This is sorta the beginners philosophy question. There are plenty of answers, it’s not the “gotcha” it appears to be. Those answers unroll into all sorts of branching other conversations but they exist.
Maybe it’s because free will exists.
Maybe there’s a greater purpose for what we call “evil” that results in more good.
Maybe it’s a definitional thing, where “evil” to us is always going to be the most-evil existent thing so if existing evils were gone “evil” would still exist but it would consist of aggressive kitten licks or something. So “evil” can’t not exist, but it’s not because God can’t get rid of what we call “evil” now.
Maybe there’s a greater purpose for what we call “evil” that results in more good.
A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be “far from the center of the garden”. IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.
The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It’s not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?
Maybe it’s because free will exists.
Then God shouldn’t have given it to us, still his fault, OP still applies
Maybe there’s a greater purpose for what we call “evil” that results in more good.
Then God should have given us the understanding of it so we’re not left to question him, OP still applies
Maybe it’s a definitional thing, where “evil” to us is always going to be the most-evil existent thing so if existing evils were gone “evil” would still exist but it would consist of aggressive kitten licks or something. So “evil” can’t not exist, but it’s not because God can’t get rid of what we call “evil” now.
Shitty point, we have a clear definition of what these evils are currently and yet nothing is done about them. Maybe if we somehow lived in a world that no longer had the evils we see today you’d have a point but this is just a silly one
But free will cannot exist with an omniscient god, because if he knows everything, then everything is predetermined, giving us no free will and also making god evil for allowing all the suffering to happen. And if free will does exist god isnt omniscient
Without free will, true worship cannot exist. (If God is God, he certainly has the right to create us for the sole purpose of worshipping him.)
To your latter points, I agree that we know clearly what evil (a.k.a sin) is—sin is anything apart from God’s character (e.g. the fruit of the spirit to start).
However, it’s not up to us to “get rid” of evil, that’s on God, and that’s exactly what he did when he sent his son Jesus to die on the cross as a substitute for the punishment we deserve, and when he rose from the grave he signified that substitution was complete. If we truly accept that fact, then God considers us saved (“redeemed”). And, one day Jesus will come back and eliminate evil once and for all.
As to why God allowed evil to enter the world in the first place, well, that’s one of the cornerstone discussions of Christian theology, I can’t easily summarize that here. In short, a redeemed world can know God’s love and worship him more deeply than a world which was never fallen to begin with. (And again, if God is God, he absolutely has the right to create us—and all of creation—for the sole purpose of bringing him glory.) Here’s an excellent article that explains this more fully.
Do you believe all this, and if so, why?
According to the Bible, God never gave man free will. He only gave us the free will to accept the knowledge of actions. However, it reads more like how you would think of a child as innocent – humans didn’t know what was good or bad. Of course, the Garden of Eden was never real and the story was just a story.
However, the Bible also states that the reason we have free will is because love and good aren’t forced. You can’t love someone or perform a good deed if those are your only options. You have to choose to do so. The angels also had free will which is what led to Lucifer and his followers.
I’m not religious anymore, but my parents are still super Catholic. My dad taught Sunday school growing up and still works for a church while my mom is a teacher at a Catholic high school.
What annoying when people who have no grasp of what philosophy about starting saying these statement and expect me to answer them.
Edit: reading the comment is also annoying. When someone mention God, many assume the statement reference their own religion and draw conclusion based on it. I had someone start talking about god doesnt exist because “the proofs” are wrong, but these proofs all driven from his own religion. ( ex christian talking about statement that doesnt make sense in the bible) when I attempt to speak on higher level ( forgot all religions lets talk about god as an entity or thought ) they kept circling around to same points.
Many people dont know how to debate or what they are debating.
Yeah this is sort of in the same vein as “well how come god can’t make a crooked straight line?”
If it’s crooked it isn’t straight. The problem isn’t omnipotence, it’s that you’re asking for the inane. Or perhaps it’s possible but we are limited by our perception. Who knows?
An omnipotent being would be able to setup the universe in such a way that it could be done, anything less is just being very powerful. Its only really a problem for monotheistic religions, most with pantheons portray their gods as very powerful but not all powerful.
But we don’t live in that universe. Would =/= is.
The problem with the request is there is an implicit “in such a way that it makes sense in front of me right now with the way the world is and with the definitions of those words intact.”
