Is God particularly fierce?

[davidmartin]

ketzer, if absolute good has such a bad name, it is not it's fault but ours. if you are saying we can't handle it, then it becomes forbidden fruit. anything people say you shouldn't do and try and put you off doing, I want to know what they are hiding!
what i'm saying is what is hidden has been made unappealing by evil, for the very reason that you not seek it. the world is presumably very happy to allow so much evil to go on in the name of a nihilistic acceptance of both good and evil, so i don't see the prevailing concepts as being any less dangerous than what inspired them in the first place to oppose

Originally Posted by sky123

I personally find wisdom through experience, not in knowledge. I think it's being able to make good judgement based on what I've learned from past experiences.

I don't think there's a better Teacher than previous mistakes, you look at them and learn from them and become wiser.

I prefer to use good/bad rather than good/evil, I've never experienced what others call evil so I understand bad easier as I have experienced things I would label bad.

Actions that produce a good outcome for myself and others I call good and obviously actions that hurt myself and others I see as bad... It's only through self realization that I can achieve wisdom.

Just my little opinion though

Yes, I believe another word for the sum of all of those past experiences is life, a word that perhaps represents something quite a bit greater than that sum of those parts.

I hear what you are saying about the word evil. It seems we humans have a need to disown it. We seem inclined to take a part of our human selves and give it over to another being outside of us, and then place that label and blame on it. Unfortunately, once it rears its ugly head within, we no longer recognize it for who or what it is, as we have projected it onto someone or something outside of ourselves, and off to war with it we go, all in the name of that which is good.

Hmmm.... than reminds of some lyrics from one of my favorite songs.

From Same Mistake by James Blunt
"And so I sent some men to fight, and one came back at dead of night
Said he'd seen my enemy. Said he looked just like me
So I set out to cut myself and here I go"

In fact the whole songs seems like a rather appropriate metaphor for the rather fierce experience of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA-SAHEES9U

[sky]

Originally Posted by ketzer

Yes, I believe another word for the sum of all of those past experiences is life, a word that perhaps represents something quite a bit greater than that sum of those parts.

I hear what you are saying about the word evil. It seems we humans have a need to disown it. We seem inclined to take a part of our human selves and give it over to another being outside of us, and then place that label and blame on it. Unfortunately, once it rears its ugly head within, we no longer recognize it for who or what it is, as we have projected it onto someone or something outside of ourselves, and off to war with it we go, all in the name of that which is good.

Hmmm.... than reminds of some lyrics from one of my favorite songs.



In fact the whole songs seems like a rather appropriate metaphor for the rather fierce experience of life.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OA-SAHEES9U

It isn't about disowning the word evil which is just a label that is used as an opposite, it's about how individuals see/label the opposite of good....

Originally Posted by davidmartin

ketzer, if absolute good has such a bad name, it is not it's fault but ours. if you are saying we can't handle it, then it becomes forbidden fruit. anything people say you shouldn't do and try and put you off doing, I want to know what they are hiding!
what i'm saying is what is hidden has been made unappealing by evil, for the very reason that you not seek it. the world is presumably very happy to allow so much evil to go on in the name of a nihilistic acceptance of both good and evil, so i don't see the prevailing concepts as being any less dangerous than what inspired them in the first place to oppose

I agree that if God has gotten a bad name it is not God's fault but rather those who have presumed to know God's will and speak for God, and perhaps equally so those who have made the mistake of believing them. It seems to me that as often as not, the they and the them in the above sentence are one and the same. I don't know why we seem to believe things when I suspect that deep down on the inside we really know better, perhaps it has something to do with our stomachs and the promise of a meal. Personally, I would not seek to forbid anyone from seeking God, in fact I suspect it is the central reason we are here in the first place. I would however caution anyone doing so to keep one eye on evil as the other searches for good, as the two can be hard to tell apart, especially when one does not necessarily know what they are looking at.
I really don't see the world as rejecting all religious and moral principles in the belief that life is meaningless as the crux of some supposed problem. Today as much as ever many seem to rely on religions to tell them what the meaning of life is, and to dictate to them what their moral principles should be. And today as much as ever, those teachings and dogmas hide as much evil behind their fig leaves as any good they may espouse. It is not that we accept both good and evil as inevitable, but that as much as ever, we struggle to know which is which, and as ever, we bring our own bias toward self to the examination.
I think that it is perhaps as common a problem that we have found the evil within to be unappealing and have therefore hidden it from ourselves. If we are absolute enough at denying the evil within ourselves, pretty soon all we can see within is good, which can make it difficult to tell the words of evil coming from within from the absolute good words of God. We find others to blame for the evil in the world that seems to us to be nihilistically accepted by so many, and they return the favor. Whether we go about seeking absolute good in the world, or go off to battle to bring it about, we should perhaps first learn to recognize the evil that lies within ourselves, and realize that we must first get the self in order before we seek to show others the way, or even to recognize good outside of ourselves. If what we are intent on looking for is good without evil, we run the risk of missing the evil that is right behind our own noses. But that is not on God, God is patient and willing to wait as we bounce blindly off rock after rock as we find our way downstream and back to the ocean.

