(August 31, 2013 at 3:00 am)Beta Ray Bill Wrote: Everyone has wondered about this: why is there so much evil and suffering in the world if God is supposedly loving and able to stop it?
The Bible says that God is all-powerful and all-knowing. Doesn't he know about every act of evil that ever was and ever will be? Why does he allow this suffering to happen? Doesn't he care?
No, he doesn't. Please let me explain.
Some Christians say that God allows evil into the world because he has a master plan. So, basically, every murder, rape and abortion that has happened and ever will happen was by His design. He allows us to do these horrible things, so basically we are doing his will, and have not sinned in any way, or ever can.
Another defense is that God is God, and he is allowed to do anything he wants and so whatever we want is irrelevant. That again falls back onto the murder, rape and abortion atrocities. Does a god that does these things because he wants to sound like a good one?
What about free will? Doesn't God give us that? Of course not. He knows everything, and is planning every second of our existence. We are all merely pieces of his puzzle. Satan was his design. So was the Holocaust. What about the 2.4 million deaths in the Bible? God did all those, and quite often, if you research the OT, you'll see that he is quite pleased with himself.
But, as many of you are already thinking, the real answer is that there is no God. If there truly was a God that "loves love and hates hate" then existence would be a lot more pleasurable than it is. Following reasoning and study, we can obviously see that existence has no guiding force. Our fates are not decided. If they were, I would want nothing to do with so evil of a God as the one in the Bible.
It is great that you bring this up. I was reading Genesis today, and I came across a stupid passage concerning God's disgust with all the corruption in the world:
The Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And the lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the lord said, "I will blot out man whom I have created from the face of the land, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens, for I am sorry I have made them." But Noah found favor in the eyes of the lord.
Genesis goes on to say that the flood wiped out all humans except for those who rode on Noah's Ark. But why didn't God just kill all the corrupt people? He's God, remember; he's omniscient. Why did he make Noah and the animals go through all that trouble to build the ship?
Better yet: Why did the corrupt people back then have to die in the flood (which there is not geological evidence for)? Why do the many corrupt people today get off scott free? It sure would be nice if all the Wall Street bankers who illegally foreclosed peoples' homes would die in a flood.
