We're getting away from my original point, which was that a lesser amount of "evil" (suffering and so forth) in the world would be better all round and maybe better than some kind of perfection. That's OK though, I'm happy to discuss what you put forward.
Sorry. That wasn't my intention to change the subject. I feel like we are on the same page, though. What we are discussing is, what is the right balance of good and evil? Is there a right balance at all? Or, do all of the possible combinations bring the same opportunity to convert evil into good?
The question that I have always had is if God wants us to experience him and so on, then he should make it a lot easier to, first, be sure he even exists and second, know what the heck he wants. It's his show of course, but imo if an omni God wanted me to believe in his existence I would do so, and if he wanted to give me instructions then he would do alot better than the confused mess of prophets and messengers and holy books that we have now. I don't see how that would change in my thought experiment.
Yes, people do some amazing things sometimes. The problem is that none of it is anything that humans can't do if they put their minds to it (and have the right minds in the first place). Once again, if God wants us to believe that we are getting assistance from him he should make it more obvious. And the improved version should involve a some improvement from God too. Am I being repetitive?
I hear you. And I've mentioned this in a few different threads. There cannot be any communion unless it is perfectly true. Any physical revelation ( actual proof ) will naturally and automatically become an idol to some, many, or most. If God does not have a physical form, revealing itself, proving its existence in a physical way prohibits communion. This is a lesson that's taught in the Hebrew bible. The example that comes to mind is in Judges. The Jewish people just finished a succesful campaign led by Gideon. Gideon takes the spoils, fashions a golden something-or-other to commemorate the miraculous victory, and the Jewish people start worshipping it. It's sad and embarrassing as a Jew to read stories like this. But, they're also great lessons for a religious person.
So, it's challenging. On the one hand, yes God wants us to believe, and there's opportunity to benefit greatly for ourselves and others from that belief and communion. But also God also needs that belief to be perfectly true. And then this begs the question: Isn't God supposed to be omnipotent? If so why can't God directly tolerate falsehood within itself.
In Judaism God is described as "who?", also described as "what?", and also rarely described as "where?". Communion with God is connecting with God, and being included with God. And none of that can happen if there is any falsehood at all. Contact with God is being in the place that is God. That place does not tolerate anything false.
And that is why the serpent never lied. It can't lie. It still cannot lie. That's what makes it tempting even today.
This lack of tolerance is difficult to reconcile with omnipotence, but only because true/false is usually limited to intellectual true/false. Emotions can also be true/false, and cultivating true emotions is, in my opinion, much easier for several reasons. Primary among them is, there are infinitely many emotions. Intellectually there's really only 1 version of truth. But emotionally there's infinite opportunity to cultivate truth. Because of this, the lack of tolerance was compensated by granting human emotions as an act of God's omnipotence.
God is all truth, and only truth, and doesn't change. Using omnipotence God created humans who were vastly diverse, and still, each one has the capability to operate with God, in God, on God's terms in complete truth. For those rare individuals that do not have any emotion at all, either due to pathology, or God forbid, as a result of trauma and torture, they still have the opportunity to connect with the divine through their intellect.
If a person is healthy, and is capable of experiencing human emotions, it's actually not that difficult to connect to God. Christians do this the best in my opinion. The idea that God would sacrifice its only son for humanity as a promise that each person's sins would be forgiven, brings a very powerful and strong and absolutley true emotional connection. But it cannot be rational; it cannot be intellectual; if God isn't literally a sky-daddy who physically impregnated Mary, yadda, yadda, yadda. Not that a lot of people take Christianity to this extreme, but a "God in the flesh" if understood literally, intellectually, is folly if God is not actually "flesh". People teach that it is. For those people who
do believe it literally, if they're wrong, when they conjure that idea into their mind, then they have sabatoged the connection that they're seeking, and they've sabatoged the connection for the other adherents, students, children that they are teaching.
