there seems to be a universal battle of good versus evil. i was contemplating whether or not this originated from religion (god vs. satan) or if god and satan are just the figures used to represent the ultimate good and the ultimate evil in society. what do u think?
good vs. evil or god vs. satan?
- Thread starter isis25
- Start date
isis25: there seems to be a universal battle of good versus evil. i was contemplating whether or not this originated from religion (god vs. satan) or if god and satan are just the figures used to represent the ultimate good and the ultimate evil in society. what do u think?
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M*W: God and Satan are symbols for the forces of good and evil in the world or positive and negative energies.
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M*W: God and Satan are symbols for the forces of good and evil in the world or positive and negative energies.
There's no battle of good vs evil. That's something that was all made up by man through manipulation of the Bible to have things their way during the Dark Ages. During those times, you'd hear more about Satan than you would actually of God. God and Satan have no problem with one another in the Bible, only man says so to strike fear into people. They created this evil image of Satan and then created their own laws that is supposedly God's will for control. The whole "you're either with us, or against us" yet using it on the highest scale possible (God, Satan, our souls, etc). Satan is merely a skeptic to God's creation (us) and tests us to to see if we appreciate God as much as God thinks we do. He basically realizes the predicament we're in of not being able to interact with God which means we'd have little faith in him. Why believe in something we can't see or able to prove the existance of, ya know?
Anytime you hear someone say something is the work of Satan or some other similar rubbish, that's pure crap. Satan isn't bad and there's no battle of good vs evil. It's all made up.
- N
P.S. - No, I'm not a Satanist.
Anytime you hear someone say something is the work of Satan or some other similar rubbish, that's pure crap. Satan isn't bad and there's no battle of good vs evil. It's all made up.
- N
P.S. - No, I'm not a Satanist.
it's simply good,evil, ying, yang, positive, negative.
but when it comes to god, devil there roles are reversed, check out religious teachings and you will find that god is the most evil one, were as the devil is not. it's just been labeled that way.
why should you have fear in god, or fear gods wrath, if it's surposedly a good thing.
and also I am an atheist not a satanist.
but when it comes to god, devil there roles are reversed, check out religious teachings and you will find that god is the most evil one, were as the devil is not. it's just been labeled that way.
why should you have fear in god, or fear gods wrath, if it's surposedly a good thing.
and also I am an atheist not a satanist.
Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
Neildo said:
How bazaar. So you are actually maintaining that there is no evil in the World and that everyone everywhere is acting out of perfect Love and Charity?
Then how do you explain the Child Porno Trafficers, Car Thieves, Rapers, Mass Murderers, and Republicans?
Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
isis25 said:
There is a Level at which Divinity does indeed transcend all Human Concerns; however, the Human Collective Consciousness has an inherent Religious component and will project itself in Religious Terms, revealing just as much Divinity as far as its Lights can at that moment shine forward and upward.
it started i reckon when the 'left brain' or logical rational function of the brain, mind became deified
As you know logic analyzes, abstracts things. this is not to say that PRE-deification of logic we didn't do that, but when the logic becomes DEIFIED then what Is analyzed and abstracted is believed to actually exists as a CONFLICT
so for example, 'heaven' and earth' become separated. now in reality there is no 'object' called 'heaven' that is a-part from anotheer object called 'earth'...it is rather a continuum of experience....same with all oppo-sites, Nature and spirit, female and male, good and evil, etc etc
Obviously, from this logical separation there happens the concept os an 'all-good' 'God'....as soon as you perform that logical step you THEN need an 'all-BAD', right, and first it is Nature/Goddess (because remember LOGIC has been deified and 'logic' believes it is TRAPPEd in Nature--aPART FROM Nature), and for Judaic christians that is soon translated into satan and/or the devil. Then the person(s) who have created these concepts believe and propagate the idea that 'they' are in conflict. AND it actually suits the purposes of the dominators. for their major strategy for controlling people is DIVIDe and CONTROL. so if they can incite this inner division in us as a good part versus an evil part. then they are really in control aren't they? it means you are un-stable....a quaking angst-driven person who will cling to them for security if they claim they can help your 'wicked' self!
