Quite stream-of-consciousness and all over the place, I'm sorry:
Our group in TOK did a presentation Friday on free will, and the question was raised: Is God free? My bit:
God is not bound to do good works; good works are bound to be done by God. He is the paradigm. The standard. The original. You might ask, "Then what makes it good? Who decided that what God does is good?" Irrelevant. Things are only good because God did them. God is free to do whatever He pleases. We must understand that we are made in God's image, we are created in love, and that our very bodies, souls, world, and reality are put together, run by good. So every action that is not reconciled with God is one that is directly against our nature and the way we were made. God made us in such a way that we run on good so it is essentially stupid (I don't mean to be accusatory - I am the most stupid of them all) to try to work any differently - it is like a bird trying to fly without using its wings. There is such a thing as good and evil in the world, a true force of right and wrong. But we cannot think that God is somehow bound by this force and the reason He is so great is that He fulfills its wishes perfectly. God is this force. The reason God is great is not that He strives for or reaches perfection the best - He is the reason we know what perfection is. He is the only thing - force, power, standard - we answer to. To believe otherwise - that there is some standard that God fulfills (or, in some cases, to believe that there is some standard that it is impossible for something to fulfill and so God does not exist) - is to believe that there is another force or power that God answers to, which is to believe there is another god. Where does it go from there? Thus, God is the standard. We are not like God in our endeavor of perfection (because God is not in an endeavor of perfection), we are in an endeavor of God.
There is still, largely, the mite in the eye of what makes God the standard. The question of what makes what God decides good. What if we weren't bound by that? I think it's silly to be bothered by this. God made us so that good is good and that's how we work. He very well could have made us another way, and we would have run up against the same exact problem. We must remember that we wouldn't be if God hadn't made us. It's like saying, "I'm really bitter about this whole hunger thing. I don't think it's fair that I have to eat all the time, so I'm gonna stop."
More on this later, I think.
In other news, thanks and respect to our veterans, including my father.
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5 comments:
To me, God only created good. Then people ask me "how can you believe that when there are entities of evil such as Satan?" God created Satan out of good-it was Satan who chose to neglect good. And that's how I define evil: the absense of good.
I don't know if this is, in any way, even relevant to what you're saying, but it somewhat goes back to our Free Will topic. To me, we have free will because God created us to enjoin in good, and it is up to us to either fulfill that good or to neglect it (bad deeds). [this last statement was unbelievably shallow, and I apologize. But if you haven't yet noticed, I am terrible at using words to bring across my ideas].
I'll respond with more later.
<3
Totally agree! C.S. Lewis has described bad as a broken piece of good.
Bad is the absence of good the same way that cold is the absence of heat and dark is the absence of light.
Bad, cold, and dark can't exist without that from which they originate. In fact, they don't even really exist. What we perceive as bad isn't really bad (or cold or dark) it is only what results from a lack of good (or heat or light).
When we see something and say that it is dark, what we're really saying is that light isn't there to illuminate and so our perceptions are limited and different.
And totally with you about the free will thing, though I can express myself no better than you can (as evidenced by my attempt in TOK on Friday).
I love you a lot.
Is evidence a verb?
Shoot.
It is now :)
you guys hit the nail on the head.
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