How a Good God Can Let Bad Things Happen: Does God Have Our Morality?
The Post-Modern Shadow — Part 3: Absolute & Relative
Absolute and Relative
The Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma
is based on two truths:
a truth of worldly convention
and an ultimate truth.
~ Nagarjuna — Mūlamadhyamakakārika 24:8
An interpretation of the Two Truths Doctrine (from Buddhism) is that there are two types of truth. Truth can be Absolute (Divine, non-dual) which is transcendent and beyond our comprehension here in the relative realm; and relative truths (comparative facts) are, in essence, always partial.
All truths — material and moral facts — that we experience are relative and thus partial. For example, the concept of good only exists in relation to the concept of evil. This is why criminal law only applies to persons older than six years, for at red (1st person) one has no concept of right and wrong, this understanding only arises with the development of blue (2nd person); because in first person perspective there is no-one who’s rights can be infringed, no-one that one can have duties towards.
I’m using the Spiral Dynamics stages of development here, as explained in my previous article:
The Absolute realm transcends and subsumes the relative realm. God is the Alpha and the Omega, contains all opposites and all relative things. (More on the relationship between these realms — evolution and involution v imminence and eminence — in a later article.)
Omniscient, Omnipresent, Omnipotent and Good
There can be no final and complete separation between creator and created.
~ Darren Everitt
There is an archaic Kabalistic inquiry as what a God who is Omniscient, Omnipresent and Omnipotent could possibly lack; and the answer is limitations. (So we are God Limited!)
There follows that the question “How can a good God let bad things happen” contains the assumptions that God is: 1) omnipresent and omniscient — all-seeing and everywhere — so that He knows of bad things happening; 2) omnipotent — all-powerful — so that He can stop the bad things from happening; and 3) Good, so that He has cause and will to not let the bad things happen.
It occurs to me that — and here I depart from Jewish theology — the first two requisites — omnipresent and omniscient, and omnipotent, are absolute whereas the third — good, is relative. The error here is trying to assign a relative characteristic to an Absolute God. A unitary, singular Divinity, must, by virtue of being all things, contain both good and evil.
The Fall of Lucifer
Get behind me, Satan!
~ Jesus Christ — Matthew 4:10
From a psychological archetype point of view, as mankind developed and evolved, so did our perception of God, as one can track through the bible. Of interest here is that because man denies his own evil, so did God — by exiling Lucifer from heaven.
The rebellion and fall of Lucifer is symbolic of our own (alter-ego) drives being denied and suppressed into the psychological shadow; this is the first act of the phenomenon known as projection where one sees evil (or whatever human trait one is in denial of possessing) only in the world and being acted out by other people.
Quite convenient that we first deny evil it’s existence, e.g. privatio boni, and then blame it on the Devil. Does this remind you of identity politics and cancel culture? What is happening here is that with the onset of postmodernism, the shadow is being projected past the third person (other individuals, the Satan archetype) and into the fourth person, i.e. socio-political groups.