So it is easy. But it's also difficult. There's opportunity for everyone, and a lot of people do it. But, there's also a lot of opportunity for error. And, imo, people have every right to be angry. It's a true emotion. Go ahead and blame God for those things that are considered unfair. Blame God for not making it easier. Don't forgive God unless and until God answers in a way that is understood. All of that is absolutely true. But don't expect an answer if the god that is being imagined intellectually doesn't match THE God which is absolultely unique. It's like typing the wrong url. It's like mistyping an email address. And it could be that people are being given the wrong url and given the wrong email address. If so, who's actually to blame?
Why surprising? My Brave New World would be populated by people equivalent to the best of us now. They exist now.
I thought we were talking about small communities. And I thought you were saying, maybe I'm mistaken, that in those small communities, the changes in human nature you are proposing already have happened, and the negative aspects have been eliminated.
Most of what you describe is what can be achieved through Buddhist practice. I've experienced a taste of it and it is wonderful.
The problem is that the benefits are only experienced by those that succeed, a small number indeed. What about everyone else? They still experience bad as bad, not good. And if you want to call God omni-benevolent it has to apply to everyone, not a privileged few. That's why it's "omni".
Well, yeah, but also... I don't know. For me, what you're saying sounds good at first, but then my mind starts thinking about the implications of everyone succeeding. And then my mind flips back in the other direction because there's supposed to be future world where everyone does succeed. And this little ping-pong match goes on for a while, and the resolution, in my opinion, is that everyone will succeed, but all for different reasons.
The people you're talking about, the few, those are people who succeed in an intuitive straight forward manner. There's also a few, who will succeed in a completely counter-intuitive backwards manner. And the rest, the vast majority, are somewhere inbetween, and this middle majority is a wildcard. They will succeed, but by some combination of intuitive, counter-intuitive, and other means of converting bad to good. And it could be that they employ multiple techniques, switching moment to moment, or leaning on a few different techniques that they know work for them.
So yeah, it's rare for people to succeed in the straight forward way, but that's not the only way. There's probably lots of ways to convert bad to good, especially if one considers combining techniques. I gave you 1 example, that would work effectively in a range of possible worlds. It works in worlds which are much much worse than ours, and also in worlds that are much much better than ours. If it works in all possible worlds then God is certainly omni-benevolent. How much more so if there are multiple techniques for converting bad to good that work in all possible worlds. That's a Mega-Super-Duper-Wow for me.
I've written a lot, so might as well be complete. There's just a small bit left to explain my position on this. You may be asking, why I might object to everyone succeeding in a straight forward manner.
It doesn't make sense for
everyone to succeed in a straight forward manner.
Obviously, some people do bad things. They should experience bad as bad. On the other hand, if everything was quid-pro-quo and obvious in the here and now, everyone would know each other's faults. I'm not sure I like that either. If I make a mistake, I appreciate the opportunity to work that out privately. And if everyone knew "His house burnt down, he must be an evil-doer" then what? It makes it much harder to make those inner needed changes. If everywhere I go, people look at me like I'm evil, because my house burnt down, I start to feel evil, and then I do evil. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
So, the retribution is hidden, mixed with random harmful phenomena. Good things too. Good things happen to good people, and good things happen to bad people. Bad things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people. And all of this is a form of keeping people's inner dimension private. It's modest. Not that people shouldn't be punished publicly when they are proven guilty. But there is some benefit to keeping these things private. If everyone obviously succeeded as a result of merit, then those who are lacking merit are obvious also.
OK. If good things happen to bad people, and many people are succeeding, then those bad people become role models, and evil is being encouraged. It's better if only a few people succeed in a straight forward manner. Some of those will be good people, some of those will be bad people. The bad actions are not mistaken for the cause of the success. The preference here is not encouraging bad behavior which overides encouraging good behavior because if there was a quid-pro-quo then everyone's inner goodness and badness would be public information. And that would make converting bad to good more difficult.
