Urth Net

← back to the conversation

Agia's Weapons

Dan'l Danehy-Oakes · 21 Dec 2011, 19:44 · from 2011-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: danldo at gmail.com (Dan'l Danehy-Oakes)
Date: Wed, 21 Dec 2011 11:44:57 -0800
Subject: (urth) Agia's Weapons
In-Reply-To: <SNT123-W6876B9941BAE7428AD784CFA50 at phx.gbl>
References: <SNT123-W6876B9941BAE7428AD784CFA50 at phx.gbl>
Message-ID: <CAJ8=rthmcgrNHha9B3PvtgA6Y3fV-C+aS7sDNN76OQZvfL8cxg at mail.gmail.com>

Lee Berman wrote:

> But Gene Wolfe has read the Bible and has had to figure out why Noah's
> Flood, which provided such a painful, unpleasant death to so many
> people (and innocent animals) was necessary. The Christian definition
> of evil is separation from God, yes?

No. The definition of evil is rejection of God or deliberate
disobedience of His will. This _causes_ separation from God, which is
the definition of damnation.

> I disagree. The view of "evil is a choice" is a humanistic view. We need to think
> that to inspire us to make good choices. But God (in the true Christian sense)
> cannot have any choices. Anything He does is the ultimate in good. No selection
> A or selection B for Him.

And yet the Catholic church teaches that God is completely free --
free, for example, to create or not to create. The Creation was not
necessary for God to be God.

-- 
Dan'l Danehy-Oakes

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net