hurting children, starving people, rape, torture, sickness, fear, shame, suffering, disaster, disease, broken relationships, broken homes, pain in all forms... 

shall I go on?

wars, lonliness, stealing, killing, destroying, hoplessness, helplessness, worthlessness...

shall I go on?

from the news today: children hiding in closets, cut out and murdered fetuses...

shall I go on?

homework, boredom, aging, diets, misunderstandings, theological debates...

If someone is behind all that...

I hate them.

I'm not positive if I SHOULD hate them, but I do...completely...without remnant.

love,

selah

I’m working on this, so I might describe it poorly. But you’ll get the idea.

“Evil” as I understand it, is privation, or better, privation of the good, the beautiful. It’s privation of that which a thing is naturally endowed to be or ought to be. But it’s not an “essence” or a "thing" in its own right. It is a negation.

Now, Hart (in his Tsunami book) says some interesting things about evil as privation. Don’t have the book in front of me, but the idea is that evil can have no independent, autonomous existence. It’s a parasite, a kind of cancer, that feeds off of other things. It has no "being" of its own.

But if some being is evil, then it is something that evil is feeding off of. But that means there's something about the host, something it ought to be, something its nature can be, which is in a state of privation. Since evil is fundamentally a privation of relational beauty that works itself out through choice, it follows that it can only exist in and through sentient beings who have SOME remnant of relational capacity. In other words, it can never be the case that a sentient being has NO such remnant AND that the being exists as utterly and completely evil. That’s ultimate metaphysical privation, an autonomous parasite, and a contradiction of terms. It would mean “evil” is some THING that exists. That would be to attribute “existence”—a beauty per se—to evil itself. So if Satan is a sentient being and he exists, doesn’t it follow that there must be SOME irreducible capacity for good to explain his continuing existence? Actual evil only exists where there is a contrasting capacity for good.

We have to understand the nature of "evil." Hart got me to thinking about this. Evil has no independent existence. It is privation, pure and simple. It is das nichte. It's a kind of metaphysical "shadow" or "stain in the desert." And as such it can never have utterly consumed its host so long as that host exists. To have done so would be to have annihilated the host. So either utterly evil and unredeemable sentient existence--if existence can ever get to such a state--is by definition annihilation, OR sentient existence can't get to such a state and remains therefore redeemable. I just don’t know which is actually the case, and that’s why I say: It’s either annihilation or eventual redemption for all sentient, volitional, relational beings. I lean to the latter. But the idea that a sentient being would become utterly and completely consumed and defined by evil and yet continue to exhibit [the beauty of] ‘existence’ is simply not possible. So either Satan is redeemable if he exists, or he no longer exists, having been utterly consumed and annihilated by evil. I can't imagine that by this point Satan is not as evil as he can possibly become, and I’m inclined to think he’s still around! So…

Does it work?

Tom

Post Edited (TGB) : 9/25/2006 3:16:06 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (TGB) : 9/25/2006 3:12:18 PM (GMT-5)

Love on girl, in the Spirit of Jesus Christ,

Mark

Selah,

I agree, evil is the privation of good.  A SHADOW can never CONSUME the LIGHT, to the contrary God will one day totally blot out all light in evil and evil will no longer exist in reality.  Call it annihilation if you choose, but once there is no longer any light of God residing within any sentient being, then there is nothing worthy of redemption.  It would be like redeeming a cow, a beast, instead, the beast will smolder forever in the past, like a good memory.   See SATPOE.

When we move away and rebel against God, he can deprive us of himself; I consider this the wrath of God and the road to spiritual death.  When the light of God is totally removed, we are left in utter darkness.  Darkness, like evil, has no true entity of its own. Darkness has no reality of its own other then the simple default of being in the absence of light.  When Satan and his followers are cast into utter darkness they will no longer exist in reality.  Similarly, there is no such thing as a pure lie; it’s the privation of absolute truth.  It’s ambiguity of a partial truth that sustains lies.  In total Light and Truth, the darkness of evil and the serpent’s tongue of lies will cease to exist; the only reality in the universe will be the truth and life that exist in the presence of God… that is the Good News.   

Don’t let others throw a guilt trip on you; we don’t rejoice for those in Hell, we rejoice with those in the reality of Heaven.

The seventy returned with joy, saying, "Lord, in your name even the demons submit to us!" ¹⁸ He said to them, "I watched Satan fall from heaven like a flash of lightning.  See, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing will hurt you.  Nevertheless, do not rejoice at this, that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven."

p.s. Pure Truth is clear and does not change, regardless if you read it slow or fast.  

Post Edited (sparknheart) : 9/25/2006 1:56:55 PM (GMT-5)

http://www.romanity.org/htm/rom.10.en.original_sin_according_to_st._paul.01.htm#s1

Post Edited (PotOnWheel) : 9/25/2006 5:56:50 PM (GMT-5)

Post Edited (TGB) : 9/26/2006 8:54:57 AM (GMT-5)