If God has to change the rules or redefine something then your request isn’t fulfilled.
Can god make a universe where a crooked straight line is both possible and impossible, where he both causes it to exist and also not exist?
Reading this thread is like watching a 4 year old figure out how to blow a bubble in milk and think it’s profound.
What god and satan was Epicurus talking about here? Just curious what idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving god existed about 300 BC. My little Roman mythology knowledge has their gods closer to Greek gods: limited in power, easily fooled, and extremely flawed.
One of my favourite discussions of the problem of evil is the chapter below. It’s a discussion between two brothers regarding God and suffering in the world if the end result is eternal paradise. TW: child abuse, suffering and death. Children are used in the argument specifically because they don’t deserve suffering, they are innocent according to Dostoyevsky (I easily agree).
It’s heavy but worth the read imo, and not unnecessarily graphic.
Dostoyevsky lived before the baby hitler question. If you knew without a shadow of a doubt a child would become the a very evil person, is it more ethical to kill the child now and spare the suffering of those later, or not kill the currently innocent child but condemn the others. A child does not deserve to suffer for the same reasons an adult does not deserve to suffer. No one inherently deserves to suffer and have evil happen. However, free will can lead to suffering and oppression.
Dostoyevski would argue that having the child suffer so that everyone could go to heaven is wrong. Even if the child, the child’s mother and the “free will” person that caused the suffering all hug and apologize and forgive in heaven, it’s still not worth it.
Absolutism is a fine theoretical stance, but breaks down immediately when faced with real situations. Furthermore, someone with such an absolute stance will not make the effort to have a real debate and possibly change their stance, ergo it is not worth engaging with.
Being an absolutist is all fine and dandy (for example it makes philosophical debate much quicker) right up until you actually apply it to real life, at which point it becomes untenable.
It’s like the problem with the first law of robotics (I know they were intentionally designed not to work, but they are a useful framework by which to think about things).
A robot must not harm a human, or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm - so robot could not use violence to stop a terrorist attack because doing so would require it to harm a human, yet at the same time not stopping the terrorist attack would cause other humans to come to harm. There is no solution to the problem given the input limitations.
Any intellectually honest approach to philosophy has to recognize that every situation is unique. What you need is a moral framework that allows you to adapt to a situation without having to resort to absolutism (like the laws of robotics). You might as well have the philosophy of just not doing anything ever, and you would have exactly the same result.
Given that we may very soon actually have robots and AI this is a more important question than ever before and I really don’t think it’s been given any attention.
Zoroastrianism Vs Christianity
Please expand.
I have a few points to this.
The first being) he already has, it’s called heaven, a world without harship, strife, and evil.
The second being) the prevention of evil and the complete elimination of evil are different goals. If we are truly made in the image of god as the bible says, then god geels similar emotions to us as well. So the ultimate answer to the question of why hasn’t he is: he doesn’t want to.
The third being) who is to say he has not already, and the goal post of what is evil has moved? How could we possible know god did not create a world before this, with “true evil” only to restart it into this world.
The fourth being) in a world with free will and no evil, the definition if free will completely changes, so therefore he could, but it would not be the same to him or to us.
The first being) he already has, it’s called heaven, a world without harship, strife, and evil.
What does heaven look like for babies and embryos that die before reaching maturity? Are they just out there floating around by the hundreds of billions?
Ignoring the insurmountable pile of contradictions in the bible, hell is actually the default afterlife destination due to humans being born with “original sin” (don’t know if that applies to embryos, but apparently god wasn’t aware of embryos when the bible was written).
Each sect has their own beliefs on the matter, with the majority believing all babies and children go to heaven, even though the bible does not explicitly say that this is the case.
Heaven / hell / whatever alternatives I’ve heard of have one thing in common: infinite time, which sounds like an absolutely miserable existence. It’s like that scene in the movie Beetlejuice where they draw a ticket for the queue, and you’re sitting there bored as shit forever. Apparently theres a word for fear of infinity: apeirophobia.
Actually, what “original sin” truly is has been debated, many believe death itself is original sin, which is why heaven is eternal.
Assuming your stance is embryos are alive: the default stance of most christians is the physical act of baptism and church rites are less important than the belief, a child incapable of understanding God would go to Heaven or Purgatory. In some sects it is not the physical birth that matters but the spiritual, your spirit is what goes to Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory when the body dies, and it can be argued embryos and newborns do not have a soul per se, just the capability to harbor one.
