(February 8, 2015 at 4:04 am)Harris Wrote: Here you are not making differentiation between suffering and Evil. Suffering and Evil are not same concepts.They are for you, since you believe in the existence of a being who could eliminate both, but does not, and expects you to clear him of any fault for it.
Harris Wrote:Do you think Death is an Evil?Death is simply the end of the life cycle for organic life forms. For the believer in god, it's not death that is evil. It is god who is evil, for using death as a tool of coercion.
Harris Wrote:According to Quran, human life is a trial. For that reason life is short however, sufficient for our understanding of good and bad actions.And the reason for any of that is because it's how god set things up. God wants suffering. God wants conflict. God wants pain and death and struggle. That's not a trial, that's preparation for the role he intends for you. You think god is testing you in order to send you to a reward or punishment, but god is simply making you tough enough to become a soldier, able to dish out pain and punishment without remorse, and able to take as much as possible before you fall.
You're his video game toy, to be used and discarded. That doesn't strike you as evil?
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould