It’s not that god allows suffering. It’s the occasional goodness he allows to show how bad, bad can be.
Suffering is the default position. it’s gods aim that we all suffer and die, uselessly.
No. What you have to ask is why does god allow happiness and hope and joy. And why does he allow these things to the worst kind of people?
God is basically evil and enjoys the seeing millions of babies die from nothing more complicated for a omnipotent god to provide: clean water.
He sends earthquakes to the poorest of people and sees mother mourn over the squashed babies.
But all this suffering would not be bad enough, if it were not contrasted with a few moments of happiness and joy. So that in the end you know damn well that pain and suffering is going to attend your last days - unless that is you are a complete prick and have managed to exploit so many people to ensure that you can have a doctor on hand to ease your pain. This is a privilege that so few people in the world get.
But enough for the poor billions to see what they could have; this makes the suffering all the more painful
Free will doesn’t reconcile any kind of pain or suffering due to natural disasters. And in most cases, it doesn’t reconcile any kind of pain or suffering precipitated by man. Example - a man rapes a child. If God can do anything, then he could stop the rapist from raping the child without impacting his free will. Perhaps he causes his car to break down while on his way to rape the child.
In an interview the great writer Guy Davenport spoke poignantly and elegantly to this problem. He said he liked to tell stories of people who have a sense of belonging, which he believed was essential to happiness. He then said:
“I think it’s taboo to write about any kind of happiness. I mean, Joyce Carol Oates would burn her typewriter if she accidentally wrote about some happy people. When I reviewed her first book in The Hudson Review, my critique was, This is an unrelieved novel of desperate misery. And I said, This seems to me to be unrealistic, despite its intense realism; surely these people enjoyed an ice-cold Coke once in a while? But in fairness you could say the same thing about Zola. I mean, his coal miners must have had a bath sometime, or gone to a play or seen a puppet show.”
The idea is that it’s hard for a person to envision a totally bleak, torturous life unrelieved by any moments of happiness and joy.
Of course, that doesn’t address the problem of fairness and justice when it comes to what appears to be the arbitrary and seemingly unfair and unjust way that good people are forced to suffer while supposedly bad people have lives of wealth, ease, and comfort. I think that is mostly addressed by turning to theology, philosophy, and eschatology. Perhaps the idea of karma can play a part in coming to terms with this kind of thing. I would prefer to think in terms of karma rather than just turn victim, give up, and relegate myself and all of humanity to some vivid, imaginative, biblical end times with my idea of “good” people (including myself of course) achieving The Rapture while the “bad” people burn in fire and brimstone forever. I think life is way more complex than that, and that the ultimate truth that most of us share about reality is actually an illusion. To break free of the illusion might be the ultimate goal of an authentic, individuated life.
People are desperate for their to be some kind of justice, or reason for things that happen. But you can consider Karma, or divine retribution as much as you like, but the sums just don’t add up. When people say “thinks happen for a reason”, I can only respond with disgust.
The only justice you can get is human justice, such as it is. And the only relief from suffering is provided by the hard work of human medical science.
I don’t expect there to be any overall reckoning. As far as I can see- I’ve done pretty well on the cosmic scale, beaten cancer, have a house , a car, a wife and dog who both love me. But I still see lots of suffering in the world for no good reason. I’m under no illusion.
I still suffer every day to some extent, dont let my arguments fool you into thinking otherwise. Something IS at work to make me lose hope and it sends me thoughts, visions and dreams- commandeers my friends and family and tries to break them so as to affect me and make me give up. This very well could be God, but its also just as likely to be technology created by man and grossly misused. This is why Im here- God could not refrain from interfering, our living reality wanted a front row seat and even the devil wants to lose to a worthy opponent. How much suffering can you take and still remain a good person. I can take it all but I had to fight against impossible odds to reclaim my mind to do so. The future of peace, love and harmony is entirely possible- Ive been saying for years that it will get worse before it gets better and its still just as simple as being the change you want to see in the world. If God is as Lev described then I should be dead by now for daring to break that hold, but Im not.
Let’s say you have the power to stop a child from getting raped without any harm to you. Would you allow the child to get raped or would you stop the rapist from raping the child?
