Hello Sinister:
— Did god create evil?
O- Pilate asked:“What is Truth?”. Here I have to ask:“What is ‘evil’”? Then we may attempt to assign it’s existence, objective or subjective, to a creator.
— It would seem to me that god had every opportunity of saving or stopping the fallen angels and lucifer in the inception of evil but instead chosed to do nothing.
O- What if angels were but aspects of God? There would be no “falling” of any kind. God would be all in all. Who decides what is falling or ascending?
— If god created evil and certain dualities in the universe it would seem only natural to act on them with ourselves being the children of creation.
O- What if “evil” is but a point of view? The world did not objectively change, but our minds became judgmental at the Garden of Eden. What God had created “Perfect”, man now found imperfect; the children of God now saw nakedness as in need of correction. God admits that now man knows good and evil, but unlike Himself, they have a finite perspective on matters. This always leads to a confusion between what is apparently evil and what is in fact evil. From our perspective something seems like an evil, but from God’s perspective there may be no evil and vice versa: when we see no evil, God sees an evil. Since infinite is superior to finite, it is His perspective that takes precedence and decides the matter of what is or isn’t evil.
— And since religious people believe in freewill
O- Not all people: See Martin Luther’s “The Bondage of the Will”.
—…god is responsible for those who choose to do evil instead of what is defined as good as he created the free will of choice within ourselves to do each.
O- If God is responsible then there is no good nor is there evil. No one then could be praised nor blamed. God is omnipotent, so from one perspective or another, all is subject to him. God’s omnisense makes the freedom of our will an absurdity, depending of course, on the accepted definition of “choice”.
— Since god created evil I don’t believe there is any real reason why we as people should not indulge ourselves in wickedness and let us be honest god indulged himself quite a bit in the old testament with the destruction of those he called heretics in a psychological egotistical manner.
O- In my opinion, God did not create evil because evil is but a point of view, not an objective reality. We can and do disagree about what passes as evil, at least in some occasions. How much more would these disagreements occur when the persons judging do not share a common humanity? God’s standard is not our standard for what is evil and we can only presume to be correct about evil.
God acted in a certain way…how do you know that it was in an evil way? Are you the judge of God? But I think that what you hope is to justify what evil you would like to do. How about you immitate the good God has done and always does? Instead of focusing on what evil you think God does, why don’t you concentrate on the good, you may also think, God does?
— Even more interesting is that with freewill mankind can choose to rebel against god which only proves his limitations in that he is not so omnipotent as he leads his followers to believe.
O- You depart from the perspective that freewill is all but a given among the major religious faiths. Read Romans and Paul’s tale of the “Potter”.