Have you ever gone shopping in a department store for shoes or clothes?
Sure you have.
Do you just walk over to the rack or shelf and select what you want WITHOUT trying anything on to see if it fits?
No.
What good would that do? You'd end up having to bring it back!
So, let's try something on? We'll see if it fits. If it does and you like it--take it home with you.
If it doesn't--just leave it right here on the rack.
PREMISE:
What if God is completely blind to Evil?
The way a person who is color blind is blind to color God would be blind to Evil.
A color blind person knows there IS color--they just can't see what others can. The color blind person sees alright--just NOT color.
What would a God who is completely blind to Evil actually "mean" as a description that enables us to understand something mysterious about the history
of God's behavior (as told in scripture)? Let's try it on and see, okay?
In the famous oft-told tale of the Garden of Eden the EVIL character (serpent) is introduced. This original serpent is later (in scripture) described as "a liar from the beginning. The father of the lie."
The liar-serpent says to the human character:
5 “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.”
The serpent tells a lie about God. Can you spot the lie?
Later, after the human couple has sinned, a completely CLUELESS God wanders through the Garden.
Notice how ignorant of the Evil this God is:
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?”
10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from? ”
12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me —she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.”
13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?”
I know most people reading this assume God is pretending to be unknowing to draw the humans out. That is eisogesis (reading INTO the text) and is clearly not what is written.
In the Book of Job we find Satan (original serpent and demon) taking his place IN HEAVEN alongside faithful angels before the face of God.
If God were Evil-Blind it would explain why Satan was tolerated in the Holy of Holy heaven.
When Lot bargains with God over Sodom's inhabitants as to persuading God to spare their lives another instance of Evil-Blindness appears. Apologists
insert their OWN understanding of why the Supreme Being would enter into a Good Cop/Bad Cop argument with an inferior Good Cop human on the side of Mercy and Forgiveness.
But, for the sake of "trying it on" just read it as it is.
Genesis 18:23-25
Abraham approached him and said: "Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? What if there are fifty righteous people in the city? Will you really sweep it away and not spare the place for the sake of the fifty righteous people in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing - to kill the righteous with the wicked, treating the righteous and the wicked alike. Far be it from you! Will not the Judge of all the earth do right?"(NIV)
An Evil-Blind God would HAVE TO agree to such a bargain! Can you not see why this would be true?
An Evil-Blind God could hate what is bad just as a color blind person could appreciate that color is beautiful...but..without actually having the capacity
to SEE it!
Besides, which is holier--a God who KNOWS EVIL or a God who does NOT?
Look at the perfect Law God gives to Israel. It is not a law that identifies EVIL. It is a law that is obsessed with behavior.
Faulty behavior is what SIN is. If one Israelite blinds the other the compensation is retaliation of an equalilty that is literal and breathtaking!
In our contemporary society this would quite rightly be viewed as barbaric and cruel. What human judge would sentence someone to blindness?
But, an Evil-Blind God would only be able to cope with behavior in this way. There would be no proper UNDERSTANDING that inflicting blindness is an EVIL when it is deliberate!
Good and Bad is a formula with God. It is practically arithmetic. The MORAL nature of the Law of Moses is questionable because the penalty for a disobedient chlld (for example) is having the Parents STONE THE CHILD to death! NOTE: No remedial therapy, group prayer, hard labor and counseling is to be found in God's thinking!
Why?
Perhaps it is because God is Evil-Blind.
But, what about the Flood of Noah's day. Surely that was the result of SEEING EVIL and desiring to punish it.
Genesis 6:5-8
New International Version (NIV)
5 The Lord saw how great the wickedness of the human race had become on the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of the human heart was only evil all the time. 6 The Lord regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. 7 So the Lord said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them. ”
The text would indicate God was reading every human's mind!
How would the writer of Genesis 6 be able to KNOW with certainty that God could read minds? And what about the obvious exaggeration "only evil all the time"? That would literally mean humans never thought about eating, sleeping, sex, recreation, nursing a baby, mending clothes, etc.
The writer of Genesis is giving PRETEXT but fails to justify the necessity of killing innocent animal life! In fact, the Genesis writer attributes regret to God for having created man in the first place! Clearly, if the writer were correct, God had no clear purpose in mind for creating man and was surprised as hell to see so much going wrong. It would also mean there was no Divine Plan that simply must be carried through to completion either.
Watch this seeming last minute after thought described...
8 But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord .
Stop a moment.
In the bargaining between Abraham and God what was the MINIMUM requirement to spare ALL? Wasn't it just ONE good person?
There is clearly no consistency to the description of God's value system as told by bible writers.
EVIL is simply a boiler-plate "reason" for God dealing very harshly with humans. It is a HUMAN plot device to shrug off difficult mysterious dealings with the supernatural deity.
Israel is chosen as the "apple" of God's eye but is continually chastised and delivered into the hands of enemies.
Israel is ordered to slaughter babies, animals, men, women indiscriminately. The scope of horrible actions is all over the place for God it would seem!
Unless we "try on" the idea that God is blind to Evil none of it quite comes together unless we just blank out our reasoning faculty and skepticism.
What does it really come down to--this BLINDNESS?
It would mean, for one thing, that God is a being trying to cope with a different sort of life force than He himself possesses because it is vastly INFERIOR
to His nature.
For some peculiar, inexplicable reason this God could only create HUMAN INFERIOR BEINGS.
We can easily prove this by asking: "Is THIS the best of all POSSIBLE worlds for a Supreme Being to create?"
This built-in inferiority makes them unable BY NATURE to operate on the same moral level as the God who created them.
God does not comprehend this. It makes Him angry. It makes him lash out. It makes Him bargain. It makes Him inconsistent.
If we step back and look at the history of God vis a vis humanity---God blusters and threatens and acts out. But, not as an infiinitely SUPERIOR consciousness--only as a more POWERFUL one.
Because God detects behavior He does not approve He seeks to thwart it. But--not reasonably, knowingly or....drum roll please....EFFECTIVELY!
God's firstborn is eventually sent to explain LOVE to humanity and the result is disastrous murder!
Now you can superimpose all your lifetime of Theology on top of this description and make the confusion go away.
But wait!
Try for a moment to see it a different way.
Try RESCUING God by understanding that He may simply be blind to evil.
Your thoughts please.......