Native spirit,

Namaste ..?.? You come in here and insult the majority of religion and then borrow phrase of peace ? It is laughable to elevate Spirituality which has nothing to do with the Spirit……more like a cult…..

I do not believe in your Religion I am A spiritualist
I do not borrow anything, I use quotes that I believe in so keep your ego in check


Namaste

Isn't Spirit uality connecting to the Divine through your own personal experiences ?... how is that a 'cult'.
Some Religion's could be seen as cults, imo....

NativeS #4

I TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU!

Molearner…….”It is laughable to elevate Spirituality which has nothing to do with the Spirit.

Spirituality is ALL ABOUT THE SPIRIT………thought that was fairly obvious.imo

Personally, I can’t see how NativeS has tried to “elevate” spirituality in her comments.

I wonder if anyone else thought that.

Well, back on the topic! Clears throat...:wink:

If we are made in God's image (in so many, many ways it is darn hard to comprehend) ...one way is how our mind works in diversified ways.
We love beauty and comedy and love, yet, we are entertained by movies and books all about horror, wars and tragedies!
The business of News Reporting proves that out.

If an Infinite Being wanting to create a vast creation on so many different planes or dimensions...would not that Being
become bored if it were ALL
Comedy and Peace?
Would that Being not want an EPIC to observe for Eternity of interest?
That is, that would include turmoil and victory, war and triumph, love and hate, challenges and overcoming, rough edges being smoothed, mistakes and then corrections...foolishness becoming wisdom?
Yet, all the while knowing - there is no death - there are always many chances to overcome issues (reincarnation)...
and that any suffering does end.

In other words we are actors on a stage. Happy and sad - acting out good and evil...for what reason? One would be
to be observed, entertained, another to collect data from.

Just my input; take it or leave it, of course. :wink:

It seems to me that evil is ultimately an illusion and is not real. I deny the reality of evil. I deny the reality of pain and suffering.

God cannot really have created evil since it doesn't exist. But god, the I Am, is responsible for the existence of the illusion of evil. I feel there must be a positive purpose behind this illusion of evil. Since I am God, I must be responsible for the evil illusion. I would never have created the evil illusion unless it had a positive purpose.

But what is the positive purpose? I seem to have forgotten. I have chosen to forget. I have created forgetfulness.

Maybe one day I will create remembrance. Maybe I will choose to remember why I created an illusion of evil, pain and suffering. I will also chose to remember why I have created a reality of joy, bliss and abundance.

In the meantime I will choose to enjoy the process.

the simplest i know how to put it is, when god created us it was with the intent we would find ourselves able to make 'real' choices between things. That we wouldn't be 'locked into' 'foregone conclusions' at every step of the way. That we would each have our own sense of agency in terms of how we relate to life, the universe, and everything.

How that situation with him deciding that came about is debatable i guess but that was the situation as I understand it.

The problem is, if you do a deep dive into humanity, you eventually get to the point of understanding, that if a certain thing happened and then we were left unfettered everything we would want to do would tend in the opposite direction, that we would choose to make less and less choices until we sometime become unable to make real choices. That there would be foregone conclusions forever locking us into a single way of life. That we would lose all sense of our own agency in favor of doing all the 'proper' things.

But that is not the way of life, that is the way of death.

God knew that and told us not to make a certain mistake lest it happen.

So we made the certain mistake anyway and then he was left with making life unpleasant enough that we wouldn't be able to ever rest in the desire to endlessly get away with making less and less choices....

certainly if you look at it we keep trying to go that direction, to make things easier and easier and more and more automatic while making life more and more pleasant and happier, but there is always something in the end, that we find wrong with whatever conception we have accepted about life, that makes us hurt, that makes us step back and go another direction than the one we want to go in. Makes us make some choice other than just continuing on with the results of previous choices.

Unpleasantness/harder is stuff we don't want; and because we don't want it we call it evil and try to get rid of it; and because we call it evil and try to get rid of it, evil exists.

But really, the only other choice for god to make is we all die.

He decided not to make that choice, so we are left mad or depressed or otherwise very unhappy because we aren't getting things the way we want them to be.

We know this is wrong and we want it to be right!

And yet the fact it is wrong and we are unhappy about the disparity has to be ok with him because again the only other choice is, we all quit with our own agency to make choices, assume the foregone conclusions have caught us up and that we can't go against them, become proper little beings, and just die.

Delving around to try and make sense of the Verse I find different interpretations that make more sense to me personally.

"I make success and create disaster” (HCSB). “I make well-being and create calamity” (ESV)
“I send good times and bad times” (NLT). I prefer the last (NLT) version....

From my position, it is not really strange at all.

Weren't we created with free-will?
Is it not up to us, what we do with our free-will?

As for Isaiah the 45th Chapter, I consider it ito be one of the most thought provoking Chapters in the Bible.