Isn’t there that philosophical argument about how God can’t be both all-good and all-powerful? If he’s all-good, he would have to stop bad things.
It’s been well over a decade since philosophy class, but this reminded me of that argument.
Forgot who made it though.
Epicurus.
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
It’s the Epicurean Paradox https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicurean_paradox
In summary:
If God is unable to prevent evil, then he is not all-powerful. If God is not willing to prevent evil, then he is not all-good. If God is both willing and able to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?
E. Invented by humans
That follows from D.
Yes, he didn’t exist until he was invented. 😁🫠
In one of the Discworld books there are two gods. One is the mighty Thunderer, who has temples all over the vast Empire. The other is a Frog God worshipped by a tribe of about fifty people in a swamp. When they have a fight the Frog knocks the other guy out, because nobody really believes in the Thunderer and the Frog’s people have strong faith in him.
I miss Terry. Discworld should be read by everyone!
deleted by creator
deleted by creator
dualism
Cool - let’s worship that!
That’s just seems shitty
BeCaUsE hE’s MyStErIoUs!
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
One of the earliest forms of copium
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
We’ve had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We’ve had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can’t blame the Spanish Flu on “nature” because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can’t dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can’t blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
You take a very narrow view of history.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
Even prior to the last century, the overwhelming bulk of human suffering was inflicted by other humans. Slavery, most prominently.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
You can go back to The Taiping Rebellion, New World colonization, and the Inquisition to find plenty of fully human made disasters before the last century.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words ‘God works in mysterious ways’. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won’t be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
God is just an edgy anime protagonist
Reincarnated as the Christian God!??
there is a fucked up fifth answer that works for theists, E. terrible things don’t exist
That could be worded as “things that seem terrible to us, actually aren’t, our understanding is just limited” or something along those lines, to make it a somewhat valid sounding argument. Obviously though that would still make any god shitty for giving us the ability to perceive the suffering, so it’s basically “god is evil” end result as well
F. He’s testing us
F is just B with rose tinted glasses.
E. You deserved it
If you’d read more than 3 books of fiction (the Bible can be only one of them), you’d probably have cultivated a level of imagination that suprasses this meme.
I think the Pope and Cardinals would all choose B and then proceed to schpiel about how this life is a trial and he takes each of us at precisely the time of his choosing for good reasons inconceivable to mere mortals bla bla bla
they’d pull out Job. And basicaly say “you’re too stupid to understand. to limited. How dare you question god? that’s not your job, now get on your hands and knees and clean my shoes with your tongue. Oh and give me your money because I need it more than you and god says you have to. You didn’t earn it anyway, it all came from god, too.”
God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.
Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth!
He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you’re cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.
In Buddhism, the concept of God as a powerful creator is not central. The question of “why terrible things happen” is addressed through the teachings of karma and interdependence. Terrible things occur due to the collective actions aka karma of beings, influenced by ignorance, attachment, and aversion, rather than a deliberate act of a deity. Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, the most aligned answer would be that terrible things happen because of the causes and conditions created by sentient beings themselves, rather than any of the options listed.
Religious people be like:
he won’t, because he doesn’t interfere
He causes them, because it’s the circle of life
He can’t, because doing so would cause chaos
He doesn’t exist, because you don’t believe
I think they also say, he causes them to teach us things.
Yeah that little kid that drowned in the pool really learned her lesson, I guess…
The god the Abrahamists have chosen to worship is a weather and war god. So he is a vengeful dick.
When the Israelites were still polytheistic they worshipped, besides this war god, a sun god and a god of fertility in the Pantheon. Yet they’ve chosen to solely worship the war god. Says a lot about them.
hear me out.
what if it’s actually B and C?
Then it is not worthy of worship.
