[Serious] Literal and Not Literal

[Anomalocaris]

But the unsaved are in precisely the position of your blind man.  I asked you again:  If God wants everyone to be saved (and he does, it says so right there in the manual), why is the Bible intentionally ambiguous?  Surely it would be within God's power to make it clear and unambiguous to everyone. Moreover, the message in the Bible could be couched in such a manner as to make it irresistible to everyone.

I don't think God has wants. I don't see God as some being with some  deficiency resolved by yours or my salvation. Any salvation is for myself, not for God.

But let's think of something analogous to consider the question of irresistible. It seems to me that nobody really wants to be a bad a person, no one wakes up in the morning, and goes I want to be terrible or a bad father, a bad friend, a bad son. No one wakes up saying they want to be filled with hatred, resentment, and contempt. We seem at some level desire to be good.  But why is it this thing that I desire, why is this desire not sufficient enough to be good?

Nobody wants to be the man pulling the rope on the lynching tree, but when the time came, that's where we all are more likely to end up, pulling that rope. Have we men of the future resolved, the condition that could lead us back to the lynching given similar conditions? I don't think so. That condition remains unresolved, rearing itself in other ways, till the time comes again.

Maybe we're men of competing desires, we desire to be good, but another part of us desires to be bad. If Good is the state of eternal salvation, and bad is the eternal state of damnation, maybe some of us desire to be damned. We want to be buried in our resentments, rather than being buried in Love.

And if the ancient Hebrews saw something that defies any attempt at definition, why did they take so much trouble to define it?

They didn't. It's written for those who do see it. For those that don't, they can't see anything but a series of wannabe/pseudo scientific and historical facts when reading it.

"Good" is a nothing more than a very crude and variable heuristic algorithm thought, not always honestly, by opinion makers to be sellable as "bringing the greater good in which everyone has a stake", for the goal of brining predictability and controllability to the society,    If such a stake can't be shown, it must be made up.  Hence god and reward of heaven.


 But by no means can most people's innate ability to see and the desire to pursue what seems advantageous to themselves always be reconciled with such crude algorithms.   Hence evil.


Evil is not the failure to do good.   It is the reflection of the innate intellectual bankruptcy of the traditional concept of the moral "truth"