Why did god create evil?

[dtango]

I'm sorry, perhaps we're suffering a disconnect here do to differences of language.

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Well, I believe that my English is not that bad and that for our differences we should blame my love for OT.
I love the OT because as Richard Dawkins wrote in the “Delusion” the God of the OT (“G” for monotheistic gods, “g” for polytheistic ones): is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully. This description matches perfectly the description of the gods as it is found in the archaic texts and older myths and legends. That God is not the Christian God!
The grave mistake of Dawkins (and yours too) is that he calls this narrative a fiction forgetting that the author of the supposed fiction is the oral tradition of so many cultures.

Are you not arguing that "soul" is a product (or invention) of egyptian philosophers and not a common belief of the egyptian people (or any people, were it not for those philosophers)?

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Correct! But it is the product of the misinterpretation/misunderstanding of a single word. It is nobody’s product. The meaning of the word deteriorated and once it got close to the meaning of the soul it was hooked and exploited by the clergy.

However, there is a basic difference between the idea of the immortal soul that came out of the Egyptian temples and that of the “spirit” of living entities which, doubtless, our ancestors had in mind.

The proof that the concept of the soul did not exist among Egyptians (before it was imposed upon by the priesthood) consists of the fact that in the Egyptian tradition it is not the soul that undergoes judgment but the body. When the judgment of the living was transformed into a judgment of the dead by the clergy, they still had to satisfy the requirements of the sacred archaic texts and provide the dead with a body suitable for judgment. A body that will not decompose and thus they resorted to the madness of the mummification. One paranoiac idea had to be supported by another paranoiac idea.

So, when we are referring to the soul we mean an immortal soul that is undergoing judgment. No such concept was found among the Native Americans. All the others were contaminated by the various editions of the soul adapted by the various nations (Plato wrote that we have more that two souls and Pythagoras advised not to eat garlic because it bothers the soul!!)

The version would depend on which people we wanted to focus on. In all cases we have their burials, their art, and their artifacts. All of which seem to point to a belief in an afterlife, souls, etc. All of which predate civilization itself, let alone egyptian civilization.

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I live in a suburb of Athens and I do have a lot of dogs...



...special cat-loving flying dogs, as you can see!

When one of my dogs die I do not dump his body in the trash can. I burry him with his collar and his little carpet. A companion, either man or animal, on dying is not transformed automatically from a companion into dead meat. He is still a companion of whom one continues to take care. That care has nothing to do with belief in afterlife.
The belief in an afterlife is unnatural. If some people do believe in an afterlife (without having been taught to) they either have an excuse or something had gone terribly wrong with them.

Sure, if you mean "we all passed through the near east". That doesn't mean that all of our beliefs have their origins in what people in the near east believed tens of thousand of years after we did so.

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According to the study of the word ba it seems that the concept of the immortal soul appeared in Egypt at about 2500 BCE. The gods and their story is 40 to 50k years old (Australian Aborigines mention giants but no gods because some tribes reached Australia around 55k years ago). Therefore the common stories about gods can be easily explained but the belief in immortal souls requires some evidence as regards the Native Americans. Do you have such evidence?

Let us consider the case of the Celts. Most probably you know Thomas Rolleston and his book “Myths and Legends of the Celts”. We read in page 80:

The classical writers felt rightly that the Celtic idea of immortality was something altogether different from this (the Greek and Egyptian idea is meant). It was both loftier and more realistic; it implied a true persistence of the living man, as he was at present, in all his human relations. They noted with surprise that the Celt would lend money on a promissory note for repayment in the next world. That is an absolutely Egyptian conception. And this very analogy occurred to Diodorus in writing of the Celtic idea of immortality –it was like nothing that he knew of out of Egypt.

Many ancient writers assert that the Celtic idea of immortality embodied the Oriental conception of the transmigration of souls, and to account for this the hypothesis was invented that they had learned the doctrine from Pythagoras, who represented it in classical antiquity. Thus Ceasar: “The principal point of their [the Druids] teaching is that the soul does not perish, and that after death it passes from one body into another.” And Diodorus: “Among them the doctrine of Pythagoras prevails, according to which the souls of men are immortal, and after a fixed term recommence to live, taking upon themselves a new body”

(Note that Diodorus is referring to the doctrine o Pythagoras. He himself did not believe in an immortal soul because it was a concept foreign to the Greek culture)

Rolleston also noted the distinction between popular and scholarly conceptions. A distinction of utmost importance for anyone who really wants to understand religion.
In a paragraph entitled “The Popular and the Bardic Conceptions” he writes:

Nor must it be overlooked that the popular conception of the Danaan deities was probably at all times something different from the bardic and Druidic, or in other words the scholarly, conception. The latter, as we shall see, represents them as the presiding deities of science and poetry. This is not a popular idea; it is the product of the Celtic, the Aryan imagination, inspired by a strictly intellectual conception. The common people, who represented mainly the Megalithic element in the population, appear to have conceived their deities as earth powers –dei terreni, as they are explicitly called in the eighteenth-century “Book of Armagh”- presiding not over science and poetry, but rather agriculture, controlling the fecundity of the earth and water, and dwelling in hills, rivers, and lakes. In the bardic literature the Aryan idea is prominent; the other is to be found in innumerable folk-tales and popular observances; but of course in each case a considerable amount of interpretation of the two conceptions is to be met with –no sharp dividing line was drawn between them in ancient times, and none can be draw now

Sacerdotalism, whether Christian, druidic or Zoroastrian makes no difference.

I believe that in order to kill religion it must be shown -as in the case of the concept of the soul- how the idea of spiritual gods was produced. In other words, to show how ridiculous the concept of spiritual gods is by providing evidence that the inhuman gods of our forefathers were no more than just a race of bloodthirsty men.