God-Devil?

:detective:You might want to look at Arianism (first mayor split in christian believes)

Also the Crusade(s) against the Catharian people is interesting.

Politics, money and churches rule the World, badly I think.

I have not studied either Manicheism or Mandaeism in depth. I don't know how far you might have gone into Zoroastrianism -- I'm not all that well versed in it, but I've been doing a little research lately on Christian concepts which may trace back to Zoroastrianism, including "the devil", and I'm interested in learning a bit more about it myself.

After searching around a while, I ended up back in Christianity, but with a very liberal universalist perspective. Like you, I do not view God as omnipotent. (1)The problem of evil just doesn't work with an all-loving omnipotent God, at least not for me. (2)The New Testament has passages stating that Satan aka The Prince of the Power of the Air aka The Devil is the ruler of THIS world. (3)The New Testament also says clearly that those who follow the teachings of Christ/God will suffer for it in THIS world, which (to me) makes no sense if God is all powerful in this world.

Perhaps I can help you with directions for possible interest or non-interest in early Christianity and JudeoChristianity. I have studied the Christian Apocrypha and early Christian sects a bit, including the early Coptic Church in Egypt and Christian gnosticism. I honestly don't think you'll find the type of dualism you describe in the legitimate early Christian movements ("legitimate" to me does not necessarily mean "orthodox", but it does mean a known, relatively early movement with reasonable acceptance and known followers somewhere in the ancient Christian world). Still, I may be overlooking something.

IMO, the important aspect of studying Christian Apocrypha and Christian gnosticism, should you decide to pursue it, is to learn which apocryphal (non-canonical) writings were most widely accepted by known sects of early Christianity. For example, The Shepherd of Hermes, The Odes of Solomon and First Clement were very widely read in very early church history as liturgy, though they did not meet criteria for the New Testament Canon.

The first complete copy of the Gospel of Thomas, essentially "the sayings of Jesus", was found in the Nag Hammadi library (discovered by archaeologists in 1948 in Egypt). It is a bit controversial, in that the early church in Rome was aware of it, rejected it for the New Testament canon, presumably because of its gnostic leanings, yet accepted the Gospel of John which also has hints of early gnosticism. Modern scholarship indicates The Gospel of Thomas might well be the earliest written gospel account.

There are certainly learned, well-studied adherents of gnostic Christianity, usually following the earliest schools of that movement. But some of the "bizarre" dualism (and other "phantasmagorical" teachings) espoused by some modern "gnostic Christians" come from quite late works, not connected with any known historical early Christian sects. I do agree with many Christian scholars that a lot of these later writings fall more into the category of "creative mythology" than into the category of "Christianity as practiced by early Christians (per the early church history available to us, which is considerable)".

The Nicene Council finalized the New Testament canon in the 4th Century AD, and from that point on, orthodoxy tightened its grip and even pre-existing alternative interpretations were branded as "heresies". Some long-established sects, particularly Egyptian and Syrian, continued to use a few of their early non-canonical writings. However, I don't recall that these writings involved any significantly greater dualism than the New Testament canon; again, I may be overlooking something.

A type of dualism, perhaps influenced by Zoroastrianism, entered into some forms of intertestamental Judaism, found in some of Judaism's pseudoepigrapha, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other writings, starting around 3rd (?) century BC through the beginnings of Christianity and later. Philo of Alexandria wrote a great deal attempting to combine Judaism and Hellenism.

And... that's about all the information or ideas I can offer you. Though I've tried, I just never developed a "feel" for Eastern thought, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, etc. My husband is a NeoPagan, but my personal interest in "paganism" concerns more the origin and history of religion, the first written records of human spiritual beliefs in ancient Mesopotamia, and comparative mythology.

Keep us posted on what you discover -- it sounds like you're beginning an interesting journey.

rebecca

Removed by Alan story unacceptable to some

Manic schizophrenic comes to mind.

I can't tell if you mean God, or if you mean me!

(If the latter: shrinks are always very clear that I'm not psychotic, and they usually frankly confess that they don't know what to make of me. I'm just a crazy mixed-up 57-year-old kid, I suppose.)

I'll reply to the more serious and longer responses later. (I haven't had breakfast yet, and already I'm having a tough day, over on the BBC Radio 4 message boards, in one of which I've been castigated for daring to be philosophical and to mention Noam Chomsky and Leo Strauss in a thread about 9/11!) This is looking interesting.

Your statement seemed to suggest my little story about good and evil was the product of a "Manic schizophrenic comes to mind" I do suffer from bipolar disorder but it is now under good medical control, and my story was just a silly attempt to make some sense out of evil, in the light of a supposedly god of infinite power.

Ah, I see (I think):

I didn't see Alan's short post, as I scrolled down the page, and I saw only the "manic schizophrenic" comment, which (I now see) immediately followed it, but included no quoted context, so I presumed that it was a comment on my OP in this thread.

