"Kater Moggin" <kimmerian RemoveThis @fastmail.fm> wrote in message
news:kimmerian-E7A403.05354523082006@news.verizon.net...
> Mackie <mackiemesser RemoveThis @zoomshare.com>:
>
>> Consider that evil-doing and evil-creating are not the same, that good
>
> Consider reading more closely.
You want that my nose should come poking right through your pixels?
> I didn't say they were the
> same.
So you acknowledge the difference. Very good!
> The Tanakh . . .
I don't know what importance you are placing in the term "Tanakh" for
the Hebrew scriptures, but the Hebrew/English copy of the Masoretic
text on my shelf is the same as is to be found identified as the Tanakh
here . . .
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Bible/jpstoc.html
But if by "Tanakh" you refer to the text as it existed before the
Masoretes installed the diacritical marks for vowels, then of course
ambiguities will arise permitting errors of mistranslation and
misinterpretation as per this . . .
> asserts both that the LORD creates evil
> _and_ that he does evil -- ergo he's an evil-doing, evil-making
> god according to his own scriptures.
You do not support that statement from specific passages, so there is
no reason to bother with it.
>
>> Perhaps, you would observe that in terms of what both Genesis and
>
> My observation was about your terms.
Believe me, had I any notion that such comical use would be made of
those terms as you have enjoyed to turn God into a follower of Karl
Marx, I would have realized the fault implicit in them, and stayed my
hand till an expression not subject to such absurdity had come to mind.
>You claimed that the
> Creator made evil for sake of a greater good, but the ends
> justify the means is considered a bad excuse . . .
Oh, stop it. My meaning is clear, howsoever clumsily expressed, even in
this post which you have so deftly caused to disappear, here. When the
"greater good" or which is to say in your terms, "the ends" [sic] is no
'end' but a beginning, the very creation of 'good' itself, no
justifications nor excuses are at issue.
> and it completely
> fails when applied to God Almighty, since as I've already
> pointed out, you can't possibly argue that circumstances forced
> his hand.
But of course I can and do argue that point, showing that God's method
of creation is by division, light from dark, good from evil; the
'circumstances' forcing his hand, are nothing more than the attributes
of his own nature, the nature he creates, who he is, how he does
things.
>
> Going back to Genesis . . .
Yes, let's do go back there, to the text, to the passages you found it
altogether too convenient to excise, and in any case that you should do
a fair work of responding to the points, I will return the courtesy in
regard of this . . .
> it's clear both that man shares the
> Creator's knowledge of good and evil ("Behold, the man is
> become as one of us, to know good and evil": Gen. 3:22, Yahweh
> talking) and that Abraham questions the Creator's plan to
> destroy the righteous and wicked alike in Sodom. Gen. 18:16-33.
>
> Not to forget the Book of Job, where the Creator o.k's the
> torture of a "blameless and upright man," then goes into a
> long song-and-dance routine instead of 'fessing up to what he's
> done. For someone his size Yahweh moves very well on the
> dance floor, but the buck-and-wing makes a poor answer to Job's
> questions.
>
> -- Moggin
The text of this post edited for a more concise rendering of the
content . . .
From: "Mac the Nice" <jpdm45 RemoveThis @hotmail.com>
Subject: Beyond Good & Evil, Revisited
Date: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 2:14 AM
Consider that evil-doing and evil-creating are not the same, that good
cannot be created except by division from evil, seeing both must come
into being, the one to allow for the existence of the other. But if you
will not hear this from me, then you have the words of one in whom I
know you greatly trust, the great heresiarch, Marcion, as he writes
them down (so I contend) as author of the so-called, "Epistle of Paul
to the Romans".
At 7:12 the following appears, as the irony begins . . .
"Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment holy, and just, and
good."
Note that the law is identified as "good" and that breaking it, "sin"
is therefore necessarily "evil" . . .
"What shall we say then? Is the law sin? God forbid. Nay, I had not
known sin, but by the law: for I had not known lust, except the law had
said, Thou shalt not covet." 7:7
There can be no recognition of evil, but for the consciousness of good.
The one is known by the other. Had the law not fixed its canon against
covetousness, a person would pursue his lust with no notion that this
was anything other than perfectly acceptable human desirousness--and
lots of fun!
In Verse 8, Marcion goes elegantly on to state this point in just a few
words . . .
"For without the law sin was dead."
He might easily have said, "unborn" had it not been for a further use
he has for his image of choice . . .
