When I was in college, one of the choices for an emphasis in a Religion degree was theodicy.
I had heard of The Odyssey, but the term theodicy was new to me. It's all about the question of whether God is all powerful and all good, even though there is evil in the world.
This topic interests me for about a minute.
How would I know if God is all powerful and/or all good?
The conception of God, using Latin terms that can't be in the Bible, since the Bible isn't in Latin, uses ideas such as omnipotence and omnipresence. There are many terms that are so big that they don't mean anything.
When I think of The Odyssey, or any plot involving polytheism, there are various pushers of reality behind the scenes and they disagree. But if there is One behind it all, then how do we reconcile what we see with one overriding intelligence?
Well, that's easy- we back up enough to say "hey- I don't understand this." You can get a PhD in it if you want to but what have you accomplished.
In the Age of Ultron, I liked the title. But seeing bigger and badder creatures fight one another stretches no envelope for me. Somebody's going to win and as we make movies bigger and badder at some point we realize that we really don't know what the bigger badder thing is. It's a limited screen holding our creation up there and oooh... look at that- the monster fills the screen so how much bigger can it get?
As power and general badness exceed the scope of our understanding, what have we accomplished but that same thing as putting your eye up so close to something that you can't see it.
Joyce Carol Oates The Accursed p. 442-3
If we don't know the future, and have no idea what God's plan for us is, are we not in a position to imagine "free will"?- and are we not responsible, in any case, for our actions?
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