My stance is irrelevant, but I believe there’s no “afterlife”, so all this stuff about god and whatnot is pure nonsense. It can bring up interesting philosophical questions sometimes though, about what is life and what does it mean to be good and to have a fulfilling life.
Here’s your answer.
You know what they say, the best way to make someone an atheist is to make them actually read the Bible from front to back.
I have a friend who was a serious muslim so she started reading the quran and then relized at the age of 8 that the whole thing is bs so she stopped believing. Its funny because there are a bunch of people who tell her how shes disrespecting her ancestors and she should at least read a bit into it. She probably knows more about it than 90% of the people telling her about it.
I was also ashamed to find out, there is no tradition! Religion shifts focus and meaning constantly and usually as a reaction. The religion I was born in now says it’s ALWAYS been against trans people, and point to the written beliefs that came out of being anti feminism the last few decades and recontextalize it to fit their priorities now. I’m old enough that this lie is obvious and stupid. But this has always been the process. It’s been new age reframing old age material into current beliefs that not only have no logical connection to any doctorine or belief, but often defy the very principals they claim to extole. It’s always been people poorly copy and pasting popular opinions and priorities over actual historical beliefs.
Just understanding the historical facts and what the very religion that produced it holds as fact and fiction, because it’s not even intended to be factual vs. A bed time story, will make most people realize either their religion is made by fools and liars, or they need to adapt a very symbolic kind of faith.
Can they slip the geniologies? They’re just there to prove the guy in the story is really truly the descendant of someone holy and important, so add nothing if you just presume the protagonist is a proper protagonist
Wow people from thousands of years ago were people from thousands of years ago. Checkmate, everyone. I am so smart.
Ask your next zealous Christ/Jew/Islamist if he thinks his holy book is out of date.
Most Christians now accept female priests, gay marriages, fires on Saturday and clothes with mixed fibres. How would they do this without accepting that the book is outdated?
It sounds like they are picking and choosing what to believe and follow, based on their own preferences. If that is the case, they’ll believe whatever they think benefits them, even if it is at the expense of others.
We have seen this play out with christians against gay people. Now we are seeing it play out against trans people, even though the bible says nothing about trans people. The bible does say to love thy neighbor as thyself though, to judge not lest ye be judged, and to leave judgment to god.
Picking and choosing only the parts people like makes them hypocrites. Picking and choosing only the parts people think are “good” makes the bible essentially worthless to follow and base one’s life on.
They are indeed picking and choosing. However, I’m just contesting the poster above claiming that believers would deny the book being outdated. It’s more like a “you have to interpret the core message of love thy neighbor… And sometimes hate the neighbours we specifically don’t like” kind of thing these days.
You might have heard of a group called Christians. They have a lot people there who think this is a devine rulebook and everybody must follow it.
Eh, it’s not like they actually follow the bible, nor do they follow Jesus’ teachings. They follow whatever their pastor tells them to follow.
The Bible wasn’t even written thousands of years ago. Bit if it were but lots of it was rewritten and indeed rerewritten by the church over its history, so their revised version. The one they think takes out some of the less acceptable bits.
Okay let’s say 500 years ago. Misogyny, slavery and rape were basically just everyday stuff.
Right, but that’s the word of god for some people, not the word of the everyday man.
Which god was he talking about anyway ? They had thousands of the fuckers at the time.
A more general tri-omni god
This was a guy who assumed the existence of Platonic solids. He clearly had a streak of monotheism in him.
Disgusting. I hope they threw him off a cliff.
Or maybe he’s just a cunt, what with all the murdering people.
To get around this, ancient fuckers in my country invented reincarnation and karma. That conveniently also gave them the license to be supremely racist.
I don’t know though the Americans managed to be super racist while being Christian. They got around that one by just classifying anyone they didn’t like as not a real person.
Religion has always been the excuse, it’s never been a preventative.
The simple solution is that there is no “evil.”
I like the story The Egg by Andy Weir. It gives an example of that idea.
Alan Watts also talks a lot about that sort of thing.
You remind me of my wife.
When we met, she introduced me to lots of short stories that made me reconsider my perspective on things. This was one of them. She still makes me reconsider my convictions whether I want to or not. I sure do love her for that.
This is the most wholesome, loving thing I’ve read on Lemmy. You’re truly a gem.
Can you share some of the others?
