Comment by piva00
6 days ago
Read it again, I said: It's a cheap shot because the religious explanations to suffering are cheap, they are retconning a fundamentally flawed logic that is not possible to exist unless you invent a yet more convoluted reason. They still do not explain why the suffering can only be abated by being more pious, a good being wouldn't make you beg on their feet to show you deserve to be spared from the suffering it created.
So again, if there's a God, it doesn't care. If your God exists and makes you have to pray for it to solve the suffering it created, it's a sadistic one.
Your argument assumes that an all-powerful being that permits suffering must be the source of suffering and must be sadistic. Those are both specific metaphysical claims that require their own defenses. As one example: Do your parents, who allow you to suffer learning in school, not care about you?
You're treating it as self-evident when there's nothing self-evident about it. The free will defense, soul-making theodicy, and skeptical theism all offer coherent responses. You don't have to find them convincing, but 'I don't buy it' isn't the same as 'it's logically impossible.'
My parents aren't all powerful, it's not a remotely close analogous to the force supposedly responsible for everything there is.
Soul-making theodicy uses one of those cheap cop outs: suffering is necessary because humans need to learn.
Basically all defences use the cheap excuse "you don't understand because you are human", leaving no logical argument left for us to find and requiring just to accept that the all-loving being creates suffering for reasons we cannot know. Which, again, is sadistic.
At this point, I find it interesting that for never mentioning what religion I follow, and for merely suggesting that prayer may be beneficial; your reaction is stronger than if I had simply blamed speaking to crystals at 2 AM after 5 glasses of wine in an attempt to manifest a job. If I had even suggested going to a My Little Pony Convention in an attempt to do networking, you would’ve scoffed less, which hardly implies good faith even with yourself.
Also, your arguments are hardly original. They are 2,300 years old, originating with Epicurus, older than both Christianity and Islam. Regurgitation of them with such certainty is Reddit 2013-era levels of uninspired; as though both religions did not address these arguments from their foundation. I also find it astoundingly arrogant, because it implies that religious people have never witnessed or endured intense suffering, lest it be self-evident.
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