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On another thread you taunted:

Darth J wrote:...that God is limited by eternal laws, and is irrelevant to the problem of evil........
There is plenty to discuss on this topic, and it has been discussed for hundreds of years, and Mormonism has not brought anything new or unique or insightful to the table....
We can do that without Mormonism. You are conceding that Mormonism has no unique insight, despite its claim to have prophets and apostles to tell us eternal truths about the nature of God and the purpose of life.

I picked up the challenge and delivered the goods proving that there is a uniquely Mormon insight into the problem of evil. And of course it centers in the gospel of Jesus Christ:

Nightlion wrote:This thread proves that the natural man has no business speaking about God.

God does not reduce to your level. He is not carnal, sensual, devilish, and not even temporal. He is spiritual. His words, and commandments are spiritual. His purpose in having us suffer all manner of wicked senseless and seemingly useless evil it on this wise:

So that when, and if, we ever come unto him, we will have all that drama to have to forgive.
What that causes us to do is appreciate just how somber and sober, meek and lowly in heart we must become even to be gracious to outrageous offenses we suffered BEFORE God will grant us a sanctification and raise us up to a higher state of existence.

Suffering is not only necessary it is the prime directive of this life. A thousand rapes, molestations, robberies, mob riots against our property and family, prison, withering lingering illness, loneliness, betrayals, wars upon ruthless wars all mangle a soul in the conflict of justice and demand a reconciliation. Or so it is made to seem. Our natural being sifts throught it continually for a reconciliation in physical terms that can never happen. It is the synthesis of immutable justice against all physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual viciousness either that we personally suffered or know to have been that distills within our soul to be offered up as our sacrifice in a broken heart and contrite spirit to access the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I guess I could say this another way a few more times. But what good will that do? I have gone through this experience and synthesis with the Living God as my waiting Savior. I know with a perfect understanding what I am saying is THE GREAT reality to why there is evil.

To be sinned against and sacrifice/suspend all desire for justice invokes the grace of Christ on your behalf. Not because you suffered. But that you prized a life with Christ and God above natural justice. You prove that you value the love of God above your own best interest. Above your moral outrage. Got it? This is expansive and very cool in its construct, don't you think? Does not matter if you suffered greatly or hardly at all. This is the key to acceptable repentance that opens the door where Christ and God the Father receive you to begin to teach you how to receive all things. If you choose to keep your moral outrage, you chose poorly.
Suffering give you a chip in the game. Use it. Show grace that grace might be done unto you.
Not that the world is worthy that you forgive, but God is worthy that you cash in your chips to know him. As was elegantly said; The purpose of life is to know God and teach others to know him....Ms Jack.

Unique enough for you Darth J? Has it been.....said before? I wonder. I wager not. I could have died seven times already before I put it together like this. I know what I did. It was this. Just never had to look at it this way. This was no ready answer. I just thought of it. Because you asked I combed back through all I know and have experienced to see it in terms you might understand.

Now it is a ready answer and a polished shaft in the quiver of the Lord. lol Thanks.

Do you now concede by ignoring this?

Nightlion wrote:On another thread you taunted:

Darth J wrote:...that God is limited by eternal laws, and is irrelevant to the problem of evil........
There is plenty to discuss on this topic, and it has been discussed for hundreds of years, and Mormonism has not brought anything new or unique or insightful to the table....
We can do that without Mormonism. You are conceding that Mormonism has no unique insight, despite its claim to have prophets and apostles to tell us eternal truths about the nature of God and the purpose of life.

I picked up the challenge and delivered the goods proving that there is a uniquely Mormon insight into the problem of evil. And of course it centers in the gospel of Jesus Christ:

Nightlion wrote:This thread proves that the natural man has no business speaking about God.

God does not reduce to your level. He is not carnal, sensual, devilish, and not even temporal. He is spiritual. His words, and commandments are spiritual. His purpose in having us suffer all manner of wicked senseless and seemingly useless evil it on this wise:

So that when, and if, we ever come unto him, we will have all that drama to have to forgive.
What that causes us to do is appreciate just how somber and sober, meek and lowly in heart we must become even to be gracious to outrageous offenses we suffered BEFORE God will grant us a sanctification and raise us up to a higher state of existence.