Sure, but I’m not sure I remember many offhand and some have become popular since then so you may have already read them.
Two that come to mind:
- They’re Made Out of Meat by Terry Bison
- When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth by Cory Doctorow
edit: another one that came to mind, though my wife didn’t introduce me to this one, was ~~All You Zombies~~ by Robert Heinlein. I think that one has a movie adaptation called … Predestination maybe?
One my wife did recommend to me, though I found it less impactful than she did, was [https://ia801904.us.archive.org/35/items/the-jaunt-stephen-king/The Jaunt - Stephen King.pdf](The Jaunt) by Stephen King.
Also, though I don’t recall if I ever ended up reading it, she really liked All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury.
edit 2: Not sure why the Stephen King link isn’t working. The % maybe?
edit 3: Replaced all instances of
%20with a space. Link still didn’t work on my client. If it doesn’t work on yours, I’m afraid you’ll have to search for the story or manually copy the URL… Sorry.I would like a list of some as well!
Happy to share the ones I remember offhand, see above in the thread.
thank you! the ones I’ve read so far are awesome, I appreciate you sharing :)
My pleasure, happy I could spread the joy!
No one can convince me that abuse is not evil. Is it common? Banal? Sure. Is it good? No. Never. Causing truama is evil. I don’t think there’s a valid argument that it isn’t.
Not that I necessarily agree with it, but having listened to a lot of Alan Watts, he gives the impression that he somewhat believes in a just universe.
To him every experience and every challenge is an opportunity for growth, especially the most difficult experiences.
He posits a belief in a karmic universe, where every lifetime of experiences and choices leads into the next lifetime of experiences and choices.
It rubs me wrong, because that type of thinking, to me, stems from the childish belief in a just universe, that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people.
Therefore, if terrible things are happening to you, then you must deserve it because your karma created your lifetime of circumstances…
I can get the appeal from someone recovering from truama, I’ve been there and putting yourself back together is a long hard road out of hell. That being said, the truama is a disadvantage that prevents people from typical level of functionality, it doesn’t make you more able to deal with anything, it typically leaves you with disorders and disfunction. The people that overcome are outliers.
In the karmic line of logic, it is focused towards spiritual development on the scale of seemingly infinite lifetimes.
Becoming a functional or self-actualized human is secondary to the experiences each lifetime provides in the infinite karmic cycle of death and rebirth.
If I redefine evil and child abuse and power then God is the best scarecrow humans have ever created.
Nice premise but I can’t stop giggling that the universe created for the child to mature has to be hellscape for parent, for all those instances of the same talks they will be having util that day (finally) comes.
For an intellect that vast, and with such a different experience of time, would it really be so difficult?
As the nature of the parent is no further explained than hinting at a “human” origin we will never truly know. Can’t imagine though that a couple billion same-ish talks not take a toll on the parent.
I do love that concept. I don’t think it removes evil, just shifts its perspective
If this were multiple choice, then I would go with #2.
I learned fairly early even as I was in Sunday school that I’m a better, more moral person than god. And I’m just a flawed person. So what use is such a god to me or anyone?
You don’t know that. You haven’t been exposed to the same power that God has. You think deleting the toilets of your Sims is funny at the human level because the Sims don’t experience life the way we do. Imagine that scaled 1000x up.
Ask yourself: would you delete the toilet of every man, woman, and child on Earth just for giggles? Based on my past actions in videogames, I know I would.
The continuing existence of my toilet is proof that I know that God is a better person than me.Not that god is real, cause he isn’t. But I always found him to be an abusive, gaslighting piece of shit. Imagine telling your kids “I love you more than anything, I created you in my image. I want you to be happy and loved… But if you don’t accept my love, I’m going to murder you and torture you with fire for all eternity… But I love you!”
I mean DUH, obviously it is impossible to have any objective morality without appealling to my own personal, internally inconsistently defined God whose written word I am certainly interpreting correctly after being filtered through tens of thousands of writers and editors and translators through thousands of years, whose objectivity morality also ‘works in mysterious ways’ whenever it seems contradictory!
Its simple!
Who are you to challenge God’s word?
Who are you to challenge God’s word
* points to a book written and edited by humans
(Not arguing with you, just showing my amusement at standard Christian bullshit)
Nuh-uhhh, it’s the WoRD oF GoD
Where God is humanist principle, and God is a humanist, then circularly, principle exists without micromanaging intervention in perpetuity.
