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Why Didn't God Kill Lucifer ?


Rade

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Why didn't God (the God of the Hebrew bible) kill Lucifer instead of allowing him to escape from heaven ? Consider all the positive outcomes of this single act by God not taken. Much much less evil on earth if Lucifer does not exist. Original sin of Eve then Adam was direct result of intervention by Lucifer in the garden, to add confusion into the mind of Eve. No Lucifer, and Eve then Adam do not eat the fruit from tree of knowledge. No Lucifer and then no need for Jesus to suffer and die to save humans, Jesus would perhaps still be with us today to continue teaching his gospel of love, his mission would have been one of teacher not savior. Jesus clearly explained how humans get to heaven after death and it did not require that Jesus be dead and raise from death. God clearly had no problems killing millions of sinful humans during the flood event, yet he allowed Lucifer (who did the ultimate act of evil and sin of being disrespectful to God in his presence) to come and go as he pleases to spread evil and sin among humans. In their song "Ohio", Crosby-Stills-Nash conclude with the single word WHY, why did the students have to die...I ask God, WHY, why did Lucifer not have to die ?

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Even after Adam and Eve sinned they carried there sin within themselves. Even if God had destroyed Lucifer/Sata,n sin was still in the world. God had a plan before the world was created. Without God Jesus or Satan we are still born with free will. God allowed Satan to stay because mankind needed to know who and why Satan did what he did. Intellectuals ask where does knowledge come from... common sense says God who else? Paul

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It's pretty simple, the believers in god needed to have a scapegoat to blame of the worlds woes on, the concept of Satan aka Lucifer was created to allow bad things to be blamed on Lucifer.
OK, so this explanation would also explain why God created Lucifer in the first place and why God allowed evil thoughts to enter the mind of Lucifer before he and other angels were tossed from heaven. That 1/3 of angels agreed with Lucifer and also were removed from heaven must mean that God was not doing a very good job making heaven a perfect place to live. Makes one wonder if heaven is such a good option after death for humans, clearly better than hell, but is it possible there is a third option after death of humans, neither heaven nor hell, and this option is one lacking all historic evidence of any evil ?
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Even after Adam and Eve sinned they carried there sin within themselves. Even if God had destroyed Lucifer/Sata,n sin was still in the world. God had a plan before the world was created. Without God Jesus or Satan we are still born with free will. God allowed Satan to stay because mankind needed to know who and why Satan did what he did. Intellectuals ask where does knowledge come from... common sense says God who else?
Adam was not created with sin by God he was created perfect, the sin resulted only because of interaction with Lucifer in the garden, which God allowed to occur. God simply could have told Adam the story about his dead evil angel Lucifer during one of their walks in the garden, a great lesson for Adam to learn about evil, no need for Adam to ever meet Lucifer in person, pure evil itself. Would you rather tell your children stories about evil people or set up a situation where they are forced to interact with them, especially if you want them to love you ? Imagine the horror of a child when they discover that you as parent allowed them to meet with evil face-to-face, just so you as parent get warm selfish feeling inside that you know your children really love you because they meet evil and reject it. As you said, common sense informs what God should have done, kill Lucifer, but God willed not to. Again I ask, why ?
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Understanding,

You missed the first sentence and the word after. God gave Adam and Eve the first law commandment "do not eat of the tree of good and evil". Satan convinced them difference. There sin was disobedience not believing God. It was in Gods plan for man. Man was predestined to be save by John 3:16 and his free will. Satan is part of Gods plan for man. Paul

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Adam was not created with sin by God he was created perfect, the sin resulted only because of interaction with Lucifer in the garden, which God allowed to occur. God simply could have told Adam the story about his dead evil angel Lucifer during one of their walks in the garden, a great lesson for Adam to learn about evil, no need for Adam to ever meet Lucifer in person, pure evil itself. Would you rather tell your children stories about evil people or set up a situation where they are forced to interact with them, especially if you want them to love you ? Imagine the horror of a child when they discover that you as parent allowed them to meet with evil face-to-face, just so you as parent get warm selfish feeling inside that you know your children really love you because they meet evil and reject it. As you said, common sense informs what God should have done, kill Lucifer, but God willed not to. Again I ask, why ?

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The best explanation of this I can think of is to take Tolkien's mythic work Ainulindalë, The Song of the Ainu. Here are a couple of extracts from the wikipedia articleon it.

 

The opening paragraphs of Ainulindalë tell of the time before Time. First to be named is Ilúvatar (God) (‘Father of All’, also called ‘Eru – “the One, He that is Alone”’ or the compound Eru Ilúvatar). Ilúvatar, as his names imply, exists before and independently of all else. He can take a particular concept, thesis or theme, and ‘give a secret fire to it’, will it into being, so it exists as a distinct object or entity. Such existence itself is a representation and concretization of divine conceptualizations: there is first the idea, then the concrete, or ‘objective’, manifestation commensurate with that idea. The ‘Ainur’ (meaning ‘Holy Ones’, singular ‘Ainu’) are the first such concepts-embodied or themes-realized; they are the children ‘of Ilúvatar’s thought.’ Upon their creation, when nothing else existed, Ilúvatar taught the Ainur the art of ‘Music’, which becomes their life and work. So the Void (as Tolkien refers to the universe outside Arda) becomes filled with the making of Music.

