Faith

I've always thought that the Gnostic Manichean idea was interesting because it basically says that is what happened and the God of the bible is actually Satan and the physical world is evil and that's the purpose of Christ to reveal the presence of the True God.

You can understand why the early Christian Church considered them heretical.

Another interesting group is the Cainites, so named because they consider Cain, Adam's first son and first murderer, to be the first and supreme saint. Their idea is that redemption is the greatest gift from God, so a person should commit as many sins as possible in order to show glory to God by earning His forgiveness. And the worse the sin, the greater the honor of having His forgiveness.

Historically it's debatable whether this group actually existed or they were just a cautionary parable told by the Church.

Master Joined: 09 Jun 2009 Posts: 1410

So the Cainites were basically Old Testament Sith?
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@Cerrinea: Haha! Gotta love that description. Wink

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EUC Staff Joined: 09 Nov 2011 Posts: 1204 Location: Nirn

Personally, I serve God because He is all-powerful and good. It's crucial to me that God is both. If I lived in ancient Greece and I believed in Zeus, I might just rebel against him regardless of his power.
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EUC Staff Joined: 09 Nov 2011 Posts: 1204 Location: Nirn

I see. But obviously, "good" is a completely subjective term. This may be a good example, but in Skyrim there is a Daedric Prince (an evil all-powerful God) called Peryite, who is the Prince of Pestilence. I spoke to one of his followers and they said something like "Peryite is the pus in the wound, others turn their noses at us but pus cleans the blood, and sometimes Tamriel (the main landmass) needs to be cleansed by plague." Some people would consider a plague-spreading all-powerful demon-god evil, but some people have a different perspective.

Obviously, this isn't real, but I just played it and it seemed relevant. God made plagues and floods and stuff, didn't he?

Basically all of faith is based on the interpretation of the same information.
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There's always a bigger fish - Qui Gon Jinn.

You shall learn that history is an intricate weaving of many events. No one thing can be understood without the proper context.

The best techniques are passed on by the survivors.

Well monotheistic religious people would say that God is good because God defines what good is and therefor bad is what God isn't or rather what goes against what God wants. That seems to be the general explanation for why a good and all powerful God allows the existence of bad and evil things. That requires a certain philosophical idea that ignorance is not bliss and people couldn't be happy having a perfect life unless they were aware of the possibility to have a crappy one. Based on human psychology that seems to be pretty true.

I tend to think that all religious doctrine is mostly human psychology personified into mythical characters and stories, along with an explanation for things that people don't understand as well as attempts to document things that are beyond human understanding, if not conception- those things like the meaning of life, the existence of a soul or non-physical world, the creation of the universe and the end of time, life after death, etc. The Big Questions.

Also a cultural accounts of laws and customs that are pretty subjective and shouldn't be taken too seriously, IMHO.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and tell you that I personally subscribe the most to the Gnostic view that the world of sensory experience is separate from the world of pure ideas, the spiritual world and that humanity cannot directly experience God, which is the sum of the universe and not personified into an individual entity but "filtered" through a serious of intermediaries. To them these intermediaries were more or less what we'd call supernatural beings, and they might on some level be higher dimensional forms, but I think they mostly tend to represent levels of consciousness that shift from the material and mechanistic towards the pure and spiritual.

Christianity tends to reject this idea in favor of a personal God that can be directly experienced, although the idea of a cosmic Will in either form is not really any less convoluted.

In Norse the Giants are not really evil, at least as far as humans are concerned. they don't mean us any ill will. They are just like the Greek Gods and the Titans. They wage ceaseless war against each other because that's how they were born to be. In the End Times, called Ragnorak, the Gods and the Giants will destroy each other and the Earth and humanity will live in a new blissful state where the world is purged from the conflicts that arose during it's creation, pretty much akin to the Biblical Kingdom of Jesus after the Apocalypse.

Oh dear, are we opening that relativism can of worms again? Razz

EUC Staff Joined: 09 Nov 2011 Posts: 1204 Location: Nirn

I'm just saying, the Nazis believed they were doing a good thing. In my set of morals they weren't.

(I'm not justifying what the Nazis did)
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There's always a bigger fish - Qui Gon Jinn.

You shall learn that history is an intricate weaving of many events. No one thing can be understood without the proper context.

The best techniques are passed on by the survivors.

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