False.
Leaving aside what Judaism says about Lucifer, in what sense do you mean that G-d is “responsible for a wide degree and quality of evil”?
*"And I heard a loud voice in heaven, saying, “Now the salvation and the power and the kingdom of our God and the authority of his Christ have come, for the accuser of our brothers has been thrown down, who accuses them day and night before our God. And they have conquered him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony, for they loved not their lives even unto death. Therefore, rejoice, O heavens and you who dwell in them! But woe to you, O earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great wrath, because he knows that his time is short!”...Then the dragon became furious with the woman and went off to make war on the rest of her offspring, on those who keep the commandments of God and hold to the testimony of Jesus. And he stood on the sand of the sea."* (Revelation 12:10-12,17 ESV)Evil was created by creatures, not God. God does not create evil, although He does not stop all that we create from happening, and He does cause good things to come out of it.
Evil is not a being, thing, substance, or entity. Being is either the Creator or his creature. Even Satan was once good. He is a good thing gone bad - in fact, a very good thing gone very bad. If he had not had the greatest ontological goodness of a powerful mind and will, he could never have become as morally corrupt as he is.
When God was at “rest” before creation, He had yet to pour out His great powers of Perfect Strength (Justice) and Restraint (Mercy)…both of which are Infinite Virtues of God.
Michael the ArchangelThey might be alike in that they are “pure spirits” but to me that is where the similarity ends.
Odile…great post…but I have one issue. You state…“Christ did not shed His blood for them [angels]” I believe that is wrong. See the posting above where the Book of Revelation is quoted…and you will read there how the good angels cast out the bad through with the weapons of Truth …and the Blood of Jesus.
Of course they are opposing enemies, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be similar to each other just as two democracies at war with each other can be similar.
This is a very strange notion of similarity - two things are similar if others occasionally react to them the same way. It’s like saying that sunny day is like a hammer, because in the right conditions they can both cause headaches. (Migraine and being it in the head respectively). If you want to use such a definition, that’s fine, but pretty much everything is similar in this way.
God “having justification” is not just a piddly little difference that allows Him to get away with somethings. God is the ruler of the universe and the master of us, our births, and our deaths. Keeping in mind that death is not final, the comparison between God killing a person and the devil killing a person is the difference between a parent picking their child up from a birthday party early, and a psychopath kidnapping the child.
I will agree with you that God is not always nice as we see the term though. Good, yes; Just, yes; nice - sometimes (Aslan is not a tame lion). But again, I think it is stretching the term “similar” to say that God is similar to the Devil because the Devil’s work towards destroying all that is good sometimes makes us unhappy (though not always in the short term) and God’s work towards perfecting everything to the extent that it is willing to be perfected sometimes makes us unhappy (though never in the long term - though our reactions to God may).
Yes…God is Perfect Virtue…(“virtus” in Latin means “power”)Thats pretty cool,
Michael (not the Archangel)
I would agree with you. I would simply add that what we both see is extremely important insofar as it seems to be popularly unnoticed. Namely, we see that God may not help you when the knife is to your throat and your enemies are savoring your death, because God has a good reason. This means that God -the friend of friends and the exemplar of true goodness -does not exclude the dark or what we would call “traitorous” from his friendships, or his dealings. Far from it indeed, our mutual realization gives lie to the idea that just because someone is good, that he will make life easier or, in any measurable way, better for those he likes. The same for statesmen, for statesmen are reproached with doing a lot of dirty deeds, but in a way, no one does dirtier deeds than God and what God does is whiter than snow. It also shows, that practically anything could be good and that people should never despise one species of good, just because they are afraid of blood.
Actually I think that God must be an individual. If he is not then he is, rather, nothing; for there is no really existing substance that isn’t individual. Since God is really existing then he is individual.