RaptorWizard's responce to SolitaryWalker's
Mephistopheles? thread:
If we go back to the Garden of Eden story, God commanded Adam and Eve not to partake of the Fruit of Knowledge. They ate of the fruit despite the warning, and then their eyes were opened. The cost however is that they would ultimately perish, and that to postpone this, they would have to work to survive and suffer against pitiless elements. The implications of this are very difficult to see clearly, but I will speculate that there could be some higher power that wants life, at least at this level of existence, to be obedient and toiling slaves to the natural order, or perhaps it could also be challenging life to become stronger on a journey through the eons, even if the means of its accomplishment leads to suffering. In each of these instances, knowledge would aid us in our progressive development to overcome these systems, since it could give us the power we need to rise above our lowly stations, but this resistance could also bounce back upon us with greater adversity. I know not how long we shall have to endure this pain, whether it will last for 1 lifetime on earth, or if we will continue to face it for many lives to come, but the question of how to transcend this could be discovered in the finality and annihilation of all things physical. This world may be corrupted beyond repair, so to heal it, ruin may have to be unleashed upon it, for by destroying the old world, new worlds could be spawned by the will of life, worlds with ideal designs. In this way the problem of evil potentially could be ended. I make no unalterable claim that this is the direction life needs to take in the eons to come, or that such a momentous feat is even achievable, though it remains clear that we are in desperate need of a global transformation that life creates.