Angels vs. Humans

[Benadam]

You speak of good and evil as if they were two different things, but they are not. That which is corrupt is that which lacks a certain amount of good. He is who is evil is he who continually tries to corrupt anything and everything.

Satan himself is not pure evil, because of one unchangeable fact: he exists. God, Yahweh, the great I Am is the only one who can bestow the nature of ‘being’ onto an entity. As long as Satan exists, he cannot be pure evil. He knows this, and he despises himself for this. The fact that he can never be extinguished.

Good and Evil are not Yin and Yang, two separate forces. God is all that exists. He is goodness itself. To reject goodness from your life is to reject God. You can keep rejecting and rejecting him, but you must face one fact in the end. Your existence is because of God. Your ‘being’, your soul is eternal as it was made so by God. As long as you exist, that good remains, and can never be destroyed.

Archistrage

You say that a gift of God makes the one given it good? What makes you think Satan hates to exist? What makes you think Satan can desire something impossible for him to know?

Evil is that which lacks good.

The Father of Truth= Pure Good

The father of lies = All That is not…

 

[archistrage]

You say that a gift of God makes the one given it good? What makes you think Satan hates to exist? What makes you think Satan can desire something impossible for him to know?

Evil is that which lacks good.

The Father of Truth= Pure Good

The father of lies = All That is not…

But Lies cannot exist unless there is Truth to lie about. Corruption cannot take place unless there is something to corrupt. Even Satan still has a spark of Goodness in him, even if it is no more than a spark. Satan still knows what it means to be perfectly happy. He was one of the Archangels, who stand before the throne of God. He was in that state of perfect joy, bliss, love. He was there, and he rejected it.

I never said that Grace makes one Good. Grace gives one the chance to be good. It is an opportunity. We have free will, even Lucifer does, which is why he was able to reject God.

Even Lucifer is not Absolute Evil. He is a pure force of corruption. He is not the Yin to God’s Yang. Whereas God is goodness itself, and the thing that restores all others to goodness, Lucifer is only the thing that corrupts things, he is not evil itself.

 

[peary]

Why did humans get a chance for redemption, but the angels who fell didn’t?

Because they had perfect free will and had the Beatific Vision of God. It’s pretty hard to go against that~!

 

[Ridgerunner]

That’s hard to understand. If you have full knowledge of the goodness of God and of the consequences of choosing to disobey God, also having no concupiscence, how could that decision ever happen?

I even think the same thing with humans sometimes. If there was no concupiscence at first, then how did the act of disobedience happen?

How could that decision ever happen? Through pride, so titanic in its nature that we cannot possibly understand it fully. I remember reading that some saint said if we were to perceive an angel as it really is, we would be absolutely convinced it was God, so massively greater than us they are.

As we know, our own pride, frequently incites to do things that are evil, but it’s mostly small-scale stuff, and we often repent and abandon it. We’re just different from angels; changeable. But what is pride? It is self-worship. It is putting ourselves above where we really belong in Creation.

Despite what other posters have said, I am inclined to believe Satan actually does reign in hell, at least in a way. I recall reading that St. Therese of Lisieux said all people who go to hell are volunteers who, at some point near death (whether right before or after, she didn’t say) cannot accept that we are nothing without God’s love and forgiveness. They “cocoon” themselves, then, for all eternity, in themselves. Each person in hell “reigns” then, in his own hell…the hell of his own total self-abosorption in his own being without God.

Hard to really grasp that in a way, but one can sort of see it in a way, too.

 

[Dorothy]

That’s hard to understand. If you have full knowledge of the goodness of God and of the consequences of choosing to disobey God, also having no concupiscence, how could that decision ever happen?

I even think the same thing with humans sometimes. If there was no concupiscence at first, then how did the act of disobedience happen?

Adam and Eve had free will, so they disobeyed of their own free will. They gave in to the temptation of pride.