Nightlion wrote: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.
Yes, we were carnal and sensuous even before we had bodies or physical senses and corporeal desires. Truly insidious, that natural evil is.
If God did not make us his enemy, but only gave us the potential to inevitably become his enemy, then it really amounts to the same thing. So did God not foresee this would happen----meaning He is not omniscient? Or did he deliberately give us the power to realize our innate enmity to Him and fault us for it---meaning He is not just/omnibenevloent?
Unfortunately, though, you are going off script. The issue I raised, and on which you started this thread, is what, if any, unique insight Mormonism has to the problem of evil. The Book of Mormon defines the natural man as man existing in this mortal coil, not as a pre-mortal spirit.
Mosiah 3:1919 For the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord, and becometh as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient, full of love, willing to submit to all things which the Lord seeth fit to inflict upon him, even as a child doth submit to his father.Notice the "when you're slapped, you'll take it and like it!" aspect of God that King Benjamin here imparts to us.
And you're not refuting me with any of this, anyway. The idea that "the natural man is an enemy to God" is not unique to Mormonism. E.g.,
http://www.christianarmor.net/oldman.htmAll 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.
Well, you've got me there. I'm sure that that three year-old boy contemplated the metaphysical nature of his suffering and grew intellectually as that washing machine churned him to death.
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?
A diamond is an inanimate object that is incapable of self-reflection, a sense of morality, or suffering. That's not a particularly compelling analogy to a human being.
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.
The other day, I decided to beat the crap out of my kids and see if that taught them to trust in me and love me. It didn't, because they didn't understand why I was doing it. So you know what I did?
I beat them even more.I believe it was the great philosopher and theologian Mike Tyson who said, "I'll Screw you 'til you love me."
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?
Now we see the beautiful mercy of God's love. If we don't have enough faith, he will just let us suffer. But then even if we do have faith, he will sometimes let us suffer. So suffering without faith teaches us to have faith, and suffering with faith teaches us that the faith we learned to have from suffering the first time is futile.
Let's look at something Jesus said to explain to us the nature of our Heavenly Father:
If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone? or if he ask a fish, will he for a fish give him a serpent? Or if he shall ask an egg, will he offer him a scorpion? If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?Your theodicy turns this on its head: God is less moral than we are. (Or He is more moral than us in a way that we can't comprehend, but He endowed us with a conscience to make Him appear amoral or arbitrary to us.....just for fun!)
Let's imagine the SWAT team coming into a house because a woman inside is being raped and tortured. As they stand there and watch, listening to her pitiful screams and watching blood and other fluids flow from her various orifices, a bystander wanders into the house and asks why they don't stop it. They're the SWAT team! And the SWAT team responds, "Oh, well, she didn't dial 911. So if we let it happen this time, then the next time she gets raped and tortured, she'll have learned the lesson that she needs to call 911 for help."
Or, alternatively, the SWAT team is there, and the woman sees them and pleads hysterically for help while she is being beaten, violated, degraded, and maimed. The bystander walks in and again asks why the SWAT team isn't stopping it. She's asking for help! The SWAT team responds, "Sure, she's asking for help, but we don't think she's being sincere enough."
(The SWAT team is God as described by Nightlion, in case that was too subtle.)
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.
Pretty sure that reincarnation is not a widely-accepted doctrine in any denomination of Mormonism.
God knows evil's a bitch. So he sent his Son to own it and pay the cost of justice gone bad.
Yeah, that's the basic idea of Christianity. Not helping with the "unique to Mormonism" thing.
If your moral outrage rules your mind without flinching perhaps you just need more time.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
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.
The problem of evil is usually thought of to include random natural disasters, diseases, and other forms of apparently pointless suffering, too. You can talk about God doing it Himself instead of outsourcing it to mortal criminals if you want.
You called for a unique Mormon answer to the problem of evil. You revile it but you must admit it. No?
No.
Perhaps I should have specified that I meant a unique SOLUTION to the problem of evil, not a unique way of compounding it.