Melkor is introduced, and the Ainur begin their Chorus. The first Ainu to be named in the histories, Melkor (‘Arises in Might’) is described as the most powerful of the Ainur and as knowing much of Ilúvatar’s thoughts, including something of each of the primary themes that prefigure the other Ainur. He develops impatience with the schoolish process of thematic elaboration: like a precocious child, Melkor begins thinking of certain musical ideas and themes as being ‘all his own’, and he feels compelled to develop them apace.

 

Melkor's meddling messes up the music and Iluvatar then shows all of the Ainu that their music has a tangible existence as the entire history of the world. He then brings it into existence so they may see what they have wrought.

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Guest MacPhee

I't pretty simple, the believers in god needed to have a scapegoat to blame of the worlds woes on, the concept of Satan aka Lucifer was created to allow bad things to be blamed on Lucifer.

 

As you say, it's simple:

 

God Himself created the "Lucifer" concept - in order to provide a handy excuse for any divine screw-ups. "No, honest, it wasn't Me - Lucifer did it - blame him!" Just like Snowball got blamed for all the bad things on Animal Farm.

 

Bit transparent though, isn't it. Does God think humans are that dumb?

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As you say, it's simple:

 

God Himself created the "Lucifer" concept - in order to provide a handy excuse for any divine screw-ups. "No, honest, it wasn't Me - Lucifer did it - blame him!" Just like Snowball got blamed for all the bad things on Animal Farm.

 

Bit transparent though, isn't it. Does God think humans are that dumb?

 

 

God requires that humans be that dumb...

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Guest MacPhee

God requires that humans be that dumb...

 

That could be. Perhaps God wants us humans to remain in a state of perpetual dumb innocence. So we'll just accept whatever God says or does. Without questioning whether His decisions are right or wrong, "good" or "evil". God might enjoy being a dictator. Lording it over His subject human race, who can't challenge His authority, because they lack the knowledge to form their own independent moral judgements.

 

This matter of knowledge is I think crucial. As Pljames points out in post #6, God's very first commandment to Adam - as soon as Adam was put in the Garden of Eden - was:

 

"You may eat from every tree in the Garden, but not from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. (Genesis 2, 16-17, NEB)

 

Such a commandment looks highly suspicious. Why should Adam be forbidden from such knowledge. Was it to prevent Adam getting smart enough to expose God's moral incompetence?

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Hi Rade,

 

Why didn't God (the God of the Hebrew bible) kill Lucifer instead of allowing him to escape from heaven ? Consider all the positive outcomes of this single act by God not taken. Much much less evil on earth if Lucifer does not exist.

 

 

In a nutshell - the long-term good that comes from allowing freewill creatures to choose for themselves far outweighs the short-term good of quashing the Lucifer rebellion immediately. Also, the "government of the Sons for the Father desired only that loyalty and devotion which was voluntary, wholehearted, and sophistry-proof."

 

http://www.urantia.org/urantia-book-standardized/paper-53-lucifer-rebellion

 

Original sin of Eve then Adam was direct result of intervention by Lucifer in the garden, to add confusion into the mind of Eve. No Lucifer, and Eve then Adam do not eat the fruit from tree of knowledge. No Lucifer and then no need for Jesus to suffer and die to save humans, Jesus would perhaps still be with us today to continue teaching his gospel of love, his mission would have been one of teacher not savior. Jesus clearly explained how humans get to heaven after death and it did not require that Jesus be dead and raise from death. God clearly had no problems killing millions of sinful humans during the flood event, yet he allowed Lucifer (who did the ultimate act of evil and sin of being disrespectful to God in his presence) to come and go as he pleases to spread evil and sin among humans. In their song "Ohio", Crosby-Stills-Nash conclude with the single word WHY, why did the students have to die...I ask God, WHY, why did Lucifer not have to die ?

 

 

You're absolutely correct that Jesus never espoused the doctrine of atonement. You'll probably find this Bible study written by a Urantia Book reader very interesting. It contrasts the words of Jesus as recorded in the Bible with the words of the authors of the Bible:

 

http://urantia-book.org/archive/readers/atonement.html

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I’m a Minecraft fan. There, I’ve admitted it!

 

Minecraft is a 1st person adventure game that places the player in a 3D block world of landscapes to navigate, resources to gather and hostiles to battle. One of the things that first attracted me to the game was the accounts of how much fun the Minecraft creators themselves were having with it.

