. For me, I always understood that there were two types of events. Those that were under my control and those that were not under my control. I feel responsibility for the former and frustration at the latter. This frustration produces a motive for improvement, power, and a desire for knowledge.

Thus it seems, the basic impetus is there for every human. How people choose to use that impetus, is their decision. For good or evil, shall they act.

The beauty of God is that he is all powerful and all knowing. The beauty of humanity is that we are weak and lack total knowing. Our strengths have no limits and our knowledge has no bounds either, whereas God can neither improve nor degrade, can neither succede nor fail. As such, God's perfection is the beautiful while man's pain is combined with our questing natures to create the sublime. I can only imagine what purpose or will such a being would craft, but that purpose exists.