The Adam and Eve of Paradise Lost

Jesus died for an allegory

Doesn’t mean you can just make things up either and expect others to believe you. The “self” is just as full of trickery as anything else. In fact, the self is what imagines and fantasizes. The question is, how does one determine truth vs grandiose of one’s own subjective interpretation. That’s why materialism has gotten so popular - it has a clear path to verification

The scientific method is probably one of the greatest advancements of man.

One thing that makes people uncomfortable is the fact that God created evil along with everything else - intentionally.

If the Godhead sits within, so does the Satan, as they are one in the same.

A house divided cannot stand. Love cannot exist when hate is present, and the reverse is also true. Hate cannot exist where love dwells. In the same way, a person who acts hatefully one moment and lovingly the next is not trusted. One cannot be both love and hate.

One cannot exist without the other either.

The reason I disagree is that red can exist without yellow. What cannot exist without both red and yellow is orange. In the same way if love/good and hate/evil are both primaries, we have the choice of which primary in which we wish to exist.

Red cannot exist without white. The existence of the spectrum depends upon each individual wavelength being inherent to the whole.

There is no joy without sadness.

There is no love without hate.

There is no bliss without pain.

:slight_smile: Well, then, let’s go with black and white. Both black and white can exist separately. Let’s take a look at the reverse.

There is no sadness without joy; no hate without love; no pain without bliss.

I do not see this as being so.

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Black cannot exist without white just as “is” cannot exist without “isn’t”. One is merely a reference to the other, with both depending on each other to “be” in the first place.

Can a person live a life of complete and total pleasure, devoid of pain?

No, because pleasure is a drug with a tolerance, and at some point, that tolerance will lead to the impossibility of feeling pleasure without coming at the expense of someone else’s pain.

There is no one without the other.

(also, not arguing, just spouting off my nonsense as I see it. :wink: )

If there is a God, I also do believe such God encompasses both good and evil, and that the God is not benevolent

At the center of all, unattached.

Buddhism FTW

There’s many a woman who stays with an abusive husband even though he acts hatefully toward her.

Exactly. the only logical conclusion - IMHO - is that the God that created us (stipulating that such a God exists) is that He was bored and wanted a soap opera to watch.

Which is what He has created.

The fact that it’s actual people suffering and dying for his entertainment…well, he created them so why not?

Yes, but also Christian (as in, the Words of Christ/Issa Himself and no one else). The two compliment each other tremendously.

Me, too! My thought is that at some point a decision has to be made about who one is. I cannot be both nasty and loving at once, and therefore I cannot see God being both Love and Hate at the same instant. At some point choice comes into play. I love Abraham Lincoln’s observation that most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.

Since there is both good and evil, then sentient beings have to choose one over the other–they cannot do both at the same instant, or ultimately, be both.

Not following your first sentence…?

Yes, so we have established that the husband is hateful. What choice(s) has the wife made? (i.e., better to be abused than alone; better to have security from another than having to depend on oneself.) There is also the question of love. How much does someone love oneself to remain in an abusive situation?

Hard to pinpoint an exact motivation. I tend to come back to the idea that there isn’t a wholly separate being from this world. But rather, this world IS God manifest. We are each different variations or parts of the same God. Almost Pantheistic. In this framework, though, the idea of God really acts as a sort of recursive ontological “terminator”.