Considering the Non-Reality of Evil
And why it can be liberating
How could God, who is eternally perfect, create and tolerate evil and anything else that is not godlike? This difficult question is forever debated and seems to have no satisfactory answer in Judeo-Christian dogma. Yet, this essential question requires us to have a personal answer.
A given in philosophy, as in theology, is that whatever is real must necessarily be true, and whatever is true is necessarily real. For this reason, we capitalize both Truth and Reality as, in this context, they are referential to God.
The unique credo of the monotheist
True followers of Jesus — true Christians — must cling forcefully to the monotheist credo: God, being absolute and perfect Love, did not create anything ungodlike or ungodly. This is the meaning of Habakkuk, the Hebrew prophet who declared, “God is too pure to behold iniquity” (Hab. 1:13).
Consequently, anything ungodlike or ungodly is not a creation of God and is neither True nor Real. Nothing exists in Truth and Reality outside of God’s all-ness. Therefore, evil in its many forms is not of God, and neither are the related concepts of Satan and Hell.
Not being of God, by default, these ideas are formed in human minds. They are part of the collective consciousness to which we are exposed from birth and onward as we grow and develop. These negative, erroneous ideas and concepts affect humanity, believers, and non-believers alike.
My Kingdom Is Not of This World
When Jesus declared to Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), he made a critically important statement.
· “My kingdom” refers to the perfect and eternal spiritual realm of God’s creation.
· “This world” refers to the realm of the human mind. It is an unpredictable changing environment that is sometimes good and sometimes bad, unpleasant or dangerous.
Those two realms do not mix.
Despite this distinction, there are not two worlds. There is only God’s creation about which human perception has a twisted misconception. That is due to both the limitation of our five physical senses and our conditioning from the collective consciousness.
Appearances, not reality
Since early childhood, we are conditioned to accept everything in this world at face value. Yet, what we see, hear, smell, taste and touch is not Reality — but only our individual and subjective perception of it.
Whatever we experience in “this world,” can only be the product of personal and collective human minds, which produce what must be termed “appearances” because, again, they have no existence in God’s Reality.
This understanding is so counter-intuitive that it has been largely ignored. Consequently, it continues to present a major metaphysical stumbling block for monotheist religions.
Two possibilities
How could God, who is perfect, create and tolerate evil and anything else that is not godlike?
There are two possibilities:
1. Evil exists, and it is real, in which case it excludes the possibility of the perfect Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and Omniscient God. Indeed, these are two mutually exclusive propositions;
Or
2. Evil seems to be real, but it does not exist in Truth and Reality, but only as mental ideas and their projections.
Since evil does not exist in God’s consciousness, by default, it can only exist in the mind(s) of human beings.
Resist not evil
Judeo-Christians have generally accepted the presence of evil as a de facto given. Evil appears all around us; how can we not acknowledge it, much less ignore it? At any rate, Christians are too busy fighting it to give this matter much serious thought and time.
Believers have forever been compelled by the church to energetically fight Satan and anything perceived as evil while being deathly scared of Hell.
We end up being so afraid of these mental pictures created in our collective mind that we engage them in mortal combat, which is exactly what Jesus ordered us not to do when he said, “But I say unto you, that ye resist not evil” (Matt. 5:39).
Jesus knew that by resisting the so-called evil we mobilize our mental, emotional, and physical energies, and we give more strength to what is not real but only a web of appearances whose substance is mental and emotional but not actual.
The non-power of “error”
The realization that evil is not a creation of God but rather a creation of human minds should be liberating.
Everything that is ungodlike, such as diseases, natural catastrophes, man’s inhumanity to man, etc., cannot be of God. Even though they appear in our lives, and we experience their effects, Jesus’ God of unconditional love does not create these things.
If we experience something that is not God-created in our lives, it should be considered an “error.”
If these errors were Real, they would be of God, and we would be helpless victims. But if they are creations of human minds, we should be able to disempower them.
Since ungodlike events are not creations of God’s omnipotence, they should be seen as having no power of their own; otherwise, it would mean that God is not omnipotent.
“Errors” as “appearances”
When we believe “errors” to be Real, we give them power and consequently experience them as if they were Real. But the moment we understand that they cannot be of God and that, consequently, they have no God-power, we start the mental process of disempowering errors.
That is a breakthrough.
A liberating way
This breakthrough starts the process of challenging the notion that “errors” are unavoidable as an inherent part of our lives. Yet, because of the mental hold of our conditioning, our mind has accepted the beliefs of collective consciousness concerning all sorts of “errors.”
Such beliefs must be identified so that we can reject these “errors.” So long as these beliefs are held, we remain victim to them and often experience the consequences of these “errors.”
Jesus told us, “Know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free” (John 8:32). Of course, the Truth does nothing of itself; it is our active knowing of Truth that is the agent of change from victimization to freedom.
Our knowing of spiritual Truth revolves around our degree of faith that God is truly Omnipresent, Omnipotent, and Omniscient in Its unconditional Love for all of us.
Jon Canas
Debunking false creeds. Reclaiming the Soul of Christianity.
Site: https://bio.site/ChristicSoul
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My book: Religion, Politics, and Reclaiming the Soul of Christianity: A Spiritual Imperative for Our Time and Our Nation
