(December 11, 2013 at 4:48 am)GodsRevolt Wrote: Is suffering inherently evil?It depends on the suffering. If I suffer to finish my dissertation, or to run a 5 minute mile, those are good things that I have chosen. Nobody should deprive me of those things. It's also not too terrible to suffer from a head cold or a broken arm. My parents will die, and I will suffer from that, but we all have to die. I have to die someday of something- these are the range of normal experiences.
If I suffer because a psycho kidnaps me and ties me up in his basement for 10 years and rapes me every day, it would be inexcusable not to intervene if you could.
There are many things that humans can and should take care of themselves- for instance, world hunger and millions of babies dying of treatable disease. But those are things we have only recently had the technology, and occasionally the will, to fix ourselves. For thousands of years, millions of people have lived short, brutal, agonizing lives because we didn't yet have the technology or the will to prevent that.
Just a note from God a few thousand years ago like- "Folks, mosquitoes carry malaria!," would have helped prevent boatloads of suffering for millenia. Or better yet, he could have NOT CREATED Plasmodium in the first place.
Suffering exists because shit happens. It's not evil in and of itself, unless you bring a god into the equation who could have made a world without Plasmodium. God is the psycho who ties you up in his basement.
