Originally posted by DarkSide
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and
willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Conspiriology, Darkside won't be able to answer his sig, but I can since I know somebody who got an answer straight from God.
Just to preface, I knew somebody (now dead) who lost his faith and spent a lot of time in religious forums telling people about contradictions in the
bible and saying the bible was fictitious in many parts.
Then one night while asleep, he had a dream interrupted by God who told my friend basically to knock off his activity because it was people's faith
that was important. My friend asked God a few questions, one of them "Why there was so much evil in the world", the answer he got was something
like "Reality (or the world) is like my (God's) dream, and just as a nightmare can't exist without the dreamer, evil can't exist without me
(God)".
It's an interesting answer for a couple of reasons. One is that it's similar to the verse in the Bible, "I am the lord God, I make peace and I
create evil". But also because it got me thinking about nightmares or horrible dreams which couldn't exist without me, the dreamer. But does that
make me malevolent? I'm the creator of my own dreams, but I don't have control over them. Perhaps that's how God operates.
However, whether God is all knowing and all powerful, doesn't mean he should step in and control things his way, as that would take away freewill.
And what is the point of creating beings with freewill, only to control them like string puppets? Evil exists because of people's freewill.
I should also point out that the last question my friend asked was how does he know this isn't just a dream he was having, at which point he was
shown something that looked like a newspaper heading saying something about Manila Burning. He woke up, didn't understand what that meant. But one
year later to the day, there were fires in Manila, fulfilling the prophecy, confirming he was communicating with a higher intelligence (he says God).