(April 2, 2015 at 12:12 pm)Lek Wrote: I don't understand why God must remove all these things from the world in order to be loving, and I do see good coming from suffering. If you give your children everything and shield them from all adversity, all you will end up with is spoiled brats who are unable to fend for themselves. If we approach suffering rightly, it will make us stronger and better people.This seems to imply that Adam and Eve were created with the need to suffer adversity, lest they become spoiled, defenseless brats. Which would explain why Eve so readily fell for the serpent's story and why Adam so quickly ate of the fruit as well. God, having designed humans to require some form of strife in order to develop properly, gives them paradise and coddles them, and the end result is unavoidable. The story also would imply that this extends to spirit creatures, else the devil would never have been.
That further implies that all living beings are part of an inescapable cycle unless god deliberately re-wires everyone, thus eliminating free will. Either he "fixes"everyone so that they cannot ever break the rules again, or we continue to run the risk of having it too good for too long, which inevitably leads us to hell. If there are multiple gods this may just be his part in some multi-verse reality show where he's competing to see who can screw over the most people. If there's only the one god, then he's doing it for his own amusement or because he's just that incompetent. I'm not sure which is more horrifying.
"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