/lit/ - Literature

>God makes man in Eden
>Man is immortal in union with God
>Man disconnects from God via sin
>Man loses immortality
>Man keeps sinning
>Man keeps being mortal
The idea of if humanity would become immortal if it collectively stopped sinning is a fascinating theological hypothetical to me.

>>18754216
>God is omniscient
>God makes universe where crackheads set 1 year olds on fire
>Punchline is that they were unbaptised and will also be burning in Hell for eternity
>God is love

Also, citing the Bible is not a theological argument. Its just an appeal to an authority that only you and fellow bible thumpers recognise.

Problem of Evil status: Unsolved

>>18754209
Potential for the existence of evil and unfortunate accidents of nature (useless suffering) are necessary byproducts of a free will universe of cause and effect.

The value of free will is greater than the negative value of evil, therefore God in his wisdom is justified in allowing evil to be potentially and actually manifest.

>>18754209
What’s the ultimate answer to the problem of Evil? God is so omnipotent that he is able to bring the greatest of good from the greatest of evils. You can see countless examples of this demonstration in the Bible ranging from Job, Daniel, Jesus’ crucifixion and even from the conversion of St. Paul, who was a persecutor of the early Christians.

I’d like to see the Fedora boys in this board refute the quote in pic rel. I dare you to do so.

Seems like we would have to define what evil or good is, which, if God exists, would be ontologically dependent on him.

>>18754314
>le Citing the Bible is a fallacious appeal to authority

That fallacy only applies if your interlocutor doesn’t provide any other evidence to support the citations he makes from the Bible.

>le Citing the Bible is not part of a theological argument.
This stupidity of this statement right here. All of Christian theology comes from the Bible regardless of what denomination you come from.

>>18754363
Theology still requires reasoned argument from agreed premises. Your theology amounted to "if you agree that God wrote the Bible he has explained that we Suffer because of Original Sin."

>other evidence for his Bible stuff
Do you have evidence that backs up the Bible?

>>18754209
God is literally god; he gets to do whatever he wants, because he is god. Us humans (who are NOT god) can whine and complain and shake our fists and gnash our teeth all we want, but at the end of the day, God is god, and we all play by his rules. If he says we have to worship him and do all this other stuff if we want to live in paradise after we die, would you rather play by God's rules (no matter how much they don't make sense to us), or be right (and suffer eternal damnation?)

>>18754338
No it doesn't follow that a Creator could not exist and who yet does wrong to his creation.

But anyway, we're humans, and we don't like Suffering, and almost all our other reasoning about right and wrong hinges on Suffering, so why does Yahweh get a free pass for torturing kids and burning down apartment buildings?

You get points for at least mounting an argument though, callous and equivocal as it may have been.

Problem of evil arises out of the errors of Man not recognizing his true nature. To do this he must undertake spiritual practice to elevate his ethics. End game of all spiritual practice is ethics. How could you not understand this?

a good chunk of responses to the problem of evil and god's omnipotence is literally "he's God he doesn't have to follow logic" or "he doesn't have to follow human logic(wich is the only one accessible to us)", wich by its very nature (a negation of logic) is irefutable

>>18754336
Dostoevsky, who had read Augustine, already refuted this.

>inb4 Dosto was Christian
He was tortured by turns of Faith and Despair all his life, but its commonly agreed that the case he mounted against God through Ivan Karamazov in Chapters 34 and 35 of 'The Brothers Karamazov' was such a devastating critique that even Dosto himself could not answer it. He talks about this worry in his correspondances.

Enough pre-amble: Refutation of your picrel quote:

We are humans. Human understanding is limited. We cannot grasp how to get necessary Goodness
out