A car breaking down causes far less pain and suffering than a child getting raped.
You are drawing an arbitrary line around the rape of children and suggesting that if God prevents it then you would consider Him ‘good’?
But it has already be stated that a ‘good’ God is obligated to provide clear water.
And a ‘good’ God has to prevent earthquakes.
What prevents someone from saying that a ‘good’ God should also prevent heavy objects from falling on feet, gender inequality, car accidents, car breakdowns, etc. ?
Since there is no hard dividing line between what a group of people will call ‘good’ and ‘evil’, then anything could be called ‘evil’.
Ultimately, a ‘good’ God would create nothing, but then where would we be?
I get what you mean, man, I just dont believe that to be God. A past version of God maybe before it became its future self. If God was capable of time travel what do you think would happen? One would know better, the other would claim that one to be the devil and back and forth the saga goes. I know I cause others to suffer horribly and that sucks a lot. As they have made others to suffer, so shall they suffer and I am not exempt. My enemies are trying to wait me out and shut me out, break me down to shut me up just to secure their dominance. Im too far in to back out now and I dont want to. They fucked with me hardcore and fucked with the wrong damn person. They have killed me outright in many alternate realities, layers of reality. Not this one, though, but I have been tempting them. They have tried for years to get me to commit suicide or be driven to insanity. This is our perfect storm and I will calm it and/or die in the process. But I will not fail.
You can make up any shit you want - make god in your own image, as you seem to like to when you look in the mirror. But that does not change the facts of life and nature.
And I don’t give a rat’s arse for how tuff you think you are. All I see is a pussy.
And how’s that working for you? Even if you were to look to psychology for an answer, limiting your look to psychology as the pretense of science – that is, the mechanistic view – would get you nowhere. You can’t medicate people into imposing justice, though I suppose you could medicate them into accepting injustice without any thought of its impact on themselves or others. In other words, reduced to its lowest common denominator by Mr. Occam’s sharpened shaving instrument, your ultimate solution would be the zombification of humans in an increasingly dysfunctional and dystopian world.
If a man (or a woman!) wants to rape a child and to make the rape of children “legally”, then the easiest way is that he (or she!) tells again and again the lie that “children are atheists”, because the probability that this will become a law is not low, if the situation allows it. This was the case in the so-called “comministic” countries (especially in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia), because all people of this societies have to be “atheists”. If all people are “believed” (!) and have to be “atheistic” - by law (!) -, then it is very easy for the rulers and their functionaries to capture all children by removing them from their allegedly “theistic” parents and all other allegedly “theistic” members of their families in order to rape this children. The definition of “theist” is arbitrarily dictated by the dictators, and that means everyone and anyone who does not conform to this dictatorship can be called a “theist” and be punished by death because of “being a theist”. So the rapists of children can - and do (!) - become more and more.
This tendency exists, and it exists more than ever before.
The so-called “free will”:
The so-called “free will” is merely a relatively free will. The whole history of philosophy is full of that topic. According to it there have always been philosophers of determinism, philosophers of indeterminism, philosophers of a mixture of both determinism and indeterminism, and all of them have always taken turns.
No it can’t. God cannot be logically proved to exist or not to exist.
Premise 3 cannot be proven. It cannot be logically proven that a good god would not allow evil to exist in order to accomplish a greater good. Accomplishing that which is the greatest possible good is the priority. This premise is true if, and only if, eliminating evil is the greatest possible good, which cannot be known to be true. This premise assumes one knows what the greatest possible good is, which would require knowing the mind of god.
Since premise 3 above cannot be proven, this is a false statement.
Ergo this conclusion cannot be proven to be true.
Your concept of the Christian god is what is faulty, it’s a straw man.
False. An omnibenevolent God does not necessarily attempt to eliminate evil. An omnibenevolent god does what accomplishes the greatest possible good.
If God knows everything, then he would know what that dividing line is - if there needs to be one. But can we agree that a rapist raping children would fall on the more evil side of that dividing line? Or do you think it’s OK for God to sit there and do nothing while a child gets raped?