Suffering is not only necessary it is the prime directive of this life. A thousand rapes, molestations, robberies, mob riots against our property and family, prison, withering lingering illness, loneliness, betrayals, wars upon ruthless wars all mangle a soul in the conflict of justice and demand a reconciliation. Or so it is made to seem. Our natural being sifts throught it continually for a reconciliation in physical terms that can never happen. It is the synthesis of immutable justice against all physical, emotional, spiritual, sexual viciousness either that we personally suffered or know to have been that distills within our soul to be offered up as our sacrifice in a broken heart and contrite spirit to access the grace of the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I guess I could say this another way a few more times. But what good will that do? I have gone through this experience and synthesis with the Living God as my waiting Savior. I know with a perfect understanding what I am saying is THE GREAT reality to why there is evil.

To be sinned against and sacrifice/suspend all desire for justice invokes the grace of Christ on your behalf. Not because you suffered. But that you prized a life with Christ and God above natural justice. You prove that you value the love of God above your own best interest. Above your moral outrage. Got it? This is expansive and very cool in its construct, don't you think? Does not matter if you suffered greatly or hardly at all. This is the key to acceptable repentance that opens the door where Christ and God the Father receive you to begin to teach you how to receive all things. If you choose to keep your moral outrage, you chose poorly.
Suffering give you a chip in the game. Use it. Show grace that grace might be done unto you.
Not that the world is worthy that you forgive, but God is worthy that you cash in your chips to know him. As was elegantly said; The purpose of life is to know God and teach others to know him....Ms Jack.

Unique enough for you Darth J? Has it been.....said before? I wonder. I wager not. I could have died seven times already before I put it together like this. I know what I did. It was this. Just never had to look at it this way. This was no ready answer. I just thought of it. Because you asked I combed back through all I know and have experienced to see it in terms you might understand.

Now it is a ready answer and a polished shaft in the quiver of the Lord. lol Thanks.

Do you now concede by ignoring this?

Wow, that's really deep, Nightlion.

God is bound by natural laws and operates through natural laws, and yet somehow the natural man is an enemy to God. Yeah, that is really, really profound. The natural man is man as God created him, so the omnibenevolent God of classical theism purposely made us to be inimical to him.

And God is spiritual, and things of the spirit can only be understood by the spirit, so the way the spiritual God is going to put us where we can understand things of the spirit is by making us physical and putting us in a physical world. See, we can't possibly understand the state at which we already were (spiritual) in our spiritual state, so we have to be put in a state that is antithetical to that state (nautral/physical) in order to understand that we have to overcome the state that God put us in so that we can go right back to where we were before God put us here. That sure is one clever plan.

How silly of me not to recognize that the man who acts according to his nature is inimical to the God who has to follow the laws of nature.

And the reason we need to be sinned against is so that we can learn to forgive. The Broken Window Fallacy on a cosmological scale, in other words. The reason we need to be sinned against is so that we can forgive and forget. And if that seems self-nullifying---and therefore meaningless---to you, then it is simply because you are a natural man, who is an enemy to the God who is Himself bound by the laws of nature.

I think it was a nice touch for God to give us a conscience so we would be morally repulsed by the evil that we need to just forget about and move on. What a marvelous thing to know that the way to appease the omnibenelovent God who created us in such a way that we are by default his enemy is to recognize the eternal virtue of abandoning justice and glorying in our victimhood. Truly, our God is an awesome God!

Another nice touch is that, having created us as his enemy and making us in our natural state incapable of comprehending all this, God has set it up so that even if what you say is true, the vast, vast majority of the human race never understands it, therefore never has a chance to learn anything from it, and therefore suffers pointlessly. Only a merciful, just, and loving God could have conceived of such a wondrous scheme.

This also begs the question of why God needs to put us in a position to where we need to be victims for the sole purpose of learning to forgive our trespassers, rather than cutting out the middleman and saving us from the pointless suffering that is supposed to teach us to endure and forgive the suffering that would not have happened in the first place had not the God of classical theism caused and/or allowed it. But I suppose this is that natural man talking again.

By the way, did you know that Mormonism does not believe in Original Sin, and yet "the natural man is an enemy to God"? Kind of like how I love basketball, and yet I hate all team sports.

You know, a man in France recently murdered his three year-old son by putting him in a washing machine to punish him for acting up in preschool. It's too bad that you were not there to lecture this little boy while he was in the spin cycle, so he could understand that God was allowing this to happen so that he could learn to forgive the suffering that God had allowed to happen in the first place. Hopefully, that three year-old could have overcome the natural man, as his head was banged and crushed in the running washing machine, and seen the beautiful and merciful purpose our Heavenly Father had in this.

I'm taking it as a given that you would not have intervened to save him, since that would be motivated by a sense of natural justice, and that is contrary to God's plan. Should we not follow God's example and allow that little boy to be pureed, so that the higher purpose can be fulfilled of leaving a spiritual state to come to a physical state where we are supposed to overcome the physical state to understand the state we were already in so that we can return to where we started?

