Neo-Manichaeanism: Questions and Answers
Which is more powerful, good or evil?
Evil has all the power, moral beings have none. That is because power IS evil. A moral being, even the Ultimate good, would never have power over another being, let alone use such power.
[False religions: Zoroastrians believe that the two gods of good and evil are 'about equal' in power and will do battle, supposedly with good victorious. Christians adopted this belief, but made the angel 'Satan' far inferior in power to the god 'Jehovah'--in fact just a flawed creation of Jehovah. Why Jehovah would even be threatened by his own creation is one of Christianity's many logical flaws]
If the Evil God has all the power, how can moral beings ever hope to win, or even continue to exist?
Because force--and the resultant suffering--is only effective over us as long as we are ignorant of the truth and limited by our physical concept of the universe. Our victory will not be won by destroying evil using force (or persecuting members of the false religions). Our victory will be when we make force IRRELEVANT in our lives, and without force evil is nothing. Our souls will be liberated from the cycle of suffering, death and rebirth by understanding the Truth.
[False religions of course imagine the final battle between good and evil as some kind of melee in the clouds with angels hacking each others' feathered wings off with flaming swords. This image makes a neat concept for a future Nintendo game. But force against force is not the same as the triumph of truth over evil.]
If the physical world was created by the evil God, why is there beauty or love as well as suffering?
Beauty and Love are not external, they are internal--aspects of our souls shining through, making connections with each other. No object is in itself 'beautiful'; no artist, no architect, not even a god can guarantee beauty, and people have found beauty in anything--even broken machines, animal skulls, or weapons. These feelings are our own souls crying out, influencing the way our physical minds see the universe, in order to free us from our ignorance of the truth.
Should I accept Evolution or Creation?
It doesn't matter. Everybody agrees on one biological fact: living beings suffer horribly and die by the billions every moment on our world. Natural selection is a fact of ecology, regardless of wether it causes evolution or not. False religions cannot deny the meaningless suffering of life just by denying evolution. There is no "divine plan" that could ever justfiy the suffering of even a single insect, for a god by definition would not have to cause suffering to accomplish any objective other than suffering itself.
If this world is so evil, why not just starve yourself to death and enter the next life?
Since we are constantly reborn into this world or other worlds at the whim of the evil God, this would accomplish nothing, just like any other selfish act. Liberation will only come if we set aside our selfish desires created by the physical world, and think of other beings as we do ourselves, which is the essence of moral behavior. Renouncing the corrupt physical world does not mean we will destroy it or flee to somewhere else--by refusing to be bound by selfish goals, we will make the flawed world irrelevant, and transcend it.
If we are constantly reborn (reincarnated), why don't we remember past lives?
Memory is part of the brain. The brain is NOT your soul.
Do we get eternal life in paradise for being NeoManichaean?
"Eternal", "life", and "paradise" are all concepts based on our flawed world. Time is a part of the physical universe just as much as your flesh and blood body is; the hope of immortality is actually a deception that will trap you in this world, preventing you from escaping the evil God. True liberation means you will go BEYOND time and space--the dimension of time will be meaningless. This is very different from mere immortality. A NeoManichaean does not seek immortality any more than he would seek all the money in the world or absolute power.
What are NeoManichaean views onother religious beliefs?
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