How do we know God is "Good"?

riVeRratJHC man I am not an idiot! I read and understood your point about the death is not evil but that death would be bad for Adam and he should have realized it.You however are focusing in the wrong place.Adam could NOT have known about bad before he partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of GOOD and evil.You yourself are aware of this and even stated so in post 178 The converse is also true.Bad cannot exist without the good since it is necessary in order to compare the two to gauge the relative aspects of their existence.Hence Adam could not have known it was bad for him to die and bad for him to eat the fruit in EXACTLY the same way a child is not capable of such.You still have not directly answered other questions as I presented them to you.

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"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
--Don Hirschberg

Hey, I guess I am just as confused about this as you are.
I was talking with this awesome guy today about it, and he felt that yes Adam knew what evil was.He knew the tree was evil, but he did not experience the evil until he ate of it. I'm sure God spoke to Adam in way that he fully understood that if he ate of the tree, he would experience the opposite of good, and not like it. He also gave Adam life, and made it his only rule to follow. That shouldn't be to difficult.Oh and the woman was decieved, so she was blameless, Adam chose to eat it, so it was his fault.Does this make any more sense?

There is just no evidence that Adam, Eve, the Garden, etc are anything more than mythic explanation of some very fundamental human issues. The question for me is what does the myth say about these issues?Here is my understanding. Most animals don't have a way to know that they will die. They have survival instincts and will struggle to live but I don't think they know they will die, however I have no way to know this for sure, it's just what I surmise.Now at some point in human evolution the brain and culture functions resulted in a reflective consciousness and humans developed an idea that they were a separate entity. They could know by observation and reasoning that they could die. They could feel guilt and hold opinions of good, bad, evil etc. The Adam and Eve story is an allegorical treatment of these issues, of how this consciousness arose. It shows some sophisticated reasoning in the absence of a lot of information of what went before.I think it demonstrates a nostalgia for the state of innocence and an imagining that this state was a paradise like a garden. It also contains some extraneous explanations such as why snakes have no legs.In other words it is a folk wisdom that shows some deep thinking and the ordinary naivete typical of the mythical thinking period during which it arose. We are still so close to that period that rational thought (not the same thing a mental health) is still a rather rarely developed skill and the religious explanations of an earlier time remain more appealing to a majority of people than the largely non narrative mathematical studies of science.God is good because that is how people want to view the source or have been taught to view the source. There are a few references in the Bible that point to one or two contributors having a deeper insight that the source is beyond good and evil and is therefore neither good nor evil. Good can't be brought forth without evil. To create one is to create the other. To discriminate one is to know the other. Unless you can show me a stick with one end? This could be considered a koan of sorts.lfen

riVerrat That cannot fly either because the tree was not evil it was the fruit that contained knowledge of good and evil,therefore Adam cannot know evil before eating of it.Otherwise there is no point to the trees existence.This message has been edited by sidelined, 11-15-2004 12:15 AM

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"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
--Don Hirschberg

That may or may not be true. Either way it happened. At some point we started knowing good from evil.And yes you cannot have a stick with one end. Thats what we have been saying. That God created good and evil, one cannot exist without the other. But he does not make the decsions for us, we choose good or bad, not God, so it is our responsibility, and we pay the concequenses.Since out thoughts, and awareness of self being cannot exist without knowing evil, I will not blame God for creting evil. If I do, then I also blame him for creating good, myself, and the universe. So in short I believe in him. At least he gave me choices to make.

He was told it was evil. He found out exactly what evil was when he ate the fruit.Do you think that nothing bad happened to Adam at all in the garden? He never tripped or cut his finger, or anything? He had an idea of what bad was. He had something to relate the concept of the tree being bad, and off limits.

We evaluate things as good and bad. Actions and their consequences occur and we evaluate our behaviours, thoughts, feelings. Back to the OP topic question "how do we know God is 'Good'?". I will say that we don't know that. Understanding the concept of good and evil means we should not catagorize the source in that fashion because it limits it making an object of it to be evaluated. The universe is not good or evil rather we evaluate aspects of our lives as good or evil. Knowledge of something is not the thing rather knowledge is functional behaviour, brain states, responses, algorithms, data storage. The source mystery is beyond that.We analyse the universe large scale and local scale as causes and effects. How are decisions made? Decisions are part of the chain of cause effect interactions. Consciousness identifies with the processes of thought and discrimination that occur as our brains function and that identification is a component of the sense of self and the feeling of free will. It is an illusion as it is still cause and effect.lfen

So you don't believe in Jesus?

riVeRrat No evidence is given of such so there is no way to make a judgement for or against this. If he had a concept of bad then he had a concept of good and since evil is just bad to a higher level then there was no need for the tree and no need for god to warn him against eating of its fruit and no need to punish him for gaining something he already possesed. If he was told it was evil then he must have a concept of evil and again no need for either the tree or the punishment.

