God's existence and evil

[Cam42]

[quote name='DeeDee' date='Sep 20 2005, 12:01 PM']I was watching a movie not too long ago which dealth with the plague in Europe and  the Inquisition and it had a line in it that stuck with me. "Evil exists so that we may know the mercy of God."
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[/quote]

While the sentiment is catchy, the theology behind that is totally and utterly wrong.

Evil doesn't exist in order to teach us how to better love God. Evil exists, because we are disobedient to God. Evil exists, because we do things that are contrary to the will of God.

Evil does not exist in order to teach us how to better love God. Virtues exist in order to teach us how to love God. I cannot say that because I robbed a bank or because I had an affair, I can now better understand the love and mercy of God. What I can say is that because I robbed a bank or because I had an affair, I know what it is like to be separated from God.

However, those two statements are mutually exclusive. You don't come to a closer relationship with God by committing the evil, you come to a closer relationship with God, through the repentance of the evil action (sin). It is not in the evil that you find the love and mercy of God, but in the repentance of the evil action.

[StatingTheObvious]

[quote name='Chris of Zewe' date='Sep 18 2005, 09:56 AM']You seem to be misunderstanding the concept of all-around perfection, which I'm told is a trait that your God possesses (in your minds).  For example, something can be [i]perfectly good[/i], or [i]perfectly [b]anything[/b][/i], really.  Everytime I've asked one of you about your God's degree of perfection, I've been told that he's just "perfect", sans adjective.  This implies (to me at least), that your God is perfectly good, perfectly evil, perfectly 17, the perfect llama, whatever, because he's just "perfect."  In order to be "perfect", he would have to be [b]everyone's interpretation of the word[/b], or else he's imperfect as a result of the fact that he doesn't live up to their definition of the word, among other, more nit-picky reasons that I'm not quite sure how to word.
How do you figure?  If you owe me $3, that's the opposite of my owing you $3.
If your God can't lack anything, then he is indeed, as I said, also perfectly evil, in addition to perfectly [i]everything else[/i].  The way I see it, all of these things cancel out, and your God is a neutral figure at best who does not interfere with the goings-on of the universe, because that would upset his neutral balance.  In essence, he's a divine cripple.
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[/quote]Zewe. Psilocibin mushrooms are bad for you. Lay off them. Your premise is based on your human (and thusly imperfect) hypothetical definition of perfect. You are just spinning in illogical redundacy. With your 'logic', imperfect can't exist unless there is a perfect standard to measure it's shortcomings to. Evil can't exist unless there is good to contrast it with. Everything would have to be neutral, neither bad or good, perfect or imperfect, good or evil. Opposites cannot exist, just shades of gray. Everytime we boil mushrooms and drink the liquid we would experience various degress of psycho-active agents, but we couldn't really tell if we are hallucinating because we are always stoned, but in various degrees, and there is no real reality because collectively we're all partially messed up so full reality can't exist because nobody experiences full reality and if we can't experience it, it doesn't exist and colors don't exist because dogs are color blind and we just label different shades of gray with colors and black and white tv's are the same as color tvs with lower resolution of gray and ...

Sorry. I was tripping for a second there.

Edited September 21, 2005 by StatingTheObvious