Sorry, my fault. (I'm not having a very good day so far, and my eyelids still feel almost glued together from lack of sleep. I'll probably function better later, and I look forward to getting to grip with ancient heresies and seeing how they bear on my present intuitions about good and evil.)

Alan, your profile page looks interesting. I have also opened a tab on your Web page, but I'm unclear as to whether I need to register to explore the site.

In the Hermetic tradition man with a PsyChosis were considered to be in a state of mind that was talking to the gods. I don;t think they were using the DSM-IV criteria as we do now.

Merlin was reportely half devil/half man and run off to the woods on more than one occasion.

I've done a bit of Googling, but I can't find any point of contact between my own intuitions and Arianism. Even though it was a heresy to (what became) orthodox Christianity, it still seems firmly embedded in a belief in an omnipotent father and creator god (with a son), an idea which has never made any sense to me. Do you have any specific reference to an Arian account of evil?

Catharism is a bit closer, because of its Gnostic content. I quite happily use the Gnostic word 'demiurge' as a synonym for 'Devil'. But I have no theological belief in any kind of creator god, either good or evil, so I can't literally accept Gnostic mythology and its ascetic implications, although from what I have seen of it, it is quite fascinating, and I want to know more about it (along with ancient Greek mythology, and there is no doubt much else that I ought to know about).

'Creation' apart, I do see the human world as being pretty much in thrall to evil - just not in anything like such a radical way as the Gnostics. Another word I tend to use almost as if it were a synonym for evil is 'power' (hence my thinking that I should learn something about anarchism, although I doubt if I could ever be an anarchist in any practical sense). I don't have anything precise to say about this (certainly nothing precise enough for a philosophy forum); I'm just roughly indicating where my feelings lie.

---------- Post added 02-10-2010 at 06:42 PM ----------

I haven't quite got the hang of replying, with proper attribution, to specific messages in a thread (unless either the message happens to be the most recent one, or a 'quick reply' does the trick). Anyhow, melonkali writes:
Unitarian Universalism, from what little I know of it, appeals to me (and I was pleased to learn that Tim Berners-Lee, the Creator of our Web world, belongs to it), although I am not sure to what extent the Unitarian movement in the UK (where I live) represents it - it looks a little too Christian for me to be comfortable with it.

In spite of my lifelong discomfort with Christianity (I grew up in Northern Ireland - is that enough of an explanation?), I think I am beginning to feel less averse to reading the Bible, for whatever it can teach me (although I don't presently own a copy). The two things you mention under (2) and (3) both have resonance for me.

I've done very little research (if 'research' isn't too grand a word for Googling around a bit!), but for what it's worth, I don't have the impression that you are. If there was ever a heresy (within the broad Christian movement) along the lines I am looking for, it must have been stamped on very thoroughly. (But would there then not still be some recognisable mention of it somewhere, even if filtered through the eyes of its enemies?)

I am certainly not averse, indeed I am very much in need of, "creative mythology"; and in my search, I think that Gnosticism is likely to be of much help to me, although it seems extremely unlikely that I could ever believe in any of it literally. (Whatever I literally believe must be compatible with modern science, for a start.)
Thank you - I must look into all of that! The Dead Sea Scrolls, in particular, are long overdue for a look.

I think I can fairly say that I don't feel pulled in the direction of any one extant mythology more than any other, although of course I am very much pulled (sometimes, it seems, pulled apart!) by my own intuitions, arising from my own life experiences, to which any mythology (whether extant or "created") must answer. While there is a definite "Western" slant to my mind, which I feel is permanent, I feel there is something deeply incomplete and warped about it, and I need to look to the East to try to remedy that lack, without, however, uprooting myself and migrating in that direction! Paganism also appeals to me, although, as with most things, I know far too little about it.

I don't really see the world as evil, there are evil individuals of course but for the most part there is probably ten good people for ever one evil person. Rough estimate but if you think about what evil people like to do verses good, I would assume we would have a lot more messed up things happening on a daily basis than we currently do if my numbers are wrong.

Evil is easy to do, it requires fewest rules and far less effort than being good. And people love to gravitate towards what is the easiest, with the least amount of effort for the maximum gains. This is why good people can easily do evil things without actually realizing it. To be good you have to consider more, weigh more, and carefully plan, where as evil can toss out all those requirements and just head straight for the reward.

Also it is easy to manipulate those within goodness since they are bound by the rules of goodness. An evil person can press these rules down onto the good person getting them to bend in ways to help the evil person accomplish their goal. In effect the good person becomes the catalyst for evil without even knowing it. The evil person only need lie, simply to convince a good person to enact something. Since the good person will usually take the person to have their best interested invested, they will not question the sincerity of the evil persons intent. That is until they realize the evil has been done, but then it is too late.

Is the world rampant of evil? No, but since it has fewer rules it can accomplish far more than goodness can in a shorter amount of time.

You're right to pull me up on that, because my statement makes me appear more pessimistic (and possibly also much more Puritanical, or generally ascetic) than I am.

