kakistos andron

"but i think... the ones who don't struggle a little bit in the beginning.. they don't get to learn the lessons that will get them all the way to the end."

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is the lioness evil for killing the zebra, or noble for feeding her cubs?

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"how much detail did you think God put into making the world?"

"what?"

"as in - how much did He actually determine. Did he decide from the very beginning - this kid is going to spill his ice cream on Saturday which will lead to his dad being late for work and Trump winning the U.S. general election. Or did he just decide, okay so this is how ionic bonds work and here's this thing called natural selection. I think we can call it a day."

"Um..."

"If you take a microscope to everything and try and figure out how everything works - how desperately vast and intricate and interconnected all of life is... from chemistry to our biochemistry to our brains to our societies and cultures... it makes you wonder - if intelligent design is real - then how much of it was designed and how much of it is just letting the program run its programming. How much patching and debugging did God do.. to keep everything running as it should? Do you think he defined only the rules that govern the limitations and capacity of the human brain so that we could develop language and talk to each other... or do you think he mapped out what I was going to think of today and talk to you about and dictate every single word in the sentence I'm speaking now? How hands on of a creator do you think He is?"

"I... I don't know?"

"Me neither. But it got me thinking... maybe eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil didn't cause sin to enter the world. Maybe it was the threshold marker. A symbol. The result of sin rather than its root cause. Hear me out. In a world in which everything you do is permissible, how do you know you can think for yourself and act autonomously? You can't because everything you try to do is something an omnipotent deity has told you to do. Enjoy yourself, don't enjoy yourself. This is how I created you to be. This is all according to my plan. But what if you could disobey - and do something the deity expressly told you not to do. This would be conclusive evidence that you had will independent of your creator / deity. The Tree of good and evil was a way of knowing when Adam and Eve had reached a point in their development as independent entities where they could defy God's will and act of their own accord. And what about 'if you eat this you will surely die?' Well, again - maybe it's not eating the fruit that kills them but deviating from God's will and God's plan. Maybe the only way to get to 'everlasting life' or 'heaven' is by following a very strict code and set of behaviours. Maybe the way to metamorphose from being a flesh creature to a spirit creature requires a series of transformations and habits to be developed. Periods of waiting and hibernation and renovation. And what happens if you don't listen, don't do the required reading, if you don't follow the plan, don't obey the omnipotent creator, the intelligent designer, don't undergo the necessary transformation? Then you remain a flesh creature. One that doesn't live forever."