 

You see, the Minecraft world is generated procedurally around the player’s location so that it is different every time. Even the people who wrote the code for the world generation cannot predict the vicissitudes in store for them when they start a game. It’s as fresh and uncharted for them as it is for me. This is what places Minecraft on a different shelf than older adventure games with a more linear gameplay.

 

Now, the creator of reality, like the creators of the abovementioned virtual reality, if she’s good enough at what she does, should be able to seed the world with unknowns - even as she is omniscient & omnipotent. A superlative creation may be a dynamically unfolding one, rather than a deterministic one. And an omniscient creature should know the tricks to hide information and outcomes from herself, like the Minecraft creators know the tricks for peeking random variables (like commandeering the decimal portion of a fine-grained measure of the time of day, which varies from moment to moment) into their world-generation engine.

 

It’s like when I was a child I used to play Risk by myself. It was fun - not only because I couldn’t predict the dice-rolls, or which competing factions (all played by me) would come to dominate, but because I roll-played each side. “Pretended” that each (played by me) was not privy to the diabolical plans of the previous player (me). I did this not for me - not because I wanted to win or loose - but for the sake of the game itself. I wanted the best gameplay I could come up with (all by myself). Ok, it's a sad, lonely story of a young isolated geek, but you see the point of it, right?

 

If god played Risk I think she would do it similarly, but better. I think she should be able to set it up so that opposing players couldn’t cheat. Or maybe she would simply play with the Devil. I know I would have.

 

And this is part of the uneasyness I’ve always felt for the argument from evil - not the only part, just the part that I feel is pertinent to the OP. The very best work from our creator could very well be a world seeded with unknowns & instabilities.

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In a nutshell - the long-term good that comes from allowing freewill creatures to choose for themselves far outweighs the short-term good of quashing the Lucifer rebellion immediately.
Hello Amadon, first post on hypography I see, welcome. Please see the post that follows yours (by forun member 'SMAN"), there is a nice link to a wiki site on the problem of evil that offers critical argument against the view that future long-term good of free will of yet created humans is a higher good than God not killing Lucifer (which of course is an act not taken by God of long-term consequence). There is no logical reason that I can find why human free will could not coexist in an existence with other humans that lacked evil. So, my free will choices today at 6:00 am are (1) eat (2) play computer game against others on internet(3) post on hypography forum...etc. etc.....so many morally good 50 shades of free will choices I have to make every second of every hour of every day. But NO, God decided not to kill Lucifer, thus God allowed evil free will choices to enter the moral situation.

 

Also, my OP topic on God and evil was constrained to the God of the Hebrew bible, so your posts about Urantia are not appropriate. Perhaps start your own forum topic about Urantia religion world view ?

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I’m a Minecraft fan.
Thanks for your post, sounds like an interesting game. I wonder if God, assuming God exits, also has had so much fun over the years (since Adam and Eve) as Minecraft creators watching humans deal with the end results of the evil God willed to exist by not killing Lucifer ? I appreciate your link to the problem of evil internet site, but I cannot find discussion of OP question on why God did not kill Lucifer and just eliminate the problem of evil in the first place. Is the cause of evil so that God can have fun watching humans use free will to deal with it ? Edited by Rade
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I wonder if God, assuming God exits, also has had so much fun over the years (since Adam and Eve) as Minecraft creators watching humans deal with the end results of the evil God willed to exist by not killing Lucifer ? I appreciate your link to the problem of evil internet site, but I cannot find discussion of OP question on why God did not kill Lucifer and just eliminate the problem of evil in the first place. Is the cause of evil so that God can have fun watching humans use free will to deal with it ?

 

Well, now... let’s step back a moment. God’s intentions for this reality are not necessarily optimal game-play. In fact, part of the problem, I think, is that we are left to guess about her true intentions.

 

While I'm suggesting that modern, isolated, simplified & controlled VR worlds like the aforementioned Minecraft may possibly provide us with a unique, if underappreciated, insight into these diversions, I would also caution against drawing too strong an analogy.

 

Also, I now notice, I have tacitly assumed that god’s intention was the creation of a superlative reality, and then proceeded to speculate - from my humble, sublunary perspective - weather allowable chaos (evil) would - when it’s all said & done - be optimal. There’s no reason this is necessary. God could’ve had in mind a broken, dilapidated thing. For that matter, it’s not necessary that god be an expert reality-creator. Could be a bumbling old nuisance - something like the Far Side cartoon of god in his kitchen scrutinizing the instructions on the back of a box of “earthquick”.

 

Like I said, I have many reservations about the topic.

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Also, my OP topic on God and evil was constrained to the God of the Hebrew bible, so your posts about Urantia are not appropriate. Perhaps start your own forum topic about Urantia religion world view ?

 

No... Let's not start another thread on Urantia! These forums are designed for our discussions to emulate scientific methods - even our diversions in philosophy. Revelatory-based knowledge is appropriate only elsewhere.

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