As you know logic analyzes, abstracts things. this is not to say that PRE-deification of logic we didn't do that, but when the logic becomes DEIFIED then what Is analyzed and abstracted is believed to actually exists as a CONFLICT
so for example, 'heaven' and earth' become separated. now in reality there is no 'object' called 'heaven' that is a-part from anotheer object called 'earth'...it is rather a continuum of experience....same with all oppo-sites, Nature and spirit, female and male, good and evil, etc etc
Obviously, from this logical separation there happens the concept os an 'all-good' 'God'....as soon as you perform that logical step you THEN need an 'all-BAD', right, and first it is Nature/Goddess (because remember LOGIC has been deified and 'logic' believes it is TRAPPEd in Nature--aPART FROM Nature), and for Judaic christians that is soon translated into satan and/or the devil. Then the person(s) who have created these concepts believe and propagate the idea that 'they' are in conflict. AND it actually suits the purposes of the dominators. for their major strategy for controlling people is DIVIDe and CONTROL. so if they can incite this inner division in us as a good part versus an evil part. then they are really in control aren't they? it means you are un-stable....a quaking angst-driven person who will cling to them for security if they claim they can help your 'wicked' self!
I call it life, not a battle of good vs evil. Good and evil is relative. What one calls good or evil today may have been considered the opposite of the past or may be called the opposite in the future. A person may feel aborting a fetus to be evil, but I don't.
We all have free will to do what we want. That doesn't mean there's good and bad forces battling it out with one another. And even if there may be good and evil (which is all relative, mind you), it doesn't mean there's a leader on each side. And even if there were a leader on each side, I doubt it to be God vs Satan as any limited information we have in regards to those two don't show them as forces battling one another but rather getting along together quite well. Any texts or artwork that show a loving God and a demonic Satan battling it out with one another come from the Dark Ages when the church took over through fear.
But regardless, even if we were somehow battling good vs evil within ourselves, that is purely the work of God as he built us the way we are with free will. Satan has nothing to do with us having been created us that way. Satan is God's right-hand man used to test our faith in God, which has nothing to do whatever with good vs evil -- just faith in God. You can have God, you can have Satan, you can have good, and you can have evil, but you can't bunch them all up together to say that there's a battle between God and Satan in the form of good and evil.
It's good and all to believe in a higher power such as God, which many people believe to be a fantasy in and of itself, but it's another to actually do build up a fantasy story of good vs evil on top of that. You're a knowledable person, Leo, so please provide me with quite a bit of solid biblical (as anything afterwards is man-made.. assuming the bible isn't) references to this whole good God vs evil Satan battle that is going on. Try not to let any spooky churchly influences from the Dark Ages interfere with your biblical proof.
As strong as the feeling may be today of Satan being so wicked and evil a person with horns and all that, it's but a mere story from those dark days of old on top of yet another (most possibly true) story, the Bible. Go ahead and use references from that story (the bible), but not some further made-up church propoganda. The church severely tainted Christianity with lies to further suit their agenda. Good and evil? Pssh, no such thing. Who defines what is good and evil just depends on who's in control and has the most influence. The definitions of what is good and evil flip-flop more than John Kerry.
- N
Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
Neildo said:
Okay, this is what I am going to pray for before I go to bed this evening: that you are inflicted by so much intentional cruelty and victimization that you will never again doubt that there is a thing such as Evil, and that you will believe so sufficiently in Evil that it will be the entire focus of your attention that this Evil you have discovered will PLEASE depart and leave you alone.
In short, I hope you are raped, robbed, assualted, ********, humiliated, tortured, and laughed at.
Of course, if there is no Evil, and it is all the same to you whatever people do to you, then you'll be just fine.
Leo Volont said:
Yes, there IS evil. altough as previous poster said, that a lot of what is classed as 'evil' iscultturally-specific--for example i am Queer, and at periods in our history and stil existing in some plces and in some peoples minds, what Queers do is seen as evil, as is abortion etc. but this changes from culture to culture, and epcoh to epoch. but raping and murdering a child is evil ANYwhere....as is torture
so these acts are EXTREMEs of experience. the person that does them--or serial killing etc are at an extreme of experience....so what would extreme-good look like, i wonder to my self?...maybe an idealization of what good is. like matyrdom. always doing good for people and never talking back. being a goody woody two shoes. for such a person, evil would be screaming to be let out...heh. this shows the ultimate connection between extremes. ie., that there is no such thing as ultimate dualism--as the Christian church tried to indoctrinate, where a 'good' is in battle with an 'evil' where the former can lock up the latter.
another hint at the continuum of opposites, is with the Medieval Inquisition who in the intent of doing 'good' actually committed the vilest EVIL
so what that tells us is that it isn't that these potential extremes actually exists which is at fault---they HAVe to for the mutidimentsional roundness of lifedeath. what is wrong is when they are ABSTRACTED as if separate entities, and then the mind gets caught up in a viscious circle which can manifest as VERY dangerous behaviour
Good and evil might be relative to you, but that doesn't necessary mean that they are relative, nor that they couldn't be absolute to someone else.