9: For I was alive without the law once: but when the commandment
came, sin revived, and I died.
[But, as to my contention about Marcion, ask yourself: When on earth
was "Paul", or i.e. Saul of Tarsus ever "alive without the law"?]
10: And the commandment, which was ordained to life,
I found to be unto death.
11: For sin, taking occasion by the commandment,
deceived me, and by it slew me.
12: Wherefore the law is holy, and the commandment
holy, and just, and good.
Which brings it around full circle. When, in the beginning, the law is
laid down in the Garden, that they shall not eat the fruit from the
Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, that commandment then clued
Adam and Eve in to the fact that they could "do evil". Before the law,
they didn't know that. They had been perfectly innocent of any
distinction between good and evil. Now they had something new and
different to do!
But, as the Serpent (the evil consciousness of Man with all its tricks
of thought) entered in, they could reason that the law was just a big
fat boring "No-No" defining only that which was evil. The law spoke
not of good. So how could they know what it was, for the law did not
say, "Go and eat of the pomegranate tree, because those are *good*.
Yum-Yum!" Surely God was just pulling their legs!
Not. No, God was so not doing that. They knew what the 'good' was; it
was God, and his commandment, which was not doing that which was
forbidden. Of course the law was a big "No-No." The law comes by
negation, by the taking away of something, by a refusal, by limitation
of a seemingly (though illusory) positive possibility; a limitation of
possibility that automatically renders negatively another: the good.
By a negation of the negative, the positive arises. No sooner was the
possibility of evil made known to them, then by that dialectic,
therefore the good. But the good consisted in nothing, in even less
than nothing, in only *not doing*, where the *doing* is evil, in
disobedience of the commandment.
Thus was made known to them the "good". This was decidedly understood,
they knew the commandment of God was good, for if it were otherwise,
their punishment was unjust. The knowledge of both good and evil comes
at once, with the commandment.
What had remained hidden to them however was a concrete sense of what
was good about the Good, about following something so seemingly
negative, so full of limitations as the law. They were destined to
learn what was good about the good, by doing evil, to violate the good
upon breaking the commandment, thus to discover the evil consequences
of evil-doing.
Only by retrospect of being cast out of the Garden could Man come to
know of direst certainty what would have been so good about doing good
by following the law. It would have been so good, not succumbing to
the temptation, in the prurience of their curiosity to find out for
themselves what the big deal was--about evil.
It's a two-edged sword, cutting both ways, this instantaneous creation
of good and evil that comes by the law and commandment of God . . .
24: So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the
garden of Eden cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to
keep the way of the tree of life.
>
>> Genesis, pertaining to all God's creations, in the 'divisions'
>> done--the darkness from the light, the waters from the firmament, the
>> sea from the dry land.
>
> I talked about the creation-by-division in Gen. 1 a little
> while ago. Met alot of resistance.
You met a lot of nonsense. Of course it came by division; it is a
cosmological parable of mitosis and meiosis. There is not a clearer
rendering, albeit figurative, of the whole story of bio-evolution than
is to be found in the book of Genesis.
>
>> The knowledge of good and evil is God's, and is fruit forbidden to the
>> soul of man to savor.
>
> Genesis 3:22: "And the LORD God said, 'Behold, the man is
> become as one of us, to know good and evil...'" Yahweh
> observing that man has eaten the forbidden fruit and now shares
> divine knowledge of good and evil.
>
> Also notice Abraham criticizes the LORD's plan to kill the
> righteous with the wicked in Sodom and Gomorrah. Abe is
> highly diplomatic, but he gets his point across. Gen. 18:16-33.
But as Billy Wilder's "Le Moustache", bartender of the bistro in *Irma
La Douce*, says to Jack Lemmon as Le Flic (the Gendarme), "Ah, but that
is another story!"
>
>> is to transgress upon God's domain. Man will be guilty of doing evil,
>> whereas God shall always remain innocent of his own act of creating it,
>> for sake of a greater 'good' than little man can understand.
>
> "The ends justify the means" is generally considered a bad
> excuse, and it doesn't work at all when applied to an
> all-powerful God, since he can't claim circumstances forced him
> into evil.
Perhaps, you would observe that in terms of what both Genesis and
Romans are saying, no such justification is at issue.
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Do You Like Stinky Girls?"
http://doo-dads.blogspot.com/
Poetry?
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Politics?
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A Punk Rock Nancy Drew?
"It's like butter." Linda Richman
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