"How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while there is still a beam in your own eye?"
Matthew 7:4

Originally Posted by sky123

It isn't about disowning the word evil which is just a label that is used as an opposite, it's about how individuals see/label the opposite of good....

Yes, that is true. Just as good is a label that is used as an opposite of evil. Whatever words we humans choose as our symbols, I think we have an innate tendency to see things outside of ourselves that we deny the existence of within. Which I think is a shame, as in addition to leading to all sorts of mayhem, it defeats the purpose of realizing and understanding that which is within the self which is standing in its way of fully realizing what it is (try and say that five times fast. )

[sky]

Originally Posted by ketzer

Yes, that is true. Just as good is a label that is used as an opposite of evil. Whatever words we humans choose as our symbols, I think we have an innate tendency to see things outside of ourselves that we deny the existence of within. Which I think is a shame, as in addition to leading to all sorts of mayhem, it defeats the purpose of realizing and understanding that which is within the self which is standing in its way of fully realizing what it is (try and say that five times fast. )

Everything we see/experience comes from within, but like you say, some cannot see that, how can you deny the existence of with- in and accept the experience of with-out

[Molearner]

Originally Posted by ketzer

I agree that if God has gotten a bad name it is not God's fault but rather those who have presumed to know God's will and speak for God, and perhaps equally so those who have made the mistake of believing them.

ketzer,

This is true. I recently saw a T-shirt that caught my attention. It showed 4 fierce looking American Indians with this inscription: "Fighting terrorism since 1492". The people that came to America plundered the Indians and prospered greatly from subjugating African slaves. The same is basically true for European colonization. By and large those guilty were God-fearing Christians. They donned the cloak of Christianity to justify their raping of the indigent peoples.

Essentially they appropriated the Bible to provide a rationale for their actions.
This amounts to heresy. Lest we forget the Bible is the story of the oppressed. It is from that viewpoint that the Bible was written. It certainly was not from the viewpoint of the conquerors(Romans, etc) Sadly this mentality continues to this day. The States, for one, is seen as this great Christian nation therefore it proceeds that God's will backs our many policies and actions. I will not elaborate but I will point out that current American policy among other things seems to want to employ the starvation of others to bring them to submission to the will of America. One of the ploys used by these manipulators is to find an issue that has ardent Christian support....for example, the question of abortion. A support of one particular position allows people to ignore many, many questionable policies. Furthermore it confers a righteous aura to those very undeserving of that attribute.

I would suggest that Christians re-examine the perspective from which they read the Bible. Try to look at it from the perspective of being the oppressed. Was Jesus thinking of this when He said...."The first shall be last and the last shall be first" ???

[sky]

Originally Posted by Molearner

ketzer,

This is true. I recently saw a T-shirt that caught my attention. It showed 4 fierce looking American Indians with this inscription: "Fighting terrorism since 1492". The people that came to America plundered the Indians and prospered greatly from subjugating African slaves. The same is basically true for European colonization. By and large those guilty were God-fearing Christians. They donned the cloak of Christianity to justify their raping of the indigent peoples.

Essentially they appropriated the Bible to provide a rationale for their actions.
This amounts to heresy. Lest we forget the Bible is the story of the oppressed. It is from that viewpoint that the Bible was written. It certainly was not from the viewpoint of the conquerors(Romans, etc) Sadly this mentality continues to this day. The States, for one, is seen as this great Christian nation therefore it proceeds that God's will backs our many policies and actions. I will not elaborate but I will point out that current American policy among other things seems to want to employ the starvation of others to bring them to submission to the will of America. One of the ploys used by these manipulators is to find an issue that has ardent Christian support....for example, the question of abortion. A support of one particular position allows people to ignore many, many questionable policies. Furthermore it confers a righteous aura to those very undeserving of that attribute.

