Is God
Epicurus put the “problem of evil” with admirable brevity.
Anyone care to try out a solution?
Another unanswerable question. Well, at least by our current scientifical methods.
whence come evil?
from god.
A bit too brief. A bit too glib.
If a child is disobedient, is the father willing and able to punish him?
If a child doesn’t trust his father, can the father help him even if he is willing and able to do so?
un chevalier mal fet
my real name
Thanks for your post, but I’m not sure I really understand your solution. Would you mind spelling it out?
if you assume that humans have free will, then the earth could be seen as a morality test. god wants to separate the jerks from me and send us to our appropriate afterlives.
if god wants those jerks to appear and make it known that they dont deserve the good afterlife, he has to let them believe they can get away with being jerks.
lets say you are hitler, and your thinking about starting up that holocaust. then your looking up at the sky and suddenly the clouds quickly coalesce into a giant head who screams “dont kill jews or ill have your doctor secretly shoot you up with meth every day so you go insane… and then your goin to hell!” would you still do anything bad ever again? i dont think so.
What if this is not a test at all, but instead this is the real thing?
Did you ever see the Gary Larson (The Far Side) comic strip entitled, “In God’s Kitchen”? It depicts God above the Earth sprinkling it out of a spice jar labeled JERKS. The caption underneath reads, “Just to make things interesting…”
Then whence cometh evil?
Well, evil comes from things that people don’t like.
“It is evil,” really means “I don’t like it.”
Anything that a person calls evil, is basically just something that they dislike.
Then over time a superstitious layer gets build up over what people dislike.
This assumes that you are able to judge. What if I just haven’t got all of the information?
I very often see people suffering from dementia or some schizophrenic disorder apparently being ‘aggressive’ - but do I know that? Perhaps they are being defensive and acting accordingly in their own perception. This means that the cause of a certain behaviour can only be found if I have all of the facts.
If God is a Mystery, and all that remains is Faith, Hope and Love, then we will have to wait and see. But to judge God in my present state is even more presumptive than judging my poor demented brother.
Do you assume that suffering is synonym to evil?
Shalom
Bob
I would say jerkdom is in the eye of the beholder. Some of these “jerks” are just precious children of God disguised as idiots. (A saying the like of which I heard on the Oprah show.)
God is a Father. Pain is not always the worst thing in the world; sometimes to be better people, we must experience evil which acts as a maturing factor – if we take it rightly. I think someone on here has a quote by Jung that neuroses are always an excuse for legitimate suffering. I think Scripture (sorry, revealed religion) shows that some are tested by the Devil with God’s permission. God does bring good out of evil however. (Or so Aquinas says.) But God remains OUR good, our final end.
better? too long?