Lovely story Jennine and so enlightening! Since my strokes I've lost to some degree my ability to reason/annalyze. I'm hoping that there is a Heavenletter's reader who can do this thought justice: the story just proved to us struggling seekers that evil is not God's doing. How 'bout turning it around so that using it we can prove the existence of God? Something like: "Is there good, light, that's the presence of God. Is there dark, cold, evil, that's the absence of God." ... No I can't pull it together, please help John R! Maybe if you can't make it fit, John F. Manion is out there, or someone e knows who can ask him to cary this football down for a td.

LPL,
Joe

Excuse me friends but this concept has me flying. If we replace the name God with Love, we have the same story except, we need enough faith to believe that God is Love. Hatred, blackness, evil cold etc. etc. exist when Love is vacant. Move Love into the picture and we have warmth, light, love, an emotion we all know, and thus we have God, the Universal Father of Love, oh yea, you and me too. For love can't exist without God because God is Love.

Dear Joe:

I think you've got it, Joe! I think yu've got pefectly logical reasoning! Really. After 7,000 yrs. of searching someone finally figured out a perfect proof for God!

John R.

But proof is of the intellect! God needs no proof. Proof is too limiting.

I suppose we could say that we are the proof!

Love and blessings,

Gloria

But God is never not!

I didn't mean for you to amend a post?!!! I love your posts. I was just
giving my personal response! Don't you change a thing, honey-bun.

What I post isn't gospel!

Loving you,

Gloria

Thanks John,

I didn't yesterday, but I got it now, I know I've got it!

Hi Joe,

There are a couple of stories from India that touch on
this idea of "evil" that I like. The first goes
something like this, and I am generalizing here. When
bad things happen in our lives it is said that God is
with intimately us. This is because he is showing his
Love for us in a powerful way. He is trying to turn us
towards his Love, and away from our small ego concerns
with success and prosperity, so that we will see the
need for that Love more clearly. When we are
successful and everything is going well that then is a
sign that he has turned his attention elsewhere. This
is not to say that we should seek hardship in order to
stay on the spiritual path. It only reflects the human
tendency to turn to God, and Love, only when we are
hurting. When things are going well we tend to dismiss
the greater Love that is God in our lives.

The second story is found in the Mahabharata, the epic
that contains the Bhagavad Gita. Lord Krishna is the
charioteer for the Hero Arjuna. Before the battle
begins Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal who he really is.
Who and what really is God? Krishna opens his mouth,
and Arjuna's eyes are drawn to look into his mouth. In
a trance he sees inside all of creation, including
death and destruction, and tremendous "evil" alongside
good and what we judge to be love and compassion. The
lesson here is that God really is all that there is,
both good and "evil", what we humans see as evil.

What do these stories convey about evil? If evil is
the absence of God, it is only our perception that God
is not in our lives. We are given the ability to see
what we want to see. There is the Cgristian story of
the man who walks with God by his side along a beach.
There are two sets of footprints. Then there comes a
very trying and hard time for the man. He turns and
sees only one set of prints and accuses God of
abandoning him. God replies that the footprints that
the man sees are God's, not the man's. God is carrying
the man thru his time of "evil" trials.

Love is truly the only way through times like these.
When we love in hard times that Love acts to harmonize
the harshness of the pain and "evil" that we are
encountering. We are learning how to become sons and
daughters of God. It is easy to Love when things are
easy. How do we learn to Love through adversity? When
we can do that then we will have learned through
direct experience how to tap into our divine Love
nature.

The Book of Job. Job is tested by the angel Satan,
whose position in God's kingdom was to test humans. He
tested Job, with God's full acquiescence, and Job lost
everything. But because he kept Love in his heart, and
never became angry at any of the losses he had
suffered, he was rewarded with love and wealth twice
the level that he had before. Satan was a necessary
test for him, for his evolution to a greater level of
Love and Godliness.

The concept of evil as a powerful demigod arose
historically with this Age of Pisces and the rise of
the great religions of duality, as they are called.
Christainity has been the major proponent of this
duality during this last age. In the Old Testament
Satan was a minor son or angel of God, working more as
a process of testing and opposition. With Christianity
Satan grew to become a huge anti-God filled with
tremendous powers of evil. Pisces rules fear and the
imagination as well as the spiritual.

