Seriously, of course.
Seriously, of course.
Bad things happen for a reason, and other idiocies of theodicy
Jason Blum at aeon website
Well, natural disasters and terrorist attacks are hardly the same thing. Natural disasters are random only in the sense that we often canât predict them. But if God is a part of them, He created Earth such that natural disasters unfold only as they must, given the laws of matter that exist only as they must because He created them. On the other hand, for most, God embedded free will in our souls and some, over the course of their lives, become involved in what others construe to be terrorist attacks but what those who participate in them construe to be entirely moral, just and necessary. Randomness here revolves around how we never know when the next explosions â the next âactionsâ â will occur.
On the other hand, chaos can often revolve around this too because we live in a world where conflicting moral, political and spiritual narrators insist that it is only their own hospitable universe and their own inherent order that count. Their morality ensconced in their âfabric of thingsâ. Their rules and their punishments for those who violate them. And punished they shall be or else how can true goodness and true justice reign supreme.
ThusâŚ
So, sure, letâs call this âhuman history in a nutshellâ. Then the squabble can revolve around whether itâs more or less about the genes than the memes.
A multicultural, politically correct evil we can be âwokeâ to or we can âcancelâ.
We are not in a position to know in what the movements of a butterfly will ultimately result. ButâŚevery unexpected problem is a learning opportunity for growth in resolution. We need problems to overcome. Without them, we devolve back into the swamp. The question is - what are we evolving toward? What is our standard of measure for evolving versus devolvingâŚ. sun versus shade⌠good versus evil/badâŚ? No Good being? No sun? No evil/bad⌠for anyone. Our gut knows better, doesnât it?
No, seriously.
I propose a two year marriage on the condition I keep my side hoes and leave with half your assets. Deal?
The thoughts/actions in your head should be both eternal and external. If they canât be both, boot them.ďżźďżź Not everyone is willing to part with the internal/external that is not in line with the eternal. That is why we donât have heaven on earth.
Why this?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ⌠_eruptions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ⌠l_cyclones
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ⌠ore_deaths
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
Well, the man who suggested that God was loving just and merciful but, unfortunately, did not possess the power to prevent them has died:
nytimes.com/2023/04/28/book ⌠-dead.html
[b]Rabbi Harold S. Kushner, Reassuring Best-Selling Author, Dies at 88
With a wide-reaching spiritual message in books like âWhen Bad Things Happen to Good People,â he drew on his own experience with grief and doubt.
Rabbi Harold Kushner, a practical public theologian whose best-selling books assured readers that bad things happen to good people because God is endowed with unlimited love and justice but exercises only finite power to prevent evil, died on Thursday in Canton, Mass. He was 88.
His death, in hospice care, was confirmed by his daughter, Ariel Kushner Haber.
Several of Rabbi Kushnerâs 14 books became best-sellers, resonating well beyond his Conservative Jewish congregation outside Boston and across religious boundaries in part because they had been inspired by his own experiences with grief, doubt and faith. One reviewer called his book âWhen All Youâve Ever Wanted Isnât Enoughâ a âuseful spiritual survival manual.â
Rabbi Kushner wrote âWhen Bad Things Happen to Good Peopleâ (1981) after the death of his son, Aaron. At age 3, just hours after the birth of the Kushnersâ daughter, Aaron was diagnosed with a rare disease, progeria, in which the body ages rapidly.
When Aaron was 10 years old, he was in his 60s physiologically. He weighed only 25 pounds and was as tall as a three-year-old when he died in 1977 two days after his 14th birthday.
âLike a lot of children who feel theyâre going to die soon, he was afraid he would be forgotten because he didnât live long enough, not knowing parents never forget,â Rabbi Kushner told the alumni magazine Columbia College Today in 2008. âI promised Iâd tell his story.â
The book was rejected by two publishers before it was accepted by Shocken Books. It catapulted to No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list and transformed Rabbi Kushner into a popular author and commentator.
âIt was my very first inkling of how much suffering was out there, all over the world, that religion was not coping with,â he told The Times in 1996.