The old testament is extremely problematic. Israelite hasbara coup. Polytheistic relgion at the time was Canaanite. The descendants of Noah’s grandson. El was main god, that Israel is named after, and all other god’s were his offspring. Greek rule over the region, had Greeks say that all of the major Canaanite gods were the same as the Greek gods, with El as Zeus. Yahweh was the tribal god of Israelites. But it is basically very easy for any priest to invent a new god, based on narrower factional/fertility needs to collect revenue for rewarding the priest to champion your tribe/goals contrary to humanism.
The problems with old testament start with 10 commandments
There is no god before me (Yahweh), is a coup over El.
“Though shalt not covet/idolatrize” was an insurection cry over Canaanites where Yahweh orders the Israelites to destroy all idols of Canaanites instead of valuing their silver/gold content. El/God had no desire to repress worship, and their priests accepted offerings and sacrifices, so why not idolatry.
“Honour thy father/parents” codifies law at the time that gave parents the right to have the state execute their children for “dishonour”.
Just as all Churches today have as mission to maximize their power through alliance with state/authority/hierarchy, so have all religion through time. A cult is simply a religion without state approval. God exists without church corruption. Prayer has no measurable effect, but Abrahamic religions being rooted in a lie could be one explanation. Still, that evil exists, doesn’t imply that humanism/principle doesn’t exist, just that you individually have the power for evil, and tyranny/autocracy has power because you are deluded to allow/tolerate it, and evil happens from the greed and desperation it fosters. Evil exists because we are too collectively stupid and gullible to organize ourselves around evil.
https://www.naturalfinance.net/2022/11/the-invention-of-truth.html
I know this is a circle-jerk meme, but I’mma pitch my two cents anyway.
If we are talking about the Abrahamic god… “he” is both good and evil. So no; to be omnipotent one must also be responsible for evil. Kinda duh.
I could go on, but that right there is pretty much all that needs to be said regarding that god in particular. Good and Evil are man-made concepts, and subjective as all hell.
If you’re going off the old testament God is a jealous, vindictive asshole. New testament was a very successful attempt to white wash this with all that “love they neighbour” bullshit.
The Bible is wild.
That whole vibe is pretty much what created Christian gnosticism. The “creator God” or the idiot demiurge actually is the evil god from the old testament that trapped your soul in an evil reality. The good God and Jesus are here to help you transcend it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaldabaoth
For those elder scrolls players who wanted to know what Lorkhan was about: here he is.
Then isn’t it wrong of the Abrahamic God to ask humans to do good if good is subjective anyway?
That’s a fun question!
But there is that pesky “good” and “evil”! “wrong” and “right” are the same thing.
Isn’t it evil of the Abrahamic God to ask humans to do good if good is subjective anyway? Well, yes xD
Good and Evil are man-made concepts, and subjective as all hell.
Gotta get all D&D True Neutral Druidic on this and recognize life as a cycle. The wolf eats the lamb, the lamb eats the grass, the grass eats the bodies of them both. What is good here? What is evil?
To eliminate “evil” one must do far worse things than murder. One must assert one’s will over the very foundations of nature itself.
Like ripping fruit from a tree.
Or calling it a tree
Could god make a butt plug so big his ass couldn’t take it?
Or more PG, could god make a burrito so hot he couldn’t eat it?
Could god make a butt plug so big his ass couldn’t take it?
Mos def gotta meme that, if I can find a picture.
A screenshot of the Simpsons episode it came from?
Ah, silly me, I didn’t know… but sure, please send a screenshot!
Oh no. You have to want to believe and repent … But that’s free will, which is also … Frowned upon
Frowned upon by whom? I seem to recall Christian theologians jumping through logical hoops for millennia to preserve both free will and an all-knowing God, specifically so that it would be just when God tortures people for eternity for sinning.
Eve eating the apple is the depiction of free will
Pretty sure that’s sin.
Edit: But you can’t have sin without free will, per Christian theology, if that’s what you’re getting at. Same way you can’t have not-sin without free will.
A lot of people have half-cocked, pseudo-theological ideology they’ve formed from surface-level understanding of various texts and online forum psychology discussions.
If you guys pray to me, I promise to notice you and pay attention. Which is more than you can say for any god.
(You have to do it out loud and in front of me though.)
Kneeling bags my nylons.