It almost seems as if it was our collective fears thru
this age that enlivened our dark imaginations fueling
the tremendous growth of Satan thru this age to the
position of evil demigod.
And the only way to deflate Satan is thru the constant
connection with Love as we read in Gloria's beautiful
heavenletters. Love dissolves fear and quiets the
imagination.

Forgive me for being sooo long winded. I have also had
issues with evil and my meditation. I decided that I
needed to study Christianity from a more loving and
meditative perspective in order to understand more
deeply the questions that were bothering me
constantly. I redefined almost everything in order to
learn to accept and love more completely.

Truly Gloria is the Glory of God's message.
R.

Dear Robert,

It has taken me some time to work my way back to your message below, glad I
kept back peddling! Sorry for my poor spelling coming up, never checked
theirs out. But the story about Juno and Chrishna, they sound good, is so
perfect, just what I was looking for. It does show us so clearly that God
is everything, and it is our perceptions of good/evil that creates these
realities for us. Even if we cancil the satan concept entirely, we Have to
realize that it is us who are creating him, and yes, even God. Jesus
believed so powerfully that He was God that He gave His own life up to
prove it to us poor humans. Now that's belief! What is sad for me to
realize is that I Could have that same conviction if only--

LPL,
Joe

At 09:32 AM 1/15/2006, you wrote:

Quote:

Hi Joe,

There are a couple of stories from India that touch on
this idea of "evil" that I like. The first goes
something like this, and I am generalizing here. When
bad things happen in our lives it is said that God is
with intimately us. This is because he is showing his
Love for us in a powerful way. He is trying to turn us
towards his Love, and away from our small ego concerns
with success and prosperity, so that we will see the
need for that Love more clearly. When we are
successful and everything is going well that then is a
sign that he has turned his attention elsewhere. This
is not to say that we should seek hardship in order to
stay on the spiritual path. It only reflects the human
tendency to turn to God, and Love, only when we are
hurting. When things are going well we tend to dismiss
the greater Love that is God in our lives.

The second story is found in the Mahabharata, the epic
that contains the Bhagavad Gita. Lord Krishna is the
charioteer for the Hero Arjuna. Before the battle
begins Arjuna asks Krishna to reveal who he really is.
Who and what really is God? Krishna opens his mouth,
and Arjuna's eyes are drawn to look into his mouth. In
a trance he sees inside all of creation, including
death and destruction, and tremendous "evil" alongside
good and what we judge to be love and compassion. The
lesson here is that God really is all that there is,
both good and "evil", what we humans see as evil.

What do these stories convey about evil? If evil is
the absence of God, it is only our perception that God
is not in our lives. We are given the ability to see
what we want to see. There is the Cgristian story of
the man who walks with God by his side along a beach.
There are two sets of footprints. Then there comes a
very trying and hard time for the man. He turns and
sees only one set of prints and accuses God of
abandoning him. God replies that the footprints that
the man sees are God's, not the man's. God is carrying
the man thru his time of "evil" trials.

Love is truly the only way through times like these.
When we love in hard times that Love acts to harmonize
the harshness of the pain and "evil" that we are
encountering. We are learning how to become sons and
daughters of God. It is easy to Love when things are
easy. How do we learn to Love through adversity? When
we can do that then we will have learned through
direct experience how to tap into our divine Love
nature.

The Book of Job. Job is tested by the angel Satan,
whose position in God's kingdom was to test humans. He
tested Job, with God's full acquiescence, and Job lost
everything. But because he kept Love in his heart, and
never became angry at any of the losses he had
suffered, he was rewarded with love and wealth twice
the level that he had before. Satan was a necessary
test for him, for his evolution to a greater level of
Love and Godliness.

The concept of evil as a powerful demigod arose
historically with this Age of Pisces and the rise of
the great religions of duality, as they are called.
Christainity has been the major proponent of this
duality during this last age. In the Old Testament
Satan was a minor son or angel of God, working more as
a process of testing and opposition. With Christianity
Satan grew to become a huge anti-God filled with
tremendous powers of evil. Pisces rules fear and the
imagination as well as the spiritual.

