Revelation, Rationality, Knowledge & Truth — Page 177
ZOROASTRIANISM prophets. He believed in the unshakeable Unity of God. Of. His absolute goodness he did not entertain the slightest doubt. This is what he pronounced during his last speech before the Athenian senate. He believed in God, the possessor of absolute goodness, not merely through his intellectual and metaphysical exercise, he believed because he had personally known Him as such, right from the early days of his childhood. Nay, he was brought up in the very lap of God with His personal love and care. This was. Socrates who also tackled this question with profound logic but it is a logic largely spent on proving the impossibility of any evil originating from God. When it came to the issue of evil and suffering in the world, he dismissed them as human errors, logically impossible to have emanated from. Him. He had to be good, He was good and He could not be anything but good. Hence, evil must have been generated by earthly people, God having no share in their defiled practices. His answer was simple but left room for others to assail him philosophically so that ultimately he could be driven to an indefensible position. The Zoroastrian thinkers in Iran however, could not be satisfied with this answer. . They probed the question and further enquired as to who those evil men were and who had created them. If it were. God, He had to be ultimately responsible. Thus to break His ties with evil altogether, the Zoroastrian intellects must have devised the existence of another creator beside Him. . One was referred to as the god of goodness and the other as the god of evil; both enjoyed their godhead in their exclusive areas of light and darkness. . Incidentally, it should also be mentioned here that all. Zoroastrians do not subscribe to this so-called Zoroastrian doctrine of duality. There are those, though small in number today, who strongly defend the cause of Unity within Zoroastrianism. Most of these unitarians must have 175