Part of the problem arises from the rather extreme connotations of the word 'evil'. And I would have just as bad a problem if I tried to retreat into something that sounds a bit more Buddhist, such as that the world is in the grip of 'illusion', because I don't really believe that, either. (I think Dr. Johnson had a point when he kicked that stone!) But such a statement would at least point more in the direction of my baffling impression that the world massively resists any move in the direction of more goodness, as if to say, "Things are already quite good enough as they are, thank you very much", even when they quite obviously aren't.

As I admitted when I wrote that bit about the human world being in thrall to evil, I have nothing at the moment very precise to say about it, but just wanted to indicate a "feeling" I have. However, I don't think that that feeling is meaningless, or that something much more precise could not eventually be said, from a position of greater wisdom.

I think perhaps this might make it just a little bit clearer:

While there is plenty of good in the world, it mostly seems to exist at the level of private lives, or in forms which are not accorded very much dignity or respect. Insofar as we live, or rather seem to live, in a publicly shared "world", that "world" (by which of course I mean a mental and social construct, not the material world - which is where I part company with the Gnostics) seems to be more evil than good, to me, and it seems (as if it were a sentient being, although it is not) to do all in its considerable power to blot out our awareness of the real world (by which I again do not mean merely the material world, but a world which includes all consciousness, in its bewildering and often absurd fullness and individuality).

When I started this thread, and when I wrote in another thread about the "God-Devil" Being needing to be "theoanalysed", I always had in mind a conception of this Being as having its own delusional side, just as each of us human beings has a delusional side, and the delusional side of this Being as being an actual power for evil. In a way which I have been struggling to work out for about four years now, I conceive of this Being as being the real world in which we all live, as well as mysteriously having a kind of Personality in Its own right. (One might say "existence exists", as if some kind of unformulated ontological argument were valid.) But it's a split Personality.

I fear (of course I might be wrong, might just be severely deluded on an individual level), it is largely the delusional aspect of this Being, or Personality, which we think of (quite mistakenly) as being the "real world".

What goodness there is in our private and social existence tends to survive by not being subjected to the demand for "reality". It's there (sort of like dark matter, in a vague analogy), but it is not attested as "real"; and, in the world that is attested as "real", evil (of a largely "banal" kind, if I may misappropriate Hannah Arendt's term) tends to predominate. (I have sometimes called this "the evil of banality".)

I did admit that I wasn't ready to say anything genuinely philosophical about this! However, I'm almost glad that you put me on the spot over it, painful though it is, because it seems important, at least, to put it on record as something which needs to have something more philosophical said about it. I hope I'll be able to do very much better later. (I could hardly have done very much worse!)

The notion that there is one unifying principle from which both "evil" and "good" emanate is common in the history of religious thought especially in eastern monistic philosophies or religions. The presence of evil has always been a problem in western theism where god is held to be both omni benevolent and omnipotent. The tension of injustice and evil with monotheism where god is held to be loving and all powerful has usually been addressed through the creation of the devil or demons, self restraint or self limitation on the part of god to allow free will or moral growth, or sometimes through the abandonment of creation ex nihilo or divine omnipotence in the interest of preserving divine benevolence.

From Wikipedia
Zurvanism (Zurvanite Zoroastrianism), Manichaeism and Mandaeism, are representative of dualistic and monist philosophies since each has a supreme and transcendental First Principle from which the two equal-but-opposite entities then emanate. This is also true for the lesser-known Christian gnostic religions, such as Bogomils, Catharism, etc. More complex forms of monist dualism also exist, for instance in Hermeticism, where Nous "thought" - that is described to have created man - brings forth both good and evil, depending on whether it receives prompting from God or from the demons.

Personally I follow Plato, The good we attribute to god, that which is not good we attribute to other forces.
God is the ordering and rational principle in the universe against the formless void and primordial chaos. Evil is the privation of the good, the absence of god.

Twirly you do live in the smoke, it aint ever good for a pessimist. It don't encourage the idea that the world is filled with good will to all men. I escaped its clutches and I have a completely optimistic view of humanity.:sarcastic:

I spent a week in the Lake District in May, just walking up and down big hills, and getting fit, and thinking, and now I want nothing else but to do that all the time. I'm not tired of life, but I am tired of London!

I lived there for thirty years and the thought of going back gives me nightmares. Mind, I'm visiting the old place, next month. Nice to go to but better leaving.

Hi xis is Inverness near the the Lake District? that is where my the McDougall's came from (My Dad)

Very beautiful, except for that monster lurking in the lake

My grandfather was from near Edinburgh ,Alan. Twenty years in the British army, one of the old contemptibles. Not the lake district Alan, that's in England , its the the lochs in Inverness.

Thanks for clearing that up, getting back to the subject of this thread, the majority of people are good and kind, but held to ransom by a few evil corrupt people who are the opposite to altruism don't you think?

I never know if we are becoming better or more self serving. I see many kindnesses but also see many terrible things that I cant comprehend. We can only do our best Alan. I hope if I do a good service it has a ripple effect on others. We do reap what we sow.