I would suggest that Christians re-examine the perspective from which they read the Bible. Try to look at it from the perspective of being the oppressed. Was Jesus thinking of this when He said...."The first shall be last and the last shall be first" ???

' They donned the cloak of Christianity to justify their raping of the indigent peoples. '

Maybe they'd been reading the bible and took it's advice....



Zechariah 14:1-2
A day of the LORD is coming, Jerusalem, when your possessions will be plundered and divided up within your very walls. I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped. Half of the city will go into exile, but the rest of the people will not be taken from the city."

Samuel 12:11 (NIV) “This is what the LORD says: ‘Out of your own household I am going to bring calamity on you. Before your very eyes I will take your wives and give them to one who is close to you, and he will sleep with your wives in broad daylight."

Originally Posted by sky123

Everything we see/experience comes from within, but like you say, some cannot see that, how can you deny the existence of with- in and accept the experience of with-out

I do agree that every thing I experience comes from within. I create it from my own "energy", but these "things" are just the representation of information within consciousness. Information that may be coming from my own consciousness, or perhaps coming through a higher universal consciousness, forming a co-created reality entangled with other points of consciousness. However, within I also create and define a "thing", a subset of all that I have created, that I experience as "me' as opposed to other. Though this boundary around what I call me and what I call other may be illusion, as I am just experiencing the reality I created within my own consciousness, it does allow me a point of view that I feel as "self". So this illusory separation of within and without does have a purpose in allowing me to experience and explore the information that came from beyond my own consciousness as well as from within. Which gives me a more intimate and meaningful first person point of view or experience of the reality that I have created.

I suppose since I am the one drawing the boundary around what I will experience as me, I am apt to leave out some of the less appealing information that may have originated from within myself, but that I would rather believe came in from beyond my own point of consciousness, and I adjust my boundaries of self accordingly.

Come to think of it, I think perhaps I will redraw my boundaries of self and get rid of my big nose. Oooo, and I see some pecks over there that would look good on me .

And there ya go, its as clear as mud .

Originally Posted by Molearner

ketzer,

This is true. I recently saw a T-shirt that caught my attention. It showed 4 fierce looking American Indians with this inscription: "Fighting terrorism since 1492". The people that came to America plundered the Indians and prospered greatly from subjugating African slaves. The same is basically true for European colonization. By and large those guilty were God-fearing Christians. They donned the cloak of Christianity to justify their raping of the indigent peoples.

Essentially they appropriated the Bible to provide a rationale for their actions.
This amounts to heresy. Lest we forget the Bible is the story of the oppressed. It is from that viewpoint that the Bible was written. It certainly was not from the viewpoint of the conquerors(Romans, etc) Sadly this mentality continues to this day. The States, for one, is seen as this great Christian nation therefore it proceeds that God's will backs our many policies and actions. I will not elaborate but I will point out that current American policy among other things seems to want to employ the starvation of others to bring them to submission to the will of America. One of the ploys used by these manipulators is to find an issue that has ardent Christian support....for example, the question of abortion. A support of one particular position allows people to ignore many, many questionable policies. Furthermore it confers a righteous aura to those very undeserving of that attribute.

I would suggest that Christians re-examine the perspective from which they read the Bible. Try to look at it from the perspective of being the oppressed. Was Jesus thinking of this when He said...."The first shall be last and the last shall be first" ???

Well, other than pointing out that Constantine does seem to have gotten his own unique stamp added to the New Testament (and benefited greatly from retention of the Old Testament), I would say you have said a lot that is true. But before I get too severe in singling out the Christians, I try to remember that this is an all too familiar movie plot and the names of the oppressors and the oppressed have a tendency to change places in the cast as it is made and remade throughout human history. I think it is a good idea for all of us to re-examine the perspective from which we try to read, interpret, and follow what we believe to be the Word of God. Personally, I don't have a problem with heresy in general, but I would prefer it gets one closer to the truth rather than just perpetuate lies.