GOD IS GOOD If man is morally culpable for doing bad, is not God, Man's creator, also morally culpable for the bad that man does? The Christians argue that all that comes from God is good, and that Man comes from God, but Man is not good. They argue that man has a free will, so man is morally culpable for the bad that he does, but that his creator is not. If I am a scientist creating deadly anthrax for biological warfare knowing full well what might happen should they ever escape, and knowing there is a high probability that they might escape one day, and then they do escape killing millions of people, do I shrug my shoulders and say "I am not to blame, the little buggers killed them." If I create an army of human clones, knowing full well that they have free wills, and I set them free on the Earth knowing full well that many of them, if not all of them, will do bad things at some times in their lives, do I not carry the burden of culpability along with my creatures for the bad that they do? If I have a child by a woman, and I have this child knowing full well that this child might one day do bad, am I not also morally culpable for the bad that this child does? Is it not incumbent upon me to think carefully about whether to have this child or not, what the consequences to others might be and to accept full responsibility for those consequences should they turn out bad? Do I shrug my shoulders and say "I had nothing to do with it, my child is the one who killed you." Is the creator of the monster not morally culpable for the actions of the monster? Now God is also all knowing, he created man KNOWING that man would do bad. Or at least he knew there was a possibility to it. So rather than allow man's bad-doing to run rough shod over God's good creation, he probably incorporated man's expected bad behavior INTO his creation. God had a free will about whether to create or not, he wasn't forced to create, he could just as easily not created. Is not God then also morally culpable for the suffering and bad that was generated in his creation which he knew and expected to happen and which he BUILT INTO HIS CREATION? Without God's creation there would have been no suffering or man to do bad. Who started the cycle of suffering with enough awareness of the possibility of that suffering to have been able to do something about it before it happened? One might argue that giving man free will and allowing him to do bad was a necessary part of the good of creation, that a 'good' creation could not have been created with out the freewill and the bad that arose. But then should we not be able to say that man's bad is in fact good in some higher sense, thus allowing us to continue to claim that all that comes from God is good? If any HUMAN had created a universe and created other humans and put them into it to have at it with each other, that creator human would be considered a monster. How so is not God then? Homer - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Homer Wilson Smith The Paths of Lovers Art Matrix - Lightlink (607) 277-0959 KC2ITF Cross Internet Access, Ithaca NY homer@lightlink.com In the Line of Duty http://www.lightlink.com ================ http://www.clearing.org ==================== Sun Jul 10 12:06:01 EDT 2016 WEB: http://www.clearing.org BLOG: http://adoretheproof.blogspot.org FTP: ftp://ftp.lightlink.com/pub/archive/homer/adore244.memo Send mail to archive@lightlink.com saying help in body =========== http://www.lightlink.com/theproof =============== Learning implies Learning with Certainty or Learning without Certainty. Learning across a Distance implies Learning by Being an Effect. Learning by Being an Effect implies Learning without Certainty. Therefore, Learning with Certainty implies Learning, but not by Being an Effect, and not across a Distance. -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.5 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFXgnJpURT1lqxE3HERAj47AKCAbxQAIKm+wzndXJavNl1p6cRBNQCcCCOI xwCbZv+0edhsaQB4tp1qHdY= =86ya -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- Sun Jul 10 17:59:34 EDT 2016