[Magdalen] Exorcism

[Lynn Ronkainen]

Sally your post suggested this question to me - is a person evil or a doer of evil? Or is it the same?
Lynn

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 12, 2015, at 2:14 AM, Sally Davies <sally.davies at gmail.com> wrote:

"It is not possible for God to lie"....quite right Jim! We could not depend
on a God who could and would do anything. Though I suppose that if the
Temptation of Christ means anything practical, it means that God could have
decided to do wrong, but never has?

At risk of sounding like a Mediaeval Scholastic, perhaps one could say that
"all things are possible" means all wholesome things. Or even that lies and
acts of evil are negations and non-things, therefore outside of God's
repertoire.

I don't understand it either but God created us and we do evil. Nature
itself is "red in tooth and claw" and our close relatives the chimps also
do some appalling and needless things that would be called evil if we did
them.

Sometimes evil seems to be an emergent quality, like Jacob Zuma emerging
from apartheid and the ANC, or Donald Trump emerging from a post-cold-war
Republican Party. There's a point at which we can say "that one is evil"
but struggle to see the process by which that ugly thing emerged, in which
many if not all of us have a part to play.

Somehow this discussion feels very appropriate for Advent, as an antidote
to all the Christmas claptrap that goes on this time of year; and also
fitting for a week in which mathematicians announced that at the most basic
level of matter, there is an unsolvable question!

Sally D


On Saturday, December 12, 2015, James Oppenheimer-Crawford <
oppenheimerjw at gmail.com> wrote:

> I would not say something like "A Good God _couldn't_ do that!". I said I
> can't see how that can work.  Just saying that if God just feels like being
> mean --- well, your mileage may differ, but I don't think that's the God
> described in the Bible.
> 
> And I respectfully disagree. If you take the description of God in
> scripture seriously, then all things are not possible with God.
> 
> If we believe that we can depend on God, then we firmly maintain that all
> things are NOT possible with God.  If anything is possible, obviously you
> can't depend on God. I think that's fairly obvious.
> 
> To say, "Well, God can do whatever God decides to do," sounds very pious
> and good, but is it, really?  If God is good, then it follows that God will
> do not evil.  I don't think we ought to say, a la Old Testament, that God
> creates both good and evil and sends them on whomever he pleases.  That
> just makes God a supernatural Taliban.
> 
> I also think I am encouraged to press the point a bit more because what it
> looks like we are doing is trying to use these hypothetical evil entities
> to say that we are not really so awful at heart; it's those evil demons
> running around causing problems. Not our fault.
> 
> I'm afraid that I still have to say, if this is the case, then we have to
> wrestle with the question of how a good god can create evil entities and
> approve of their actions.
> 
> James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
> *“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
> except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy
> 
> On Fri, Dec 11, 2015 at 5:25 PM, Sibyl Smirl <polycarpa3 at ckt.net
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> 
>> Thank you, Sally! This one I'm going to keep to study over and over!
>> 
>> I'll add, apropos to the kind of theology that says "A Good God
> _couldn't_
>> do that!" that "With God all things are possible" and "My thoughts are
> not
>> your thoughts, nor your ways my ways".  I don't think that God uses the
>> same logics as humans do.
> 
>