It almost seems as if it was our collective fears thru
this age that enlivened our dark imaginations fueling
the tremendous growth of Satan thru this age to the
position of evil demigod.
And the only way to deflate Satan is thru the constant
connection with Love as we read in Gloria's beautiful
heavenletters. Love dissolves fear and quiets the
imagination.

Forgive me for being sooo long winded. I have also had
issues with evil and my meditation. I decided that I
needed to study Christianity from a more loving and
meditative perspective in order to understand more
deeply the questions that were bothering me
constantly. I redefined almost everything in order to
learn to accept and love more completely.

Truly Gloria is the Glory of God's message.
R.

--- Joe Tolve <Creative_Writing [at] heavenletters [dot] org>
wrote:

> Excuse me friends but this concept has me flying.
> If we replace the name God with Love, we have the
> same story except, we need enough faith to believe
> that God is Love. Hatred, blackness, evil cold etc.
> etc. exist when Love is vacant. Move Love into the
> picture and we have warmth, light, love, an emotion
> we all know, and thus we have God, the Universal
> Father of Love, oh yea, you and me too. For love
> can't exist without God because God is Love.
>
>
> At 05:40 PM 1/12/2006, you wrote:
>
>
> > Did God create evil? A University professor at a
> well known institution challenged his students with
> this question. "Did God create everything that
> exists?" A student bravely replied, "Yes he did!"
> "God created everything?" The professor asked. "Yes
> sir, he certainly did," the student replied. The
> professor answered, "If God created everything; then
> God created evil. And, since evil exists, and
> according to the principal that our works define who
> we are, then we can assume God is evil." [note: this
> is faulty reasoning to begin with, but stick with
> the story...] The student became quiet and did not
> answer the professor's hypothetical definition. The
> professor, quite pleased with himself, boasted to
> the students that he had proven once more that faith
> was a myth. Another student raised his hand and
> said, "May I ask you a question, professor?"Of
> course", replied the professor. The student stood up
> and asked, "Professor, does cold exist?" "What kind
> of question is this? Of cou!
> rse it exists. Have you never been cold?" The other
> students snickered at the young man's question. The
> young man replied, "In fact sir, cold does not
> exist. According to the laws of physics, what we
> consider cold is in reality the absence of heat.
> Every body or object is susceptible to study when it
> has or transmits energy, and heat is what makes a
> body or matter have or transmit energy.Absolute zero
> (-460 F) is the total absence of heat; and all
> matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction at
> that temperature. Cold does not exist. We have ...
> The student continued, "Professor, does darkness
> exist?" The professor responded, "Of course it
> does." The student , "Once again you are wrong sir,
> darkness does not exist either. Darkness is in
> reality the absence of light. Light we can study,
> but not darkness. In fact, we can use Newton's prism
> to break white light into many colors and study the
> various wavelengths of each color. You cannot
> measure darkness. A simple ray of light!
> can break into a world of darkness and illuminate
> it. How can!
> you kno
> w how dark a certain space is? You measure the
> amount of "Sir, does evil exist?", continued the
> (wise)student. Now uncertain, the professor
> responded, "Of course, as I have already said. We
> see it everyday. It is in the daily examples of
> man's inhumanity to man. It is in the multitude of
> crime and violence everywhere in the world. These
> manifestations are nothing else but evil. (note:
> again this is faulty reasoning, but please continue
> on... ) To this the student replied, "Evil does not
> exist, sir, or at least it does not exist unto
> itself. Evil is simply the absence of God. It is
> just like darkness and cold, a word that man has
> created to describe the absence of God. God did not
> create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when
> man does not have God's love present in his heart.
> It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat,
> or the darkness that comes when there is no light."
> > The professor sat down.
> >
> > John F. Manion
> > Secretary, Notre Dame Class of 1956
> >
> >
> >
> > Love prevails.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > __________ NOD32 1.1363 (20060112) Information
> __________
> >
> > This message was checked by NOD32 antivirus
> system.
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>
>
> --------
> "I am anxious to aid others, if ever in need of
> assistance e-mail me PLEASE."
>
>

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