Qadar

[Ruggedtouch]

Bismillah:


Somehow you are right; Satan was created for important purposes. If Satan, who continually tries to seduce us, did not exist, our creation would be meaningless and futile. God gave us free will so that we could know good from evil. In addition, He gave us great potentials. Our development of these potentials and our struggle to choose between good and evil make us experience a constant battle in our inner and outer worlds. Just as God sends hawks upon sparrows so that the latter will develop their potential to escape, He created Satan and allowed him to tempt us so that our resistance to temptation will raise us spiritually and strengthen our willpower. Just as hunger stimulates human beings and animals to further exertion and discovery of new ways to be satisfied, and fear inspires new defenses, Satan’s temptations cause us to develop our potentials and guard against sin.


It is truly beautiful when you resist Satan’s temptation and defeat him. May Allah always protect us from such temptations, Ameen.


Salam


Wael.

Please stop this madness, Wael. That’s completely unsupported conjecture. You’re waving your religious dogma around like a teenage cheerleader flailing her pom poms.


I’m not evil. No one I know is truly evil. Most of the true evil in the world has been in furtherance of political or, more often that not, religious ideologies. Currently, the greatest evil in the world is being carried out in furtherance of one specific politico-religious ideology. Go figure, eh?


The problem with all of this is that given the story, man did not commit the first sin-- Lucifer did, and thus became Satan. Everyone prefers to forget that before man was created, there had to be a conflict that allowed Lucifer to become the temptor in the test God offers to his unenlightened creations, Adam and Eve. Clearly, God has created evil, and allowed it to flourish even before Man is created. The issue of "less than perfection" has already been completely established and is extant in the universe before Man is culled from dust.


And so, when God creates Man, the result of everything is already set in place. God knows Man must fail, as he has created Satan already to allow Man to fail, and in fact decides to give Satan-- whom God knows is evil prideful rebellion incarnate-- to have power of such magnitude that it will actually become a war of good versus evil in the "last days" -- when in fact God should be able to eradicate Satan and evil and hell and damnation --with a metaphorical blink of an eye. He just doesn't do it. So much for a loving god(s).


Free will under a god paradigm is a hopeless failure unfortunately. It cannot be without reducing god in some way, and theists insist god is omniscient and perfect (how perfection creates something less than perfection-- existence-- is always unanswered as well). One cannot assert an all-knowing god and then say "but we are not robots"-- because god knows every choice we can make and every choice we will make. While there is an illusion that we are not robots, we clearly are from god's perspective. You've admitted this by noting "He is aware of whatever going to happen in the future but that doesnt mean that he is responsible for our actions.


This nicely segues to my second point: You proffer this unsupported idea that allll of this evil exists only to teach us how to be better, but then "better" can only come through god(s) and no matter how much evil is there to "perfect us" (!) we are doomed to fail miserably.


So it's useless to argue that the bad exists to make us good. Of what purpose then are there "natural evils"? How many fires wiping out cities have we needed to learn to "be good" to one another? Do we really need mudslides eradicating villages and snuffing out the lives of children just so we can rescue some of them and "be good"?


Just think, Wael, moslems killing in the name of jihad is ultimately god(s) will to make us better people. I'm down with that.