His thesis, as he wrote in the book, was straightforward: âIt becomes much easier to take God seriously as the source of moral values if we donât hold Him responsible for all the unfair things that happen in the world.â
Rabbi Kushner also wrote:
âI donât know why one person gets sick, and another does not, but I can only assume that some natural laws which we donât understand are at work. I cannot believe that God âsendsâ illness to a specific person for a specific reason. I donât believe in a God who has a weekly quota of malignant tumors to distribute, and consults His computer to find out who deserves one most or who could handle it best.
ââWhat did I do to deserve this?â is an understandable outcry from a sick and suffering person, but it is really the wrong question. Being sick or being healthy is not a matter of what God decides that we deserve. The better question is, âIf this has happened to me, what do I do now, and who is there to help me do it?ââ
He was making the case that dark corners of the universe endure where God has not yet succeeded in making order out of chaos. âAnd chaos is evil; not wrong, not malevolent, but evil nonetheless,â he wrote, âbecause by causing tragedies at random, it prevents people from believing in Godâs goodness.â
Unpersuaded, the journalist, critic and novelist Ron Rosenbaum, writing in The New York Times Magazine in 1995, reduced Rabbi Kushnerâs thesis more dialectically: âdiminishing God to something less than an Omnipotent Being â to something more like an eager cheerleader for good, but one decidedly on the sidelines in the struggle against evil.â
âIn effect,â he wrote, âwe need to join Him in rooting for good â our job is to help cheer Him up.â
Rabbi Kushner argued, however, that God was omnipotent as a wellspring of empathy and love.[/b]
Oh, I see. You prefer straw (weaker) stuff.
No, seriously.
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
Who among us would dare to go that far? What if we do have free will and we have it because God intended us to have it. On Judgement Day, after He explains exactly how our free will can be reconciled with His own omniscience, will we be given the chance to judge Him?
Starting with the Holocaust for some and for others starting with thisâŚ
Or does our free will revolve entirely around worshipping and adoring Him despite all of the things it might seem reasonable for Him to ask our forgiveness for.
Or has Harold Kushner himself having just died recently now been able to confirm that in fact God is not in the least omnipotent?
It would be interesting to know the reaction of the other prisoners after reading it. Would some, smack dab in the middle of a death camp that an omnipotent God permitted to exist, consider it to be blasphemy? Would the prisoner who wrote it be hounded into taking it off the wallâŚto recant and beg forgiveness from God?
On the other hand, itâs not for nothing that the arguments of those like Harold Kushner manage to comfort the faithful. Itâs not that God is morally imperfect but that He is not omnipotent. He created the Heavens and the Earth but He found Himself unable to fully control it. For example, suppose in creating the laws of matter, God Himself is not permitted to transcend the consequences of them in regard to those ânatural disasterâ above?
So, when you die and Judgment Day arrives, if you truly do worship and adore God, then your soul is saved and you are in Heaven. And once there all of the souls of the faithful who perished in those ânatural disastersâ are there as well.
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
Click.
And around and around some will go in this direction or around and around others will go reconciling the Holocaust with a morally perfect existing God.
How?
Of course: a morally perfect existing God, the morally perfect existing God, my morally perfect existing Godâs mysterious ways.
So, Mr. Atheist, go ahead, prove this is wrong.
Not only that but atheists of my ilk, in rejecting God and religion, are left dealing with the existential reality of living in an essentially meaningless and purposeless world, being fractured and fragmented morally and awaiting their own tumbling over into the abyss that is oblivion.
Sure, some will take pride in having the intellectual mettle and integrity to accept the consequences of living in a No God world. Me, Iâm rather partial myself to finding a way back onto the path that leads to immortality and salvation.
Of course, here even the staunchest atheist is âfor all practical purposesâ an agnostic. After all, in a free will world, whether you entirely accept or reject Godâs existence youâre still stuck with âthe gapâ and âRummyâs Ruleâ.
Starting here:
In other words, philosophically.
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
Yes, if you reduce it down philosophically to a syllogism. But what does that have to do with the leaps of faith that millions upon millions of men and women make in order to attain 1] objective morality on this side of the grave and 2] immortality and salvation on the other side of it.
