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To: Carry_Okie
Hi Carry_Okie,

Good post.

I've been playing around with the reasoning that Mr.Sayet uses and have gained some possibly useful, though hardly doctrine-worthy, insights by lining this us against both Genesis and the nature of salvation.

The short-short version would be:
Before the fall, because the man and woman had not discriminated for (i.e. eaten from) either the Tree of Life or the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil they could be said to be effectively indiscriminately good (again, after that limited sense).

After the fall I would describe people as discriminately evil in the sense that we often want to do what is good and right but we simply have a relatively easier time being self-absorbed jerks (putting it mildly).

This lines up with the point being made when you realize that many of these "liberals" believe themselves to be innately good, and so that opens the door to this inane notion that the very act of trying to be right is what has caused all the world's problems.

But to give up "trying to be right" is not to become good but to become, in essence, indiscriminately evil. To render yourself incapable of being good to whatever degree of commitment you ascribe to the notion.

This is different from being simply a rotten and wicked person like a Hitler or a Lenin or a Mao, but it does disable a unreasoning person's ability to even judge such human horrors apart from sentimental or emotional baggage they may have inherited. In the extreme they may not even be able to believe that such men really were evil at all, only that they were trying to be right after some perverse notion.

As for the condition of a saint, to the degree that we do obey God and His Holy Spirit rather than this troublesome body of death we could be said to have become discriminately good; however, until the BoD (arguably a prime example of a "second master") the is finally and fully removed that should be confessed to be a technical truth rather than a factual one.

Beyond that I see the righteousness of a resurrected saint to be both supernatural — since we would then have the Holy Spirit and no more nagging competition from the BoD — and natural — since we would then be fully aware that even knowing about evil (never mind having been or acted evilly) is in no way a kind of wisdom at all, and indeed such represents great and horrific folly and madness (which we will not undertake ever again).

140 posted on 02/11/2008 10:16:38 AM PST by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
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To: Rurudyne
I have always wondered why G-d said the Tree of Life brought knowledge of Good and Evil. Why would G-d put it that way? They already had knowledge of Good, so why would one want knowledge of Evil?

Hmmmm....

145 posted on 02/11/2008 11:08:58 AM PST by Carry_Okie (Grovelnator Schwarzenkaiser, fashionable fascism one charade at a time.)
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