From what little I’ve learnt about religion over the years, it seems like many of them are awaiting a new shepherd/teacher to guide them out of darkness/immorality onto a path of righteousness/good…
If that’s the case, then doesn’t it suggest that the original teachings of morality are not true morality and are therefore not the teachings of a true God/Supreme/Most good being?
Why would a good being not give its creations what they need to be good in the beginning? Wouldn’t that make the creator responsible for all sin/immorality they do?
The “after encountering” bit means learning is involved, and we learn in stages. Smaller bites of simpler foods are introduced first. Foods harder to digest are introduced last.
Many are still weaning.
Many of us are not just merely weaning. Many of us are still in the womb, and we see the birth pangs all around us.
And many of us are killed off at higher rates than we are born.
Those are the kinds of scenarios provoking biblical intervention historically. Just an observation.
We have the law written on our hearts, nothing we do will ever measure up to it, and thinking it will misses the point of unconditional love. You can’t earn it. You accept it & give it to others. Giving it to others the way it was given to us (on the cross) is the whole law. Please don’t ask, “Do you mean I’m supposed to climb up on the cross and get crucified or people aren’t gonna believe I love them?” You’ll sound like the dude that said we can’t crawl back up into our mother’s wombs when Jesus said we need to be born again.
Regarding why it wasn’t taught since the beginning… see my comment above regarding introducing food in stages… then… here’s a thought I had the other day. I’m not a young earth creationist, for the record.
There’s something beautiful about teaching your children there only used to be one kind of death, spiritual, and it was taught the same way you teach them what to avoid in the wild garden.
Equally beautiful to teach them there used to be only one kind of birth.
We don’t need a new teacher. We need to rediscover the teaching and live it.
Yeah pretty much. God can get the credit for all the beauty and goodness in the world, but then he also gets the blame for all the ugliness and evil. He doesn’t get to have his cake and eat it too.
But we do have “free will” (a very sophisticated form of causality whereby we are maximized-expressed subjectively across many layers of ourselves over time in ways that allow us to read the future and respond to facts as such; in a way, our free will so-called is a system of truth-discovery and as we use this system over time our own self becomes more of what it already is/was in reality and in potential, or in a way what we want it to be since our own realizations and desires and willings end up shaping and re-casting our minds and hearts over time through the many iterations of our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions). So because of that, some people feel like God doesn’t get the blame for any of the evil in the world. But that is also a failed logic, because God could have made us with the same free will we already possess while also designing the world and human nature in such a way that acts of extreme evil would not occur, or at least certainly would occur far less frequently than they actually do. And on top of that, even assuming free will is the case God would know that many humans would be put in situations that manipulated their perceptions and emotions in ways that would cause them to freely do bad things, or to not understand entirely or sufficiently the evil nature of the things they do and the harmful impact they have on others. God knew all this before the world was even created, and he still made it anyway. He knew every single evil terrible thing that would ever occur, before he even made us. And he chose to make us this way anyway. Soooo yeah, blame. You don’t get to design a robot race knowing it will have errors and wiring issues and many of the robots will consequently malfunction causing them to viciously kidnap rape torture and murder other innocent robots just minding their own business, and then sit back and claim no responsibility for any of it.
So the more interesting ideas here are: 1) On some level God must not care that some humans live short, painful existences through no fault of their own, or 2) maybe our lives here on earth are really just a little blip in our total existence, and once we die what happened to us here is largely forgotten and we take none of the pain or trauma with us, and God knows that even though we suffer right now once we die none of that will matter and we won’t even care anymore anyway, and maybe in some weird way our lives in the afterlife are better in proprtion to how much we had to endure suffering while in our earthly life, to balance things out and “make it worth it” which a person or God could claim justifies the fact of evil in the world. Either that, or like I said he just doesn’t really care enough. He might care on some level but he must care about other things more, like whatever overall purpose this world has and whatever justifies its existence in this current state it is in. Whatever that justification is, must be more important than X number of innocent people suffering and dying unfairly at the hands of evil every single day.
The phenomenon you describe points to the self transcending nature of the human mind. No paradigm is final. To hold on to the old way is to die with it. The new wine bursts the old wineskin. The Newtonian paradigm was a good one. If science stopped there it would have died. Same with religion. The unchanging Absolute perceived through the finite mind is the dynamism we call the universe.