Especially when over and again the ecclesiastics can subsume evil in Godâs âmysterious waysâ. And thus instead making it ultimately good. Itâs simply something we mere mortals can never possibly understand on this side of the grave.
Then those like Harold Kushner who suggest a loving, just and merciful God who created something He now finds Himself unable to fully control.
Then we can get really creative when all you need do is to speak of God here in a âworld of wordsââŚ
Got that? The scare quotes âGodâ.
Anyone here willing to explain that in regard to this:
ââŚan endless procession of earthquakes and volcanic eruptions and tornadoes and hurricanes and great floods and great droughts and great fires and deadly viral and bacterial plagues and miscarriages and hundreds and hundreds of medical and mental afflictions and extinction eventsâŚmaking life on Earth a living hell for countless millions of men, women and children down through the agesâŚâ
In that case, thank God for His âmysterious waysâ?
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
Thatâs exactly what it is. And the âskeptical theistsâ among us merely have to believe this. Either because they were indoctrinated as a child to accept it or âon their ownâ they thought it up and it seemed to work best for explaining away the horrors that have existed throughout human history. Both man-made and as a result of Nature thumping us up one side and down the other.
Again, here, the key is not what you can demonstrate that you believe is true but that in believing it, it comforts and consoles you. That may well be the most important component of the human condition. It certainly is for those like me unable to believe it anymore.
Actually, none of us can really refute skeptical theism because none of us can demonstrate unequivocally that a God, the God does not exist. God is, after all, one possible explanation for why existence itself exists. And if He does exist, what can we utterly insignificant mere mortals on this utterly insignificant planet in this utterly insignificant galaxy given the staggering vastness of the universeâŚ
"When we look in any direction, the furthest visible regions of the Universe are estimated to be around 46 billion light years away. Thatâs a diameter of 540 sextillion (or 54 followed by 22 zeros) miles." BBC
âŚpossibly know about His âWaysâ.
This, of course, is what we are reduced down to noting. Better to attribute the Holocaust to God. Then, one way of another, it it is ultimately a good thing. Or we are left withâŚwhat exactly? That in a No God world it âjust happenedâ given the âbrute facticityâ of an utterly indifferent universe? And that if the fascists manage to prevail in a world where that can hardly be ruled out these days, it can happen again?
Then the next extinction event wipes out the human race and it is as though we were never around in the first place?
Or some determinists arguing that if it does happen it happened only because it could never have not happened in the only possible âhuman conditionâ?
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
This is where I interject and truly muddy up the morality waters. In other words, while most would indeed insist the holocaust is clearly an example of evil, others, instead, see it as an example of good. Adolph Hitler and the Nazis for instance. And unless it can be shown that they are, say, mad or insane, then their frame of mind is one conclusion that human beings can come to embrace as rational. That, either genetically and/or memetically, there is a âmaster raceâ. Indeed, we have those around still today [right here] who seem to argue that.
Whereas from my frame of mind in a No God world, there does not appear to be a definitive scientific or philosophical assessment that pins down deontologically that the holocaust is in fact essentially, objectively, universally evil.
I have my own rooted existentially in dasein moral and political prejudices rejecting and denouncing it. But how exactly would I go about demonstrating that all rational and virtuous men and women are obligated to think as I do? After all, unlike God, I am not omniscient. In the end, it basically comes down to me saying that âI just know itâs wrong!â.
Really? Again, run it by the Nazis. Who really knows, maybe we are programmed genetically to make distinctions between those who [for whatever reason] are different from us. After all, thatâs one possible explanation for why racism and sexism and heterosexism and classism, etc., persist centuries after the so-called Enlightenment.
And thatâs why Gods and religions are so crucial. With them you almost always have access to an omniscient/omnipotent frame of mind that ever and always gets to decree what is ultimately good and evil on Judgment Day.
Or to argue that in a wholly determined universe good and evil are interchangeable because if you are never able to not think and feel and say and do other than what your brains compels you to, what does good and evil really mean?
