Laura, there are any number of excellent books out there that can answer your questions, which were:

"If God is all knowing - he knows every bad thing happening in the world.
If he's all powerful - he can do anything in the world he wants to.
If he's all good and loving - he must want to stop everything bad."


Okay. If "God" is awareness or consciousness itself, in totality, then of course that consciousness "knows everything". It can't NOT know. It is you, Laura, who decides what is "good" or "bad", because you are working from your own reference point and drawing comparisons. A squirrel thinks it's bad to be grabbed by a marten. The marten thinks it's good. What do you think? It's relative, isn't it?

"If he's all-powerful"... What does that mean, Laura? If individual beings have free will, then "God" cannot intervene against it because it would then not BE free will any longer. What does "all-powerful" mean. The very idea of power is an idea that occurs to a limited being who observes that their is some power out there, but he doesn't have enough of it (so he thinks), and he wants more! Thus the search for power begins. This is an activity of limited beings, not of an unlimited God.

"He must want to stop everything bad." So what's bad? I think it's bad to bomb people. George Bush and Osama Bin Laden don't think it is, as long as the right people (in their view) get bombed! Everybody has different ideas about what is good or bad, although there are a few things we mostly sort of agree on...except when we don't! :-)

Look, if you're infinite then you lack nothing. Something that lacks nothing doesn't want anything, because it already IS all possible things and conditions...and its joy is to simply express that endlessly.

As long as you want a God out there somewhere that is just like an enlarged, more powerful human being of some kind, made in man's image, you will not get what I am talking about here...

As long as you think God is separate from you, you will not get it. You are a spark in the fire that is God. You are one drop in the ocean that is God. The drop is composed of the same stuff as the ocean. The ocean does not tell the drop what to do or not do. If the drop chooses to regard itself as separate, then that's what it will perceive. If it chooses to regard itself as tragic, that is also what it will perceive. If it decided to be happy, it would be.

"Good and bad, I defined these terms quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."   - Bob Dylan