"How Can You Say That God Turns All Evil Into Good?"

"God is outpouring his grace over all evil. It's as if he's constantly covering reality with his grace and his glory." - Jonathan Langaeu?

Dennis Prager [paraphrased]:
"How can you say that God transforms evil into good?

Why fight evil if he turns it into good anyway?
It reduces the evil that people have suffered in my opinion.
There is no undoing the evils that have happened."

If you address these concerns, you can truly understand
Evil, you can more deeply understand the nature of evil,
And how every group, every religion can go evil.

Divinie:

These were the questions that would cause me to lose my faith, to lead me away from Christianity to choose Atheism.

Just as in the group from this lecture I am referencing, when I had these questions, there was no one who could answer it.
These were the questions that would lead me to have to deny Christian theology and the existence of God. I still recall my conclusions.

How can you say that God is pouring his goodness over all reality and transforming all evil into good?

I have seen the world, I have seen needless cruelty and suffering, I know that it is wrong and that it demands resolution. If God is in control and he allows this to happen, with no resolution, if no one pays for the evil, then either

• God does not exist,
• God is a fool,
• or God is evil.

A superintelligence should not be a fool, so it shouldn't be that.
The God of reality being evil is possible, and I can attempt to defy that God, but the only problem then is my inadequacy,
and then I have to reconcile that I live inside of a nightmare in which the God of the reality I exist is evil.
Surely Evil can't be the force of the entire underlying reality. I might be unlucky, but I cannot be that unlucky.

The fact that all these people say they serve a good God who is obviously not doing good, not making the evil ones pay for their atrocities, or even watching as they happen,
and as unreliable as human beings are,
and watching their ignorance in all of these things,
it is highly unlikely that the God of the universe is Evil,
then the only option left is that God does not exist.
The people are delusional, insane, and there is no God.

Not only is there no God but the people who say God exists are just using the concept to justify their existence.

This was my final conclusion. But this question was only a cover. It was never the real question. There was a barrier I put up between me and God, because of the real unresolved question.

The real question had to do with a matter of my own heart.

It had nothing to do with God. It had everything to do with me.

The statement on the surface was,

"I will not accept a God that allows innocent people to suffer."
but deep down, the real statement was,

"I cannot let go of the suffering I have been through until I have my retribution. The evil things that have happened to me cannot have been for no reason,
or, you cannot tell me the things that I suffered were for good."

And this train of thought can only go in two ways,

"God isn't real."
or,
"If God won't deliver justice, I will."

Notice how this mindset does not include the possibility of healing.
What is to heal but to have resolution?

God exists, and He is the force that is resolution.

but from my mindset,

God must punish evil for the things people have done to me and the people I love.
Someone must pay.

Not only must they pay, but the payment must be enough to be consolation for my pains. It cannot be sometime later or a maybe. I need to know. I need it to happen within my lifetime because only when due justice has been paid would I ever choose to support the God responsible for all of this.

There are only a few ways to deal with this, what will grow into bitterness and resentment.

The first is indifference. There is no God to blame because there is no God. It is silly for me to assume there is some God responsible. It is just humans down here, and these things happened for no reason. I can live with this. Karma will come back to the people that hurt me one way or another,
but I should grow up and realize that there's no one responsible for it all,
it just happens. The world is the way it is.

The second is of course, the more active solution, I will get retribution on my own in a way that is deserving and of a fair compensation, and God will have to agree with me–
because I can't let this go until I have my compensation, and until then I cannot heal.

All of these thought trains, they only exist because of a matter of heart.

They are just a cover, a distraction from the unforgiveness in the heart.
The demanding of answers from God is a distraction from the pressing matter at hand, the unresolved unforgiveness in the heart.

As my heart grew, as I found grace, I was able to forgive and let go and I was able to heal.

There was though, that final strand in my mind,
"It's not fair. Evil cannot be allowed to perpetuate."

On a subconscious level, I might have thought,

"Because I won't be a victim. I won't lose."

This mental stance remained as a hard barrier in my heart, because underneath that pain is grief,

characterized by the question,

How could this happen?

'How could this happen?' recognizes that a tragedy has taken place.
The mind avoids grief, so a person avoids this reality.

In this reality, tragic things do take place for which we have no account.

As I dealt with the unforgiveness in my heart, and as I grew in compassion and out of my personal story of self, I was able to move out of these mental barriers of atheistic and anti-God mentalities and able to put my faith back in the good.

But it was as I began to understand the world more that I understood that it is the case that God is goodness, and he pours out his grace into reality.

I don't mean here to reference that I came to see God pour out his grace to open-hearted groups ready to receive it, not as a theological concept but as a phenomenon, though this did happen.

Rather, I came to understand that God is a force that pours resolution and goodness into evil, as I came to learn about the people who understood this.

I would come to learn about people who understood that this was the case, and what they did, and this would teach me more about the nature of evil.

As I learned of more ways of the occult and their underlying ideologies, what I came to understand is not only that it is the case that God is this force and reality plays out in this way, but the consequences of what humans do when they realize this is the case.

The immediate question that arises from the concept that God is all good pouring out his love over man kind is,

"But what about evil then? What about the justification of it?"
This is only a surface level question, it isn't the underlying question.

On the surface, the thinking is as follows,
"If evil isn't punished, then there is no reason for a moral code, there's no reason for people not to be evil."

but under the surface there is a deeper implication, a terrifying proposition. This is what most people do not go deep enough to get to, though many do.

"If God is the force that responds to evil, then the creation of evil is also the bringing in of the good. The more evil there is, the sooner God will step in to help us."

