Comment by devjab
1 year ago
There is also the part where human suffering is our problem because someone ate an apple and it gave us free will and the responsibility of our own lives. Still doesn’t change the thousands of children who died in some war zone today, or the ones who died from starvation and so on.
If you really watch that sort of thing from the sidelines with the power to stop it, then you probably aren’t too benevolent. Then again, the last time the Christian God wanted to solve “our” moral issues He drowned everyone but Noah.
Anyway, I’m happy people find comfort in their faith. I even sort of wish I could, but I just can’t get past the watching of all the evil and doing nothing to stop it. You wouldn’t let your toddlers set fire to each other either, well, I hope you wouldn’t.
Again, within the Christian view: We've walked away from God, rebelled against him, and broken everything in the process, but it's his fault that he doesn't fix everything?
God doesn't stop evil, but he does limit it, and will eventually end it completely. Why doesn't he do so immediately, when he could?
The bible's answer is that God is giving people time to repent. See, we are part of the evil that needs fixed. It's not just diseases. It's not even just other people. It's us. But we want God to address all the evil in the world that harms us (and those we care about), but not address the evil inside us (that also harms those around us).
So think carefully before you blame God for not addressing evil immediately with big, sweeping measures. He's still in the "rescue" phase; the court cases will come.
> The bible's answer is that God is giving people time to repent. See, we are part of the evil that needs fixed.
The evil that he, according to that same bronze-age goat-herders' tale, made. Any reasonable reading of the whole story says -- nay, loudly screams -- that he's the ultimate asshole.
The one redeeming character in the fable? The Prometheus who gave Man wisdom, the ability to think for himself. He must have been some competing goat-herder tribe's god; a tribe who lost, and the winners wrote the history, painting him as the bad guy.