Well that’s just because God works in mysterious ways you lil silly Billy.
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.
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.
I agree with you. Relative truth is much more useful in real world arguments. This may be why I like the problem of evil so much, anything “sky-daddy” related to me is just a fun mind game.
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.
Despite this i would definitely have a cup of tea and philosophical discussion with Dostoyevski if given the chance.
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.
AFAIK there is no proof that this paradox was actually coined by Epicurus, despite later being attributed to him. Epicurean philosophy holds that the gods exist, but don’t interfere with anything, so it’s pointless to fear or appease them.
Hence, it would be a later invention attributed to him.
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.
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.
Zoroastrianism Vs Christianity
Please expand.
Zoroastrianism…Vs…Christianity
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.
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.
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.
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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.
sadfasfsadfd
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 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.
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?
Is Scott Alexander a dickhead like Yudkowsky?
I’d be shocked if he wasn’t, depending on one’s definition of dickhead. Everyone is a dickhead for some definition of dickhead.
UNSONG is still a great fantasy story and a master class in foreshadowing, regardless of how one feels about the author.
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
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.
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?
If this were multiple choice, then I would go with #2.
Able and willing are fine and dandy until you have free will to deal with. You can tell people the right way to be all day, but in the end you gotta come down and throw some bitches around like rag dolls. We all assume god has the ability to do whatever they want, but we never think they have rules they are forced to exist by. Rules that keep the very fabric of existence from unraveling. In short, if god is capable of being omnipresent, and omnipotent, then our ability to express free will is in danger because they could just force us to be whomever they choose, with how things are setup it makes a lot more sense gods a smoker, drinker, pissed off, and being forced to fix this shit manually while a ton of shit heads keep trying to force everything in the wrong direction. Gods an admin in a free will zone, and has specific abilities they can rely on to resolve issues, but it can take time like cleaning up the streets of rancid goulash vendors. But really, that implies we are all just visiting a zone, and once we leave it gods not god, just an admin in a zone we are no longer a part of.
No. Not all “evil” is caused by people, and not all bad things caused by people were done with that intention. There is a very large margin for “less evil”, where natural disasters could just not exist and people with good intentions get the information they need to not do something bad accidentally.
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.
I’m not trolling and this is not intended to make anyone angry.
<spoiler title>
You don’t have any control over what other people believe. You can disprove them, humiliate them or assault them with a baseball bat and they will still believe what they believe. I know you’re angry, but hurting people who did nothing to you doesn’t make you right, it makes you an asshole.
That’s the fundamental tenet of faith: belief without, or in contradiction of, proof.
Faith, by definition, cannot be reasoned into, therefore canot be reasoned out of.
The problem is that there a various faiths that require evangelism which harms others or require harm, e.g. denying health care.
There are no faiths which require denying people health care. Cruel individuals interpret their faith that way, but it’s not the faith responsible for it, it’s the individual.
But my point is that even if you find a truly evil faithful person and show them a long list of data proving that their actions are immoral, you can’t make them stop believing. You don’t have control over it. You’re trying to have vengeance on a belief by checkmating one of its believers and that can’t work; you’re just hurting someone in vengeance.
Christian Science and Jehovah’s Witness both absolutely refuse some health care, even for the dying.
This is absolutely not a No True Scotsman scenario, but institutional mandates such as the JW stance on blood transfusions.
Does that prevent any of the members from giving the care anyway? You’re blaming the religion, which is a nonintelligent entity. It doesn’t have hands. It doesn’t speak. It can’t actually do anything.
There are people who let their aging grandparent die and cite Johova’s Witness/Christian Science as the reason they did it, but they don’t actually believe. It was just an excuse. It’s always an excuse. The individual does not in any way have to follow what their religion tells them to do. It always comes down to the individual, and is never the religions fault.
This is a good thing. It means the individuals are the ones responsible for the suffering. And they DO have hands that can chained, voices that can be silenced.
The organization has power you are unwilling to admit. Shunning and disfellowship for not blindly following the rules are incredibly powerful tools used against people who have no other community or in some case even exposure to said.
In the end, it is the responsibility of the individual to take actions to save themselves and others, even when there are negative ramifications from their chose group, but that does not absolve the group nor their specific religious affiliation(s).
you can’t make them stop believing
I think we’re actually aggressively agreeing with eachother.
i’m dtf
DTF?
searches interwebs
Roger.
I’m also Roger, good to meet you, top or bottom?
Why is a Greek philosopher from before Jesus was born saying “God” like it’s one person’s name and saying he’s omnipotent?
This seems made up.
The Jews would like a word.
Good point. Drag forgot that before the Roman Empire converted to Christianity the Greeks practiced Judaism
I know you’re just a dumb troll, but I’ll respond for the curious people that might read this. Alexander the great(who was also Greek and reigned between 336-323bc, so shortly after Epicurus was born), had one of the largest empires in history, reaching all the way to India. Alexander’s legacy includes the cultural diffusion and syncretism that his conquests engendered, such as Greco-Buddhism and Hellenistic Judaism. So yeah. Hellenistic is another way of saying Greek, as in Greek Judaism. Which is where the god thing comes from, I guess.
So you’re honestly telling drag that this is a genuine quote from Jewish philosopher Epicurus?
If anyone actually cares, this is the muslim answer to how a good God can allow evil and why humanity was created with all its flaws
It’s an important question and worth taking the time to watch the video
It’s an important question
Only to the mentally ill who need cognitive dissonance to keep on keeping on
Can you expand on this? Honest question, not being rude
Religious people whose religion tells them their god is inherently good or benevolent and all-powerful (Abrahamic ones for example) feel a cognitive dissonance when they see that evil exists in the world, and thus have to discuss it with each other in order to figure out the best doublethink to maintain their religion
To those of us not trying to prop up a fundamentally self-contradictory belief system it’s not an important thing to think about _at all because our beliefs don’t require conflicting statements to be true
Quran 2:30 ˹Remember˺ when your Lord said to the angels, “I am going to place a successive ˹human˺ authority on earth.” They asked ˹Allah˺, “Will You place in it someone who will spread corruption there and shed blood while we glorify Your praises and proclaim Your holiness?” Allah responded, “I know what you do not know.”
No denial of evil here, I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the video I linked. Watch at least halfway
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.
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!