The Harold Kushner Syndrome for example. Evil exists because God is simply not omnipotent. He set creation into motion and it just got âbeyond My control.â
Free will, the Holocaust, and The Problem of Evil
David Kyle Johnson
I donât understand this. And perhaps thatâs because when it comes to things like God and evil [intertwined or not] what on Earth does it really mean to be logical? Is the existence of God logical? Is a world without God logical? Is abortion logical or is it illogical?
On the contrary, if you âlogicallyâ believe that because God works in mysterious ways we mere mortals simply do not possess the capacity to grasp that these thingsâŚ
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_earthquakes
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ⌠_eruptions
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ⌠l_cyclones
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tsunamis
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_landslides
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_deadliest_floods
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_t ⌠ore_deaths
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_diseases
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extinction_events
âŚare not really evil at all, then that need be as far as it goes. After all, itâs not like anyone can prove that âlogicallyâ they are evil.
âThe evidential problem of evil is the problem of determining whether and, if so, to what extent the existence of evilâŚconstitutes evidence against the existence of God, that is to say, a being perfect in power, knowledge and goodness.â
How is this not basically the same thing? How does one go about providing teleological evidence in regard to a God that is Himself beyond demonstrating evidentially? Since mere mortals have no complete understanding of why God chooses to do what He does how can it realistically be argued that it is irrational to believe in God? What we construe to be evil either logically or evidentially is merely the embodiment of the gap between us and Godâs own loving, just and merciful Divine Plan.
Itâs all only a problem for those unable to accept that âGod works in mysterious waysâ is all the justification the True Believer or one taking a âleap of faithâ needs.
Same thing with reconciling an omniscient God with human autonomy. Heâs God. He can do anything.
Greg Koukl
from Stand To Reason
What is the most frequently raised objection against theism of any sort? If you answered âthe problem of evil,â youâd be right. Thereâs a reason for this. There is one thing every person knows, no matter where he lived or when he lived. Everyone knows the world is broken. Things are not the way theyâre supposed to be. Thatâs the complaint. And they donât simply mean that things happen they donât like. Thatâs relativism. They mean there really are evil, wicked things that take place (objectivism).
I think we can all agree it is objectively true that terrible suffering has occurred throughout the entire history of humankind. On the other hand, when has it ever not been the case that one personâs moral rendition of âevil wicked thingsâ may well be another personâs moral rendition of the One True Path.
Or can someone here provide us with a list of behaviors that we all can agree are evil and wicked.
Letâs start with abortionâŚ
That others are able to convince themselves of this reflects just how important it is that they do. Otherwise in a No God world they would have to endure the terrible pain and suffering as just another inherent manifestation of âshit happensâ.
Of course, thatâs the point raised by those here of my ilk. No God and at best you may be able to convince yourself that philosophers will be able to provide us with a deontological facsimile. Or perhaps you are able to champion one or another political/ideological facsimile.
As for the part about oblivion, no one really knows what to expect on âthe other sideâ. But one thing seemingly for sure is that without one or another God thereâs not much that philosophers can provide in the way of immortality and salvation.
Hereâs why.
The complaint about evil itself requires transcendent, universal laws that govern the worldâobjective moralityâin order for real evil to exist as a violation of those laws.
Exactly! God must exist [eventually] in order to explain all the ghastly pain and sufferingâŚaway?
Cue Harold Kushner? Or perhaps henry quirk might explain to us how âthe problem of evilâ is confronted by those of the Deist faith. And Iâm sure that any number of these folks â List of religions and spiritual traditions - Wikipedia â can provide us with their own spiritual assessments.
"A colossal explosion in the sky, unleashing energy hundreds of times greater than the Hiroshima bomb. A blinding flash nearly as bright as the Sun. Shockwaves powerful enough to flatten everything for miles.
It may sound apocalyptic, but a newly detected asteroid nearly the size of a football field now has a greater than one percent chance of colliding with Earth in about eight years." from MSN
"NASA is keeping a close eye on three giant asteroids that are set to make close approaches to Earth today.
âOne of them will come within just 77,200 miles of our planet, which is roughly one-third of the average distance between Earth and the moon.â MSN
Whatever possessed God to create asteroids?