(August 18, 2010 at 3:03 am)tackattack Wrote: I thought I addressed this but I'll rephrase.
God created everything, therefore he created suffering. It's productivity, usefullness, or causes are given to us in the form of choice. I'll illustrate. God make a bi blak rock. He created humans who will have to move that rock to create a path. What the human's do with the rock (how it's disposed, moved, etc) is up to us. They put it aside and by the rock's round nature it rolls around and kill somone. Was that God's fault for creating the rock, putting it there in the first place, or is it the human's fault for not watching what the hell he was doing? Suffering is a tool that's necessary for evolution and thiving as a species. It's worth (needless or productive) is based on our involvement in it.
You still haven't addressed the issue, which is that God could give us choice without suffering, and certainly without needless suffering, such as that caused by volcanoes. Why does he allow volcanoes to erupt? Why did he choose to create us through evolution, if it causes so much suffering?
Quote:Did you sponsor 5 families in your home so the don't have to live in a village on the side of a volcano? Did you help build levees that protected a village from flooding? Have you done research to help prevent infant death rates from climbing? Our capacity for violence, war and sadism is not our fault? That sounds like schewing accountability and a lack of personal responsibility. I am responsible for my own desires and animalistic instincts and it's my social obligation to use the roductively not destructively.
No, I've done none of these things. Maybe I should feel guilty about that; I'm not sure. Certainly I'm more ethical than many people, though no doubt less ethical than quite a few. All that's irrelevant, though. My point is that human nature is such that people are inclined to harm each other. God could've given us more compassion, say, and made the male hormone in particular less conducive to aggression. If compassion is not incompatible with free will at the moment, why would more compassion be? Nobody is responsible for their desires and instincts; that's nonsense. Whether they obey them is perhaps their responsibility, but again, it's God's fault for giving us those desires and instincts in the first place.
'We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.' H.L. Mencken
'False religion' is the ultimate tautology.
'It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.' Mark Twain
'I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.' Abraham Lincoln
'False religion' is the ultimate tautology.
'It is just like man's vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.' Mark Twain
'I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.' Abraham Lincoln
