(January 5, 2015 at 10:11 pm)Rhythm Wrote:(January 5, 2015 at 9:57 pm)*steve* Wrote: Call it an excuse if you want. I call it a mitigating circumstance. If God is the creator of our reality, God isn't shielded from the pain, suffering, evil, etc. If God created the universe as it is then God must have thought the negatives were worth the positives.-and it just gets worse. Good to know that god decided for some poor infected 3rd world fucker that his miserable existence was totally worth it - by gods metrics...of course.....and worth it - regarding some unspoken "it". Now it's not an issue of necessity, but what some other party figures is worth it (whatever the hell that means)?
What about any of that is a mitigating circumstance? What do you understand a mitigating circumstance to be (in some other context, perhaps...)?
Example, a person has their hand caught in a bear trap. No help coming. They can cut off their own hand to live without the hand or die. Crappy choice but it is an option.
It's easy to get sentimental about these things. Another example, if you could save the lives of 100 million people by killing a hundred innocent children, would you do it?
However, I understand your indignation about a God who would let some poor guy suffer so that life could exist. The other mitigating thing, at least in my theological ontology is that, that guy's suffering is literally God's suffering as well. This comes from an ontology that I call an aspect monism or in Vishishtadvaita a qualified monism. The poor soul is an aspect of God.
I know it still sounds cruel. People are tempted to make God out as some sort of Big Daddy or Big Mommy where shit should never happen. Just ain't so, in my view.
