re: #751 iceweasel

Whoa, what? No it doesn’t at all.

Yoi can’t escape one mystery by replacing with another. You can’t pop in ‘the will of God’ and ‘that which is outside’s God’s will” like the latter is some mystical black box.

This is Plato! The euthyphro.

Actually yes I can. And no it is not Euthyphro. There is incidentally a fabulous fable about the prophet Jerimiah debating Plato, precisely because of Euthyphro in the Talmud. God loves good because it is good and he is good as the dource of all things. The fact that we can not encapsulate G-d in his entirety in our own minds, does not preclude faith that somehow G-d does know what is ultimately Good and just with a capital G and J. It just means that we have a limited perspective on it.

We go on to say, flat out, the we truly do not know why evil is allowed to prosper. I figure if we are going to do this we should get the Theodicy out of the way, because it will inevitably come up and the Talmud of course saw it coming.

The entire point of faith in that case become trusting in God that it does and can make sense even if we can not figure it out and that further, we do trust that His definitions of Good and Evil are the correct ones.

Now you can say you don’t like that or that it is intellectually unsatisfying. You are correct that it replaces one mystery with another, however, I find mine more satisfying because it allows for a view that somehow it ultimately does make sense even if I don’t get it.

I should also point out that Hebrew has no word for faith in the sense that Christians use it. We say emunah which means trust. There is a long and subtle discussion to be made about that, but in this context, I am sure you see it.