Yhwh and the god of marcus aurelius

The chief of the various gods of Marcus Aurelius bears a peculiar similarity to YHWH the God of Israel in the sense that He is the guiding principle of the universe, and both He and the universe is deemed "good" or providential by the believers.

Its is purely a function of faith, as the faithless or weaker in faith proclaim an indifferent universe.  Such as the modern man of science, but that wasnt always so.

 

As the old emperor tells himself in his journal, essentially, either the universe is ruled by a just god, or it is all set in random, but he had faith in the chief of his cadre of gods, which was a sort of father figure analog to the Hebrew YHWH, whom is basically the bearer of that name today, "GOD", as of from the German translations of the Bible, "GOTT".

 

Isaac Newton styled himself primarily as a theologian, and the man who "fixed" Einstein's relativity equations, proving the universe's expansion, was an ordained minister and leader in the Catholic church.

 

In the book of Genesis, God at multiple times deems various elements of creation, such as light or the earth, as "good".

 

We can so easily explain away other less than good elements as machinations either of man or the old enemy, Lucifer.

 

Of the Hebrew mythos in Genesis, man is fashioned of the dust of the earth, and his name, Adam, means "blood".  God literally breathes consciousness into man, what was the original un-perverted consciousness before Lucifer intervened.

In popular mythos among evangelicals, knowledge itself is taken with a healthy dose of skepticism because man's original sin was to try for Godlike knowledge, spurned forward by Lucifer, who had been condemned prior for seeking Godlike power.  Indeed, something of the God knowledge being held by man couldve very well advanced the cause of Satan, notwithstanding history's many dark passages in the annals of Christianity.  Mark also the regime-toppling and various genocides conducted in the name of Islam.

 

Anyway.  The essential goodness of nature, which can seem indifferent or even set against one at times, is a function of faith, and an acknowledgement of the larger society of man.  All is set to plan, balanced lives to lives in one essential stewpot.  Though we acknowledge in a perfect world, there would only be death from old age and not other causes, but all things are balanced and counterbalanced against various factors, many of those factors still unknown to man's science.  Indeed, even in nature, survival depends on some action of man, and without the benefit of prior observations, none would last very long in the wild.

 

All a function of faith, the goodness of a seemingly indifferent world, just as the rules of the physical world are applied equally, without discrimination.  Various seeming accidents, incidents of a what could seem a random universe coalesce towards a return to order in the believed return of the savior and the exercising of judgement.

 

*in one of the New Testament Gospels, it is recorded that Peter tried to emulate Christ's supernatural act of walking on water.  In that one account, it is said not that Peter fell into the water, but that he "began to sink" as if maybe he had some iota of success for a millisecond standing on water.

That too a function of belief on this side of midnight, as so much is unknown or described as supernatural, beyond our known rules of nature......