I have a friend who is a case worker at the Utah Division of Child and Family Services. She had a case one time involving a little girl who was living with her grandma. It seems that grandma would hang the little girl by her ankles in a closet if this girl refused to perform oral sex on grandma. Yes, Nightlion and other readers, things like this happen.

I only wish that Nightlion had been there to explain to that little girl the divine plan of happiness that would be realized if she learned to enjoy her victimhood and forgive. I think that DCFS was wrong for their carnal, sensual, ungodly intervention. They should have let that little girl suffer so she could learn, even as our Heavenly Father does.

In the name of Jesus Christ, amen.

Why do we need to believe?

Why is being a good person not good enough?

Let us say that my mother was such a good person with such strong faith and raised me to behave as she does. I have enough faith in her and learned enough from her example to act in a moral manner. I have had no spiritual experiences that have confirmed the truthiness of anything LDS, but I act as a Mormon would act.

Now, let us say Luis Alfredo Garavito finds God and repents at the last minute. He has a better chance with his afterlife than I do, despite the fact that he raped and murdered over 100 young boys.

How does that make any sense?

In short, that exhaustive explanation does not actually reconcile the problem of evil. It just creates more problems.

Darth J wrote:
Wow, that's really deep, Nightlion.

God is bound by natural laws and operates through natural laws, and yet somehow the natural man is an enemy to God. Yeah, that is really, really profound. The natural man is man as God created him, so the omnibenevolent God of classical theism purposely made us to be inimical to him.

And God is spiritual, and things of the spirit can only be understood by the spirit, so the way the spiritual God is going to put us where we can understand things of the spirit is by making us physical and putting us in a physical world. See, we can't possibly understand the state at which we already were (spiritual) in our spiritual state, so we have to be put in a state that is antithetical to that state (nautral/physical) in order to understand that we have to overcome the state that God put us in so that we can go right back to where we were before God put us here. That sure is one clever plan.

How silly of me not to recognize that the man who acts according to his nature is inimical to the God who has to follow the laws of nature.

And the reason we need to be sinned against is so that we can learn to forgive. The Broken Window Fallacy on a cosmological scale, in other words. The reason we need to be sinned against is so that we can forgive and forget. And if that seems self-nullifying---and therefore meaningless---to you, then it is simply because you are a natural man, who is an enemy to the God who is Himself bound by the laws of nature.

I think it was a nice touch for God to give us a conscience so we would be morally repulsed by the evil that we need to just forget about and move on. What a marvelous thing to know that the way to appease the omnibenelovent God who created us in such a way that we are by default his enemy is to recognize the eternal virtue of abandoning justice and glorying in our victimhood. Truly, our God is an awesome God!

Another nice touch is that, having created us as his enemy and making us in our natural state incapable of comprehending all this, God has set it up so that even if what you say is true, the vast, vast majority of the human race never understands it, therefore never has a chance to learn anything from it, and therefore suffers pointlessly. Only a merciful, just, and loving God could have conceived of such a wondrous scheme.

This also begs the question of why God needs to put us in a position to where we need to be victims for the sole purpose of learning to forgive our trespassers, rather than cutting out the middleman and saving us from the pointless suffering that is supposed to teach us to endure and forgive the suffering that would not have happened in the first place had not the God of classical theism caused and/or allowed it. But I suppose this is that natural man talking again.

By the way, did you know that Mormonism does not believe in Original Sin, and yet "the natural man is an enemy to God"? Kind of like how I love basketball, and yet I hate all team sports.

You know, a man in France recently murdered his three year-old son by putting him in a washing machine to punish him for acting up in preschool. It's too bad that you were not there to lecture this little boy while he was in the spin cycle, so he could understand that God was allowing this to happen so that he could learn to forgive the suffering that God had allowed to happen in the first place. Hopefully, that three year-old could have overcome the natural man, as his head was banged and crushed in the running washing machine, and seen the beautiful and merciful purpose our Heavenly Father had in this.

I'm taking it as a given that you would not have intervened to save him, since that would be motivated by a sense of natural justice, and that is contrary to God's plan. Should we not follow God's example and allow that little boy to be pureed, so that the higher purpose can be fulfilled of leaving a spiritual state to come to a physical state where we are supposed to overcome the physical state to understand the state we were already in so that we can return to where we started?

I have a friend who is a case worker at the Utah Division of Child and Family Services. She had a case one time involving a little girl who was living with her grandma. It seems that grandma would hang the little girl by her ankles in a closet if this girl refused to perform oral sex on grandma. Yes, Nightlion and other readers, things like this happen.

