Who's In Charge?

The devil knows what the Book of Revelation says. He knows it's a chess game he can't win, but he's going to do it anyway. Someone who would willingly play a high stakes game they can't win is a fool, a slave or both. Therefore, Satan is either mentally incompetent, or he's doing exactly what he's designed to do and can't do anything else. Either way, he shouldn't be blamed for what he does, anymore than a computer should be 'personally' blamed for doing what it's programmed to do, or a severely retarded person should be blamed for what they do.

Who designed the devil?

Well, 'god' did it we are told. Should we then blame 'god' for the evil in the world? He made everything what as it is and made all the rules, why shouldn't we blame 'god' for the world's devilry? (And we're not simply talking about juxtaposition to goodness, but rather unnecessary degrees of evil. We are told that he did after all create hunting carnivores that eat other animals alive, and create wasps that lay larvae inside living caterpillars that slowly eat them alive from the inside out. That does seem unnecessarily evil.)

Should 'god' then be blamed for what he does? We are told that 'god' knows everything, including the future. In theory, 'god' knows for certain what he'll do tomorrow; which would mean that 'god' really has no freewill. That's the price for knowing everything that can be rationally known and 'god' knows everything about the existent world and is perfectly rational. 'god' is a cause and effect kind of guy and is a fan of a deterministic physical universe.

Because 'god' knows for certain what he'll do tomorrow, he has no choice but to do it. Alternatively, if he does have actual free choice, then he doesn't know for certain what he'll do tomorrow. If he "chooses" to do something else, then this is an illusion of freewill only, since he would have known for certain that he would have made that future alternative choice, or he never knew the future for certain at all.

'god' is a slave to his own omniscience.

Shouldn't we blame 'god' then, when he says we need to subjugate our will to his will or suffer and die if we don't? In theory, Adam and Eve were slaves and had this same Damocles sword hanging over their heads as we do today. Shouldn't we blame 'god' though when he plays sadistic slave-owner and says, 'Do as I say or I'll force you to eat the flesh of your sons and flesh of your daughters' (Jeremiah 19)? Or says, 'Do as I say or I'll starve other people until they sack your village, cause you to starve and your starving children will eat you', (Ezekiel 5)?

Well, consider that the Judeo-Christian idea of 'god' is that of a father figure who has told us that he'll *NECESSARILY* do horrible thing 'B' if we freely choose to do irresponsible behavior 'A', so if we in fact do 'A' and force 'god' to do 'B', well then, it's all our fault as it were. It seems that 'god', the fellow who created the universe and made all the rules isn't responsible for his own actions. *WE'RE* responsible for *HIS* actions, because he's a deterministic kind of guy, apparently with no freewill or moral capacity.

"Moral capacity"?

Surely, no one would argue that a trained rat or circus animal is a moral creature simply because it has been trained to behave a certain way, through a heuristic system of punishment and reward. Likewise, it would seem that no one can sensibly suggest that people are "moral" if we choose to perform certain actions ourselves as we are trained to do, like not marrying your sister or keeping the Sabbath.

No, morality requires moral choice and moral choice requires knowledge of good and evil and the capacity for independent thought. Adam and Eve BECAME capable of being moral beings when they became aware of what good and evil are. They thus became capable of passing moral judgment on themselves AND on 'god' independently.

"Passing moral judgement on 'god'"?

Yes.

What do we mean when we say that "god is good"? We mean that we understand that what 'god' does is good as opposed to bad, (or bad as opposed to good). We have knowledge of good and evil. Arguably, this is one aspect of what Augustine called "Original Sin". We have the capacity to judge, not only ourselves, but also 'god' as "good"...or not so good.

The psychologist Carl Jung argued that, even if the physically existent universe is deterministic, the virtual reality world we create inside our own conscious minds is not strictly deterministic because we sometimes perceive things irrationally, like what he called synchronicity. And because our will is acting and reacting in accordance to a world that is not strictly deterministic (inside our own heads), then we have freewill, even if our brains, the source of our virtual reality minds and our will IS itself deterministic (much like a computer with irrational garbage input will give irrational garbage output even if it is operating perfectly and deterministically).


'god' can't treat us good if we don't' behave "righteously" because that's the bargain. (He, after all, has no freewill). And if we twist his arm and do "wrong", as it were, he has no choice but to punish us, and we shouldn't blame 'god' because we made him do it. So, it would seem that WE are in charge, and we are responsible for 'god's actions.

If 'god' and devil behave deterministically and really no differently than deterministic physical forces of nature, then how, in the end, is Judeo-Christianity really different than having no religion at all? It seems that we're in charge either way. We are the masters of our own fate. It seems that cross-dressing Larry Wachowski got it right after all. The Matrix cannot tell you who you are. Free choice is "the anomaly" that keeps creeping up in the design, and we determine if this Matrix world is cage or chrysalis.