This may be the most dangerous line of thinking that exists, though there is no way to avoid coming to this conclusion. You could call this conclusion, the true eating of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, because once you eat of this knowledge of good and evil, you cannot unsee it.

The underlying implication of this statement is the reason why most people will never come to face it, because if you are goal oriented, as humans are,
then the quickest route to the goal is not to be a hero, but to be a villain.

If you know that God will respond to evil and suffering, and that the world must suffer in order to become good, and you want it to be seen within your limited lifespan, if you want to see that second coming of Christ, then the most efficient way to do so is to choose to create evil.

This is the danger of the understanding of knowledge of good and evil. Many people cannot resist once they have seen it this way. They have the understanding, they have the method, now all they have to do is rationalize it in a comfortable way.

Rationalizing what we do is the easiest thing in the world. No matter what is chosen, it's easy to rationalize what we do in the name of God.

I speak of this obviously not to promote this as a method, but rather that it is the case that people with understanding quickly see it this way if they look this deep.

As I saw this in the world, I came to know more of what real, true evil is like. The creation of evil on a deeper level and especially on a spiritual level usually arises from this understanding.

This understanding shows the true colors of the human ego, "I want it my way in my timing."

If God won't give me what I want in my timing, then I will create evil to force God's hand. I will create evil today so that Heaven can come sooner tomorrow.

An rationalizing ideology can arise quickly from this, for the 'good person,'
I'm really choosing a selfless way for all mankind and all of humanity by damning my own soul to darkness so that others may reach heaven sooner and this whole insane experience of earth will finally come to an end. The dream will finally be over.

The obvious rationalizing ideology for a person still in conflict with God is as was stated before,
the person understands that God is the force for Good and recognizes it as so, "If God will simply sit back and watch this happen, he is an evil God. I want the suffering to end, so between me and God, I am more Good. I will do what it takes to get my deserved retribution, and even if I lose in the end, I still won. I may not have been able to control everything, but at least I was able to manipulate the evil God, and I got in my last punch." This might be termed a Luciferian position if in only the sense that the classical Lucifer mounts a similar position against God.

The next ideology is the Atheistic occultist who uses the same logic as above to justify that because there is no rhyme or reason, the creation of evil to cause a later good outcome is the pragmatic and optimal spiritual approach.

Finally, the last most common ideology is one that is arising often in the monotheistic religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islamism. Perhaps the most dangerous of the ideologies, they often believe it is God's Will for them to create more suffering now in the name of future Good.

The understanding of these stances gave me a greater depth to the understanding of evil.

A single point of contrast is one I noticed in lighter ways,
the most peculiar of statements,
from the same perspective that the Good exists in the future,
but a different goal.

Instead of the goal of 'ending suffering,' what is commonly said on a more heart-centered noble path is,
the intention to reduce the amount of unnecessary suffering.

This intention is most peculiar and interesting because it carries with it a surprising amount of understanding. It recognizes that suffering is necessary, it trusts in God's plans for goodness, yet at the same time it seeks to mitigate [reduce] the total amount of suffering long term.

From a goal-oriented mindset, to reduce the suffering appears to be even counter-intuitive or counter productive. From the mindset of a critic, even this person might be attempting to bargain with God and control reality.

These ideologies deepened my perspective of evil.

For the ego, it is as simple as this,
"I will have my justice. I will have my retribution.
If God always does everything for good, then can I manipulate that, manipulate God to bring forward the good sooner. "

As is the case that Evil is always misguided, it is always a result of misunderstanding, and the result of evil is usually the opposite of what was intended by its originator, and it is still true in this case.

The problem with creating evil to bring a future of goodness sooner, thereby accelerating the timeline of humanity,
is that it actually decelerates the timeline because the ends do not justify the means. The easiest way to recognize this is that, counter to Dennis Prager's claim that evil has a finality,

[quote]

evil does not have an immediate finality. If a genocide is committed, the suffering does not end there. With the genocide of the Native Americans, the amount of suffering far outweighs the cost because it doesn't end with the actual genocide.
For whatever reason, there is additional suffering that can be felt after the event has occurred.
To miss this is why people with justification of the creation of evil have miscalculated. They have increased the amount of time necessary to reach the goal,
they recognized immediate cost in their calculation but were unable to recognize total costs.

Evil is always, always, a miscalculation of total cost.

What you may have recognized

from reading this is the correlation between what I originally stated about the ego wanting to see retribution paid out on one's own timeline,
and this later ideological desire to accelerate the timeline.

There is a common theme here of attempting to manipulate God by forcing his hand.

And so with that I bring back this question,
"But what about evil then? What about the justification of it?"
There's a better question, or a better understanding.

It's not, 'If God is pouring out Good, how is evil justified?'

it's really more like, 'Real Evil is when man attempts to manipulate the mechanics of goodness and then justifies it.'

The real evils don't come from the ignorance of good,
the real evils come from the awareness of the good and then the attempt to game it. The real evils come after the eating of the knowledge of good and evil, not before.

Man's attempt to demand that Goodness justify itself is an irrational aim. Goodness doesn't need to justify to anything, it is itself. It is we who need to justify ourselves to Goodness.

As I found my way back to my faith in God, I came to understand it,

it is not Good that is to be held responsible for evil,
rather man is responsible, as evil is the result of when man attempts to manipulate the Good.

If you're looking to why does evil exist,
mostly it exists because we ate the tree of the knowledge of good and evil,
when a person becomes aware of the mechanics of the force of good in this reality, sees that the evil of the past leads to the good in the future, gains that knowledge, and then attempts to manipulate those mechanics with that knowledge, real evil is born.
Man then creates great suffering for his own gain.

I hope this helps someone.