Your personal take on “The Problem of Evil?”

[Greed™]

Go hardcore,people christians say is the god's way of doing things.

Ask everyone christians will go nuts this question

Why do god let child around the world be raped,murdered,humiliated,if he is so powerful why he don't stop their pain,he can't or he doesn't want to do so? is heaven that good to compensate rape?

[XK9_Knight]

As for the OP. You have two options, either your god watches terrible things happen and does nothing to stop them or he can't stop them, that either makes him immoral or impotent. A third explanation would be that he doesn't stop evil because he can't because he doesn't exist.

Well, there’s a fourth option, God’s evil and think it’s funny.


From my perspective yes, evil is a problem, even if I were to accept premise 3 evil would still be present. Perhaps I could have done a better job connecting David’s argument from nonbelief with the problem of evil but my the question I am driving at is how it affects you.

How do you deal with evil or the thought of injustice when it arises?
How do you feel towards Christians who say “God is Love?”

Probably, most importantly (what I’m trying to get at), was there an occasion in your life when you saw (heard, read) something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

[Foxaèr]

I'll take the option that posits god does not exist except as a fictional character and that from a literary perspective the evil god character is not a deity worthy of acknowledgement.

[Greed™]

something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

once i downloaded a video from a torrent site with three words of the alphabet,just a innocent tag for some,but as i watched the video a saw the rape of a 1 year old being anally penetred and crying.

to this day i dont understand why i downloaded this video,maybe because it used a name of a innocent game back then.

if god exist he deserve punishment and i will be the first of the line.

[tjakey]

Christian ideology suggests that every person's sins can be forgiven so long as they accept, believe in, and worship the Christian god in the approved manor. (Specific details of that accepting, believing, and worshiping differ from sect to sect, but perhaps that is a different reason for not bothering with the god.) So it doesn't really matter what other sins, atrocities, evils, murders, rapes, child molesting, thievery, etc., etc., one might have committed, the only real thing that can land you in hell to be tortured for all eternity by a loving god is that you don't love and worship the god in the approved manor. He isn't really offended if I rape you child, sell your wife into slavery, and burn you at the stake after stealing everything you own, so long as I love Him and kneel at His feet.

Any being that demands love and worship and backs that demand with a threat of torture and brutality, isn't a being worthy of being worshiped. Any being that accepts the worship of a killing, raping, child molester and gives him a free pass to heaven in exchange isn't much to boast of either. (The current Islamic god is a real loser when it comes to this one.) For me such isn't a being that can be worshiped even if it does exist and even if it intends to torture me forever. The fact that It also tolerates / ignores / or facilitates endless evil acts every day doesn't make it any more attractive.

All of the various sects of the Abrahamic religions suffer this same moral morass, for the god itself is inherently evil. It seems all of the other gods invented by human kind are similar though its hard to say that for sure, since literally thousands of them have been imagined over the generations. It seems to me that any reasonably discriminating person with a basic human morality should find any of the gods as they are described, as too flawed to bother with.

[Darkstar]

As for the OP. You have two options, either your god watches terrible things happen and does nothing to stop them or he can't stop them, that either makes him immoral or impotent. A third explanation would be that he doesn't stop evil because he can't because he doesn't exist.

B-but, god has to let children get cancer or else their parents won't learn some cryptic moral lesson! Can't you see how great god is? You have to look on the bright side!

[Minimalist]

as there an occasion in your life when you saw (heard, read) something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

No. The lack of evidence for god (any god) was sufficient. Anyone who bothers to study the evolution of human cultures outside of their own will soon see that many primitive cultures developed the same kind of stories to explain how they got there.

There really is very little difference between the Hopi myth and your precious bible nonsense.

The world at first was endless space in which existed only the Creator, Taiowa. This world had no time, no shape, and no life, except in the mind of the Creator. Eventually the infinite creator created the finite in Sotuknang, whom he called his nephew and whom he created as his agent to establish nine universes. Sotuknang gathered together matter from the endless space to make the nine solid worlds. Then the Creator instructed him to gather together the waters from the endless space and place them on these worlds to make land and sea. When Sotuknang had done that, the Creator instructed him to gather together air to make winds and breezes on these worlds.

The fourth act of creation with which the Creator charged Sotuknang was the creation of life. Sotuknang went to the world that was to first host life and there he created Spider Woman, and he gave her the power to create life. First Spider Woman took some earth and mixed it with saliva to make two beings. Over them she sang the Creation Song, and they came to life. She instructed one of them, Poqanghoya, to go across the earth and solidify it. She instructed the other, Palongawhoya, to send out sound to resonate through the earth, so that the earth vibrated with the energy of the Creator. Poqanghoya and Palongawhoya were despatched to the poles of the earth to keep it rotating.

http://www.gly.uga.edu/railsback/CS/CSFo...tions.html

[rexbeccarox]

From my perspective yes, evil is a problem, even if I were to accept premise 3 evil would still be present. Perhaps I could have done a better job connecting David’s argument from nonbelief with the problem of evil but my the question I am driving at is how it affects you.

How do you deal with evil or the thought of injustice when it arises?

What do you mean by "evil"?

How do you feel towards Christians who say “God is Love?”

I just... don't have the same working definition of "love" I guess. There's nothing to feel; nothing to judge there.

Probably, most importantly (what I’m trying to get at), was there an occasion in your life when you saw (heard, read) something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

"There probably is no god" came long before I started to understand the implications "evil" possessed. My lack of belief came from reasoning that it is impossible for the Bible (I read it all the way through for the first time when I was six, then again when I was 11, 16, 23, and 27) to be anything but a collection of stories. A few years later, the realization that atrocities occur, despite assertions of a creator watching over us, just made me more curious- and sometimes more horrified- about religion in general, and, more specifically, Christianity.

[Esquilax]

Probably, most importantly (what I’m trying to get at), was there an occasion in your life when you saw (heard, read) something you felt was immoral, and concluded from it “there is no God?”

Speaking rationally, the existence of evil or immorality doesn't point to a lack of god, so I could never reach that conclusion from the stimuli you mention. What the existence of evil does say is that whatever god does exist, if one does, is not a god worth worshiping, is not the source of morality, and if it does care at all about humanity, it does so through a moral frame of reference so alien and unconnected with the lived reality of actual human beings as to be completely useless and incomprehensible. That god would be the perfect case study in "Blue and Orange" morality.

No, the reason to not believe in a god is the lack of evidence for one. But I take comfort in knowing that any god that does exist and is responsible for the world as it is either doesn't care enough to punish anyone, is so immoral that any action I take would be a crapshoot anyway, or is so completely outside of any experience I might have that if I actually were to meet it we would be unable to communicate properly.

[bennyboy]

I don't think POE disproves the idea of some kind of deity. It does, however, prove that literalist X-tians have trouble with basic logic.