I'm drifting off literature, but reading the New Testament I can't help but raise these questions. How would god make herself known?
If it's an activist god, then they could perform miracles. Bend conditionality or break how we understand the world of cause and effect, or create a world where evil is punished. Like god could have given Hitler cancer and killed him quick and we would just have thought it was causality.
My feeling is that if god gave man free will, he or she could still give cancer and we wouldn't know if it was god's hand or not.
So you get god's son, Jesus. The holy ghost puts an immaculate conception into Mary. Mary wasn't pregnant before she married Joseph, after sleeping with another man. This is the legend that grew up. Maybe Mary wasn't a virgin, and Jesus came up with that story, and Joseph was a good bloke because he loved Mary. And Jesus was a very spiritual person and wanted to spread monotheism. And maybe he was in a world of fiercely competing spiritualities, and developed his mythology and theology to help humans see a system of monotheism.
To me god can't be all powerful. Evil has power too, and a good god can be in competition with evil powers. I can't figure out which version of monotheism that is. Gnosticism has a split between the material world and the spiritual world, but wasn't mainstream and consider a heresy.
I can't figure out the name of the sect that doesn't see god as omnipotent. I guess it's polytheism.
You commit adultery in your heart, probably, I don't know you, but if you're anything like me. "The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9, NRSV). I think when you look at it this way, Christianity understands what Buddhism does. But Buddhism focuses on becoming dispassionate, not looking at naked pictures and getting excited, but avoiding that. Not grasping after pleasures. Jesus would tell you not to do that stuff to get into heaven, but you know, monkeys are smart enough not to do anything based on promises of an afterlife. I want my treat now, or not at all. And the doctrine isn't heaven on earth. It's a real afterlife to them.
Harari calls it Dualism:
“The Battle of Good and Evil Polytheism gave birth not merely to monotheist religions, but also to dualistic ones. Dualistic religions espouse the existence of two opposing powers: good and evil. Unlike monotheism, dualism believes that evil is an independent power, neither created by the good God, nor subordinate to it. Dualism explains that the entire universe is a battleground between these two forces, and that everything that happens in the world is part of the struggle. Dualism is a very attractive world view because it has a short and simple answer to the famous Problem of Evil, one of the fundamental concerns of human thought. ‘Why is there evil in the world? Why is there suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people?’ Monotheists have to practise intellectual gymnastics to explain how an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allows so much suffering in the world. One well-known explanation is that this is God’s way of allowing for human free will. Were there no evil, humans could not choose between good and evil, and hence there would be no free will. This, however, is a non-intuitive answer that immediately raises a host of new questions. Freedom of will allows humans to choose evil. Many indeed choose evil and, according to the standard monotheist account, this choice must bring divine punishment in its wake. If God knew in advance that a particular person would use her free will to choose evil, and that as a result she would be punished for this by eternal tortures in hell, why did God create her? Theologians have written countless books to answer such questions. Some find the answers convincing. Some don’t. What’s undeniable is that monotheists have a hard time dealing with the Problem of Evil. For dualists, it’s easy to explain evil. Bad things happen even to good people because the world is not governed single-handedly by a good God. There is an independent evil power loose in the world. The evil power does bad things. Dualism has its own drawbacks. While solving the Problem of Evil, it is unnerved by the Problem of Order. If the world was created by a single God, it’s clear why it is such an orderly place, where everything obeys the same laws. But if Good and Evil battle for control of the world, who enforces the laws governing this cosmic war? Two rival states can fight one another because both obey the same laws of physics. A missile launched from Pakistan can hit targets in India because gravity works the same way in both countries. When Good and Evil fight, what common laws do they obey, and who decreed these laws? So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief."
In the Wikipedia entry of Dualism in Cosmology, supposedly these Christian traditions are dualistic: Marcionism, Catharism, Paulicianism. I'll have to look into these things.
The problem of evil Wikipedia entry is for monotheism with omniscience, and the problem of order would be for the dualism, but there's no entry for that and dualism is usually seen as the problem of mind and body.
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