God´s Perfection, Evil, and the Lie of the Abrahamic God? Or AN Whitehead´s Di-Polarity and Human Development?

Ke Stanl Is not God perfection? Is perfection fleeting? Does perfection change? No. That version of god would not evolve. That version of god would have known before creation what would become of mankind and yet he created us just the same. That is evil. The concept of the Abrahamic God is the lie. The god of Abraham is an abomination. An invention of man to control other men. Reply Share 1hEdited Mark Rego Monteiro Ke Stanl What we have is a modern society full of freedom of expression that actually has a center of standards and criteria, that of University-based philosophical scholarship. If God is "perfection," is it not also a Divine, eternally based perfection that infinitely transcends human efforts to limit it? In Einstein´s day, his peer and philosopher AN Whitehead developed the notion of the di-polar God, one that has both an atemporal/eternal nature and a temporal expression. Process Theologians like JB Cobb have worked with that to some degree, understanding the temporal expression of God as God´s relatedness to people. As someone with a degree in Biological Anthropology, I grounded myself in detail in the evolution of human speech, symbolic behavior, and religious ritual. That moves from biological genetics to human developmental processes. Human beings are commonly understood for our technological development, from the Paleolithic stone age to the Neolithic and the beginning of agricultural settlements and a new level of cultural activity that that made possible, including materialistic idolatry of idols in Mesopotamia, in which idols of gods like Marduk and Ishtar were stolen by neighboring groups, and it had meaning. The appearance of ancient Greek philosophy is often associated with an important advance, such that modern secular culture often idealizes, or even idolizes, the figures of Socrates and Plato, among others. Were they not the source of science, democracy, and virtues? Didn´t Christianity obstruct the advancement of science and knowledge? That is a common secular myth. In fact, Clement of Alexandria used Christian neo-platonic philosophy to try to argue that Plato was a proto-Christian, and Anthony of the Desert became a pioneering Christian ascetic and monk. Both traditions advanced and intertwined, until around 1100, when Christians turned their monastic schools into Universities at Bologna and Paris, then Oxford and Cambridge, and more. The monk Thomas Aquinas Christianized Aristotle, with Aquinas turning the esoteric First Cause of Aristotle into the virtually empirical metaphysics of the Judeo-Christian Creator in Jesus´ heritage for his legacy. It is that shift that linked the lawful Creator to a lawful Creation, the lawful Universe. Humans included. Jean Piaget is famous for his innovative developmental psychological studies of children. He was followed by his own proteges and legacy in psychology, with L Kohlberg studying stages of moral development. I took a freshman class in cross-cultural psychology with Jerome Kagan, no less. We learn about issues like Malinowski´s work in anthropology, where his studies of tribal people and their culture led him to ideas of how culture meets human individual and group biological and social needs. Psychologist Julian Jaynes gained some fame for his study of ancient historical literature, leading him to note shifts in consciousness, his book titled The Origins of Consciousness and the ...Bi-Cameral Mind. Thus, as ancient historian Arnold Toynbee also became famous for his discussions, we see that people had to learn things at various levels, technology from the Neolithic to the Copper, to the Bronze to the Iron Age and the heating of alloys and the like. However, there were also psychosocial and cultural processes of growth going on, with Hammurabi´s Code a famous example of law by a Babylonian King with his gods of the likes of Marduk and Ishtar. So, I suggest that calling the God of Abraham an "abomination" is an anachronistic projection based on ideological judgmentalism. In historical terms, we see that a man presented with a new relationship to God was engaged in a way that may have been familiar from the past in terms of committing a sacrifice, in a powerful visionary dialogue. Abraham´s obedience to this manifestation of God occurred in sociocultural terms of that level in human development, and what is still a human archetype in interpreting Jesus´ death by conspiracy and execution preceding his Resurrection. Even today, scapegoating enemies and materialistic addictions and ideologies in a fixated way shows how people avoid personal spiritual balance and empowerment. Endowing God with attributes of "perfection" may have an appropriate level of usage. However, to begin projecting that "God must have known and created us just the same. That is evil." is responded to by some philosophers as "God having sufficient moral reason, because by definition God is love." In fact, we observe that scientific reality in biological evolution, and then the rough and tumble of human psychosocial and cultural development is highly physical in nature, with "evil" related to Jesus´ very highly developed and advanced socioreligious historical appearance, message, and legacy in all its complexities. Jesus taught the personal effort of spiritual practice for personal growth, as in "clean the cup on the inside," already 2000 years ago, that now has the structure in Christian-derived University and constitutional Civil Rights society with diverse resources facing doctrinal churches in a range of literalist conservative to often helpful progressive stances. Thus, the way to reconcile human free will and value in individual personal growth in diverse ways is to draw on AN Whitehead´s di-polar concept of God. God´s "perfection" doesn´t make God evil, but God´s love as a transcendent, immaterial Divine Mind, the origin of Spirit, Truth, and Love, was presented to us with clarity in the multifaceted figure of Jesus´ life, mission, and messages. We now live in his legacy of Western Civilization with UN human rights-sustainability, and structured pluralism. If we dedicate ourselves to the implications of University-based philosophical knowledge, we can understand that humans have free will, and it is dedication to God´s love through Jesus that provides the necessary standard to accept the complexities and learn how to reconcile them with loving processes. If God had merely told Abraham, "Hey, love ya babe. Just go to Canaan, and we´re cool, ´kay?" that would be anachronistic, and even based on modern illusions of corporatized profiteering and technophile convenience consumerism. Carl Jung has given us a powerful concept in archetypes. If humans are well-oriented and educated in history, they can learn from it "the easy way." If not, as most people don´t get oriented that way, they have to do it "the hard way." Either way, it has been a long, strange trip, and not one to try to cover up with hatred and judgmentalism.