I only wish that Nightlion had been there to explain to that little girl the divine plan of happiness that would be realized if she learned to enjoy her victimhood and forgive. I think that DCFS was wrong for their carnal, sensual, ungodly intervention. They should have let that little girl suffer so she could learn, even as our Heavenly Father does.

Well, alrighty then. Give me a moment to piece together your explosive snit.

But first off God did not create us his enemy. That was so from the beginning. In the organization of intelligences Satan rebelled. God had only given his native light and truth the ability to be independent. He came out of the Light of Truth an enemy to God. Probably for the umpteenth time.

All the suffering that never makes it to the synthesis of repentance and results in a spiritual upgrade is still profitable. Evil is food for the intellect to exercise against to grow as the demand for a resolution will draw out until it does. This is a crucible where faith is forged out of necessity.

Astoundingly ingenious means of creating faith where none existed before. Cool. Nobody likes work. The drudgery of it all. But that is how things get done and built. Perhaps ten or a hundred bouts of such eternities before enough faith crystallizes to access the upgrade. How else is a diamond made?

Like, what are you guys going to do for the next eternity after you realize how wrong you were? You are going to have to find a way to self-resolve. Christ will not save you. You will stew in your pottage until it is consumed. All good. Some progress will accrue.

Going back to this;

so that the higher purpose can be fulfilled of leaving a spiritual state to come to a physical state where we are supposed to overcome the physical state to understand the state we were already in so that we can return to where we started?

You were a better Mormon than to believe this. There must needs be an purposeful intervention of God to raise us up to a higher state. To justify his intervention as not just willy nilly, we must have sufficient faith to trip the wire. Few there be that find it. So?

There are sufficient camps where all epic fail can abide and distill some something. My Mormonism does not confine them to a dead end eternity. There is always the potter's grind, the Second Death, another round of the bases.

God knows evil's a bitch. So he sent his Son to own it and pay the cost of justice gone bad.
If your moral outrage rules your mind without flinching perhaps you just need more time.

Or you can receive grace for grace and move on. And how fair is that shoving murder and the epitome of evil at me as if a talking point? Sheesh. A little space if you please. A clean space to converse without the mayhem.

You called for a unique Mormon answer to the problem of evil. You revile it but you must admit it. No?

So, what I am getting from this is that there is no "problem" of evil because evil is actually gooood...

Isn't there a scripture about those who would call evil good?

ETA: Darth, sweetie, next time you need to warn me when you are going to make me cry. Thanks bunches!

emilysmith wrote:Why do we need to believe?

Why is being a good person not good enough?

Let us say that my mother was such a good person with such strong faith and raised me to behave as she does. I have enough faith in her and learned enough from her example to act in a moral manner. I have had no spiritual experiences that have confirmed the truthiness of anything LDS, but I act as a Mormon would act.

Now, let us say Luis Alfredo Garavito finds God and repents at the last minute. He has a better chance with his afterlife than I do, despite the fact that he raped and murdered over 100 young boys.

How does that make any sense?

In short, that exhaustive explanation does not actually reconcile the problem of evil. It just creates more problems.

The prize is not to act in moral manner. That's a given. Mr, Garavito does not get to say Thank you Jesus and have it better in the afterlife than someone who doubts. A nonsensical does not an argument make. I point out a reason for evil. On the scale of evil we got sassing mom to the atrocities Darth J mentions(ETMMP:) If you were mom you would have to forgive the sassing and the rape to offer grace for grace. I wonder in the grace of it if both might have the same weight. Cannot your own child offend you worse than a maniac?

just me wrote:So, what I am getting from this is that there is no "problem" of evil because evil is actually gooood...

Isn't there a scripture about those who would call evil good?

ETA: Darth, sweetie, next time you need to warn me when you are going to make me cry. Thanks bunches!

No my dear. Evil is not good. The good is what WE make of it. See?

Cannot your own child offend you worse than a maniac?

Are you seriously trying to compare a child saying "no" to a rapist?

just me wrote:

Cannot your own child offend you worse than a maniac?

Are you seriously trying to compare a child saying "no" to a rapist?

Yes. Your child owns a piece of you. The rapist never does. Who has the power to offend more?

ETA: I would gladly exchange being raped, or tumbled in the washing machine than the betrayal of beloveds which I have suffered.

Nightlion wrote:

just me wrote:Are you seriously trying to compare a child saying "no" to a rapist?

Yes. Your child owns a piece of you. The rapist never does. Who has the power to offend more?

Wow.