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"Calling Atheism a religion is like calling bald a hair color."
--Don Hirschberg

I've said this elsewhere but can't remember in which thread. I'll do a quick recap.I'm not sure if there was a Jesus but think that there probably was a teacher who died young and whose story was built upon in the telling. Early Christianity is poorly documented and much was retroactively read back into history.If there was a teacher who experienced awakening to the nondual there are passages surviving in the Gospel of Thomas and the other gospels that indicate this as a possibility but he was not understood and died before being really able to impart his teaching to others.The notion of the son of God, "I and my Father are one" can be understood as the teaching of the nondual awakening. But the Roman world and I include all the conquered lands here Greece as well and Judea were not able to comprehend his teachings so we have the literal kinds of mystery religion and old testament stuff that we find in Christianity combined with teachings about love and union with God. Christianity is not a religion that is functional for me.I have no problem with Jesus but I am afraid I find Christianity to be too much of a confused mess of contradictory beliefs cobbled together by apologetics and have little personal interest in the OT or NT as I don't think very much of Jesus's teaching survived in the NT and the OT is historically interesting only. Buddha for example as well as Ramana Maharshi had the support of their society and decades to teach others about their understanding and offer a much more developed view of spirituality than does main stream Christianity of any era. I have some interest in the writings of some Christian contemplatives but they are hardly representative.The whole notion of salvation through sacrifice to me is a very primitive religious motif that makes sense only in that primitive emotional concepts survive in the human psyche not exactly in the sense Jung meant by collective unconscious, but along those lines.
It is also an idea that seems to have largely come from the pagan mystery religions and then passages from the OT were misinterpreted by the Gospel writers to offer OT support for a non Jewish concept of the messiah.Having been so critical I do think that Christianity has done some things very well. St. Francis is an example of someone who practised a form of Christianity that I admire. When Christian belief supported compassionate love for other beings I find it admirable. It's just that the early Christian writers, Eusibius, Augustine and all have included such contradictory material that it allowed horrible practises such as the Inquistion.The great wisdom of the Buddha was to not deliver a revealed religion. There is no claim in Buddhism that the teachings were revealed by the source of the universe. The emphasis on compassion is thus more easily supported in Buddhism than it was in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam where those who disagreed were vulnerable as non believers for eternal punishment or whatever and often subject to persecution on account of their non beliefs. This kind of intolerance was extremely rare in Buddhism because there was no concept of an avenging God to support it.I don't hold Jesus, if he existed,responsible for the problems with Christianity. Those problems were introduced by Paul and later leaders and were I fear probably unavoidable giving the time and place.The other aspect of Jesus is as a name and a symbol for a consciousness that is available to all. The reality that is represented by that symbol can be called Jesus, or Krishna, or Siva, or other names, the divinities that people encounter are determined by their culture. But I'm running out of time now. You should have enough to know why I'm not a Christian, or Jew, or Muslim.lfen

Then ask God right now, he will answer you.
Or think of the odds, since thats what all you scientific people like to do. What are the odds that Adam never tripped, or cut himself, or whatever. For the last time, bad is not the same as evil. Bad things can happen to you that are not evil. I was wrong, he was told he would die.

That reminds me of when the Holy Spirit first came, how the reacted to it:

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Acts 1
42 They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.
43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.
44 All the believers were together and had everything in common.
45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.
46 Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts,
47 praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.

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This is the purest form of love from our God. Everything that happened after that for the next 2000 years was just putting an imperfect "wineskin" on a perfect bottle of wine.There is a revival going on amoung the Christians. It involves getting back to that first pure love. A lot of us don't even want denominations anymore. All the deception put forth by man and the devil is being realized, and we are sick of it.

riVeRrat Fine,but again if he understood bad he understood good which he should not have been able to since it was only after eating of the fruit that he could gain this.Is evil bad? If not then how is it different?If so,how can Adam be incapable of understanding it? But he did not die. He died much later.He was mortal at that time anyway so what is this?

Evil is morally reprehensible. It is going against God's good word.Bad is just random stuff that can happen to you, that youmight consider, well, bad.Evil can also be bad without you thinking its bad for you. Getting a BJ from a hooker could be comsidered evil, but at the time you not thinks its bad for you.Getting a bad grade on a test is not evil, and so on.Adam died a spiritual death at that moment, and all of nature was cursed. That is why we are born again when we recieved the spirit of God, (the Holy Spirit) in our lives.

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Fistly, remember that rule; I don't believe God killed any kid.

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What about in the Flood?