The Book of Enoch, which was written before Christianity and before the middle ages, desribes the angels much like later Christians.
Having free will doesn't explain the battle. That is, by desiring to be sinnless, I'd be sinless. That isn't the case, so there must be other facts other than free will.
Your argument presupposes that Satan is doing what God wants. If that were the case, Satan(the serpent) would not be punished in Genesis.
well when did the christian bible originate? because according to it, god is the ultimate good and satan is the ultimate evil and the world is divided between the two opposites. people have analyzed the god/satan scenario and re-interpreted (correctly or falsely i do not know) but there seems to be a struggle between good and evil. in revelation good overcomes evil when satan is thrown into his own fiery pit. im wondering if this good vs evil complex was instilled in us at birth or if it is a product of the media and evolution. obviously people inhabited the earth before the bible was written but where did they get the concept of god and satan?
Uh, thanks? I guess.
But like I said, there are good and bad deeds. I never said there was no such thing as bad stuff. Just because there may be good and bad deeds, it does *not* mean there's somehow a battle of good vs evil, let alone God leading one side and Satan leading the other. And that's not even taking into account what is actually considered good and evil.
Good and bad deeds are the byproduct of free will which God, himself, has given us. If there is somehow a battle of good and evil, it was created and is maintained by nobody else but God, not Satan. So basically I guess God is some bipolar manic depressant schizophrenic person for creating this mess himself.
Spoken like a true, loving Christian.
And by the way, been there, done that, didn’t cry about any misfortune that has happened. That which doesn’t kill ya makes ya wiser and stronger.
Yup, kind what I was getting at. There is no such thing as good and evil because for either side to exist, they have to do the opposite of what they believe in. A battle of good vs evil in itself is pure evil because the "good" are acting out in hypocrisy. And when it comes to acting out of survival, one has to commit so-called evil deeds so in that instance is it no longer evil? Gotta make up your minds here. One can't flip-flop what is good and evil all the time all to suit their own cause.
Now I *do* believe in an actual battle that happened (past tense) between two opposing forces, but it wasn't anything what people claim it to be today. And if you want to learn what the actual battles were, go read history and mythology that came before the Bible tweaked it a bit and before people making it even further fantasy-like into some cosmic ethical struggle. It "was" (no longer "is") a battle of sides no different than any war. Whether it's for survival, for a gain in something, or whatever. It has *nothing* to do with good deeds vs bad deeds and a struggle for our souls. Someone doing a bad deed is the act of free will, *not* Satan controlling us and making us do those things as people claim. That's pure rubbish that was started in the Dark Ages by the Church. That's not the battle of good vs evil. Good vs evil are simple labels no different than Bush being labelled good and the Middle East as evil. Obviously each side is going to consider themselves good and the other side as bad.
Arguing about ethics makes absolutely no sense and no such battle of good acts vs evil acts can exist seeing as how only one being, God, made that all happen by giving us free will. God didn't create nothing but goodness and all of a sudden Satan comes around and decides to create evil. All of that is the work of God. The battles you read of are a completely different matter. Man, more specifically the Church, is the one who turned this into a battle of ethics and began to paint Satan as the demonic scapegoat that he's viewed as today.
This is all kind of hard for me to explain clearly as I have to word things it from the average viewpoint when mine is different so it may sound conflicting in some parts. I believe in an almighty God, I believe in the God of the Bible, and I believe in Satan. However, I do not believe the God of the Bible to be the almighty God. This is why a battle is able to take place yet isn't a battle of good vs evil deeds. And then for the simple fact of God creating us with free will, that in and of itself is enough reason for a battle of good vs evil deeds to not exist seeing as how it's all the work of one person, God. A battle of good vs evil people and then a battle of good vs evil deeds are two completely different things. And then as I mentioned earlier, there's the whole problem of determining what deeds are good and evil in the first place as they change all the time depending on the circumstances which kind of disproves morals in the first place. It basically all comes down to having to do what you gotta do to survive. Everything else is mere political opinion and philosophy.
- N
And your comment presupposes that Satan was the serpent.
They got the concept of God and Satan because they were two beings that did exist (their names were yet again changed in the Bible). The only mistake made was that people saw how powerful they were and assumed them to be the God and ying and yang, the good and evil, that they thought up through their philosophy of life. It’s a subject man has always wondered about. We wonder about an almighty creator, good and evil, no differently than the people of the past did. They just screwed up and placed a face to their philosophical thoughts and assumed all the events happening in the Bible were from the almighty creator of all God. And then later during the Dark Ages, the Church screwed up turning this into an ethical battle of good vs evil as opposed to what it was, just a normal battle.
- N
Neildo said:
Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
duendy said:
The word "Inquisition" means inquiry. These were Courts of Inquiry. Yes, the British who have been at War with Catholic Europe since forever have published a great deal of Propaganda against these Courts, but it never seems to bother anybody that practically none of it is True. You need to remember that Catholic Civilization WAS a Civilization. Things were done in an orderly and a sustainable Way. Courts were established to mitigate and control Mob Behaviors and to establish order. What no Protestant ever considers is that The Church was vindicating and releasing people who were accused of heresy and witchcraft, when the Mobs would have strung them up on mere suspicion.
Anyway, you need to consider that when Henry VIII couldn't get the Pope to grant him a divorce, and in a rage confiscated all Church Property and either killed or chased off all Church Officials, he needed something more of an excuse than what had really been the truth. It was War Time. So all this nonsense about the Inquisitions was simply invented. And Historians who write in the English Language have done practically nothing to correct these politically driven absurdities.
Being Gay is not one of the Evils of which I speak. Evilness is selfish and predatory and manifests in an anti-social orientation. Barbarism is Evil. Where Evil is selfish, Goodness is selfless, and social. The Golden Rule is the best metric -- a good person gives himself no more of a priority in his own considerations then he gives to those with whom his actions have an effect. A Good Person's own sense of self will not be limited to his own strictly individual person, but will stretch out into his Group -- he will feel as though he is an integral part of His Society. He will not act for his personal benefit but will ever be striving for the benefit of his Group, His World.
Sexuality really should not be a serious moral consideration, except that people get so obsessed with it that they allow their sexual urges to overpower all other priorities. It presents a problem for maintaining the social order, just as drinking, gambling, dueling and stealing become problems. Typically societies zero in on vices that actually cause harm. I suppose the only reason why some societies have villified Homosexuality is because there were serious concerns for ongoing instances of sexual harrassment between men on the job or in the armies, and then the concerns for pedophiliac abuse which is feared and resented.
Leo Volont.....I feel you area proclaimer and a deniar. you proclaim what you proclaim without any substantiating back up, and you deny some of the worst atrocities known to mankind
This reminds me of the Holocaust revisionists who deny they ever even happened. It is all totally offensive. not just for me having to read it, but for all the thousands of victims who really DID suffer ath the hands of the Medieval Inquistions, and the Nazis.
The Catholic church to this day has NEVER apologized fro its persecution of women. "witches", midwives, pagans, and heretics, and probably has amongst its elitist members many similar deniars like yourself, with their unsubstantiated claims.
"The central purpose of the Inquisition, as its name implies was inquisitio--that is, inquiry--into heresy. In principle, heresy, was always a serious crime in ecclesiastic law" (The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, by Thomas Szasz)
This reminds me of the Holocaust revisionists who deny they ever even happened. It is all totally offensive. not just for me having to read it, but for all the thousands of victims who really DID suffer ath the hands of the Medieval Inquistions, and the Nazis.
The Catholic church to this day has NEVER apologized fro its persecution of women. "witches", midwives, pagans, and heretics, and probably has amongst its elitist members many similar deniars like yourself, with their unsubstantiated claims.
"The central purpose of the Inquisition, as its name implies was inquisitio--that is, inquiry--into heresy. In principle, heresy, was always a serious crime in ecclesiastic law" (The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement, by Thomas Szasz)
Thiis isn't so farfetched, though. The book of Ezekiel, in describing the king of Tyre, describes also a cherubin who fell, his heart at the bottom of the sea. The book of Daniel talks of a lawless one who will take God's place in the temple.
Leo, is right about the Catholic Inquisition.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/source/inquisition1.html
http://www.catholic.net/RCC/Periodicals/Dossier/1112-96/article2.html
Leo Volont
Registered Senior Member
duendy said:
And should the Blacks apologize for all the racist insults applied against them? Should the Jews apologize for all the slurs directed in their direction?
No.
Then why should the Catholics apologize for all the lies that the English have instigated against them?
First the English had a War against Spain. Then a War to maintain all the property in England stolen from the Catholic Church. And then Wars against every Catholic Power in Europe. We are talking about Century after Century of lies and Propaganda perpetuated by the English against everything Catholic.
But you want the Catholics to apologize for being insulted.
Leo Volont said:
No. you have got lost, and think you arfe me asking that.
I am asking WHY the Catholics don't apologize for all their persecutions against people who they classed as heretical or 'mad'?.....really they need to do that and also be sued for every penny they willingly accrued from their victims......would LOVE to see hypocrites you seem to spend so much time and effort defending and aplogizing for on the bones of their arses!