User:Janette Tingle

Human Freedom & The Will of God

In ancient philosophy throughout history, the benevolent nature of God’s will is easily understood to be an eternal love that extends from His desire to give of himself freely and to express the totality of all that He is. A benevolent creator God could not simultaneously exist as a benevolent and self-serving Deity who seeks His own glorification, because Love and oneness is shared, and it is the opposite of selfish egotism. If God's primary nature is benevolence, then all fear-based religions are false. God could not simultaneously exist as a controlling, punitive, and wrathful Deity who seeks to dominate humanity by enforcing divine retribution on others by condemning them. God is not the punishing archetypal figure of Old Testament eschatology that was carried over into the writings of the New Testament (in the Pauline Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, Revelations, etc.). Only when we come to terms with our own fears that we have projected onto our image of Him, only then will we know the truth, that God Is love, our only Life.

It is commonly understood that the spoken words of Jesus in the New Testament scriptures talk about an all-loving, all-merciful, all-forgiving Father. Christ taught the way of forgiveness, and spoke of a Father in heaven. We also understand that the words in red those that are attributed directly to Christ, and these other ideas of a punitive God were added by the various apostles and scribes. If Jesus did not teach condemnation, then it does not make sense why these false teachings became associated with his ultimate message of forgiveness, since we know that such ideas of punishment and condemnation are not Christ's actual thoughts, and never were. So where did this misperception first arise? Most likely it began with the Babylonian, Egyptian and Greek Mythologies. The ancient rulers wanted the power to control the masses, so they used fearful mythologies to create the illusions that have been perpetuated throughout our religious history. The idea of a punishing, vengeful God was created by the political and religious leaders who set themselves up in place of God, and projected their own warlike, punitive and controlling behaviors onto the image of Yahweh.

In the Old Testament, the rulers proclaimed that mankind must 'fear God', which inadvertently created much confusion about our ability to love Him. This is one of the most extensively misunderstood religious concepts, since it leads to doubt and confusion about our creator. Nonetheless, even in through our clouded perception, we were still asking the same legitimate question: How did we get here and how can we make our return to God - if we are somehow in fear of Him?

It is clear that there is no longer any reason for humanity to maintain such severe and harmful belief systems that were undoubtedly instilled by ancient anxieties derived from our primitive, barbaric beginnings. There is no longer any reason to maintain blasphemous beliefs in a God of condemnation that arose from fear-based religions throughout our repetitious history. We know that the Babylonians and Egyptians set themselves up as Gods and sought to control and enslave the masses by creating beliefs in sin, death and Hell through their moral doctrines about an underworld Devourer that would hear the long confessions and condemn the person by eating their soul in the afterlife - if it judged that person to be sinful (see "The Judgment Scene, Book of Osiris"). This was an enormous lie, yet, the fear of death and punishment by God remained.

The belief in original sin and death originated in old mythologies, not reality. Yet, many continue to believe in fear and patriarchal forms of punishment. They project these illusions of their own punitive fathers onto the image of Our Father. The one thing that we know for sure about human perception is that we are all innocent like children who make errors and numerous mistakes that simply need correction. It is vital that we come to terms with the fact that we have been fed many severe misperceptions about ourselves and others, and our fearful perceptions are what need to be healed and lovingly corrected. Yet, our history shows our many failed attempts to teach and correct ourselves through punitive rules, laws, and wars. As a result of this continual conflict, we have created our own world of fear, a harsh and meaningless existence where humanity has been beaten down by the never-ending severely critical mentality of condemnation that has absolutely nothing to do with God.

God’s eternal nature of benevolence is his primary characteristic, yet we continually attempt to pull God from his immutable platonic realm and make him responsible for our decaying, temporal illusory sphere. We must now come to terms with our unnatural beliefs, fearful expectations and illusions, and accept the fact that not all human characteristics can be projected onto God. We do accept that humans have free will to choose between good and evil, yet we assume that God likewise has a free will choice between such dichotomies. Yet, if God is perfectly benevolent, and wills only toward the good, then God would not have free will in the same sense that humans do. “God can only will that which is in accordance with the divine nature” (Polkinghorne 70). Preventing human ignorance, ego-driven error and evil events from occurring in the world would essentially amount to controlling our existence and would result in the loss of free will. “It could be that the virtuous acts [including actions aimed at the prevention of evil] which [God] cannot perform are possible for us only because of the imperfections of our nature” (Aquinas cited in Rundle 84). It seems that the problem of evil that arises in the world is a direct result of our human misperceptions about God, and due to our egotistical striving to gain power over our fellow man, and ultimately due to our limited capacity to comprehend the existence of a loving Father who extends love, forgiveness, and redemption toward humanity.

Furthermore, if God were able to intervene in the world of fear that we made in order to prevent ego-driven human evil from happening, (controlling our free will in the process); such controlling measures would likely include some level of retribution or punitive action (if this were true). Yet, a punishing God is inconsistent with our conception of a perfectly benevolent deity. In fact, we know that all true correction takes place through internalization and self-correction; so an all-loving and all-powerful God, would not seek to control or punish his creations, and instead He wills only for our highest good, knowing our original innocence, and he can only remember us as we were first created in Love. Anything that follows out of accord with our true nature is an illusion. Love allows us to be who we are, knowing our true eternal nature is held safely beyond the temporal world of fear, death and lies.

The eternal system of thought alters the temporal order of events, and moves us into a new reality beyond the past, into a new perception of love and oneness, heavenly forgiveness and everlasting peace. “The God of love could not be a cosmic tyrant, whose creation was simply a divine puppet-theatre manipulated solely by the divine Puppet-Master” (Polkinghorne 70-71). Hypothetically, God cannot extend to us free will with one hand, while using the other hand to control, chastise and punish his creatures. God is eternal love and oneness.

In ancient times, we believed that we left the garden of our innocence. But we leave the peaceful garden of Eden anytime that we give in to fearful misperceptions about ourselves and others. When we harshly criticize and separate ourselves, we lose our sense of love and oneness with each other and God. Separation from our Father and our great brothers is what created the original problem of the illusion of evil, sin and sorrow in the world we made without Him. We know this now. We understand the temporal illusion, yet, we continue to live as nations in perpetual war and conflict - in prideful defense of the selfish ego and the past, which is gone.

Philosophers have long argued about the problem of evil in this world, and whether or not God is to blame for the catastrophes that weigh upon us. But it is not difficult to see that the problem of evil was created as a result of our own striving to gain power over our fellow man. We created a very complex and insane human predicament through our own fearful, egotistical projections that led to this insane, punitive, rejecting and judgmental mentality that we call hell. So the problem of evil is ultimately due to our ignorance about each other, and our limited capacity to comprehend the existence of an all loving and merciful Father who extends His love, forgiveness, and redemption toward all humanity.

Excerpt from: "Human Freedom & The Will of God" - Janette Tingle (2009)

References: Polkinghorne, John. "Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship." New Haven: Yale Rundle, Bebe. "Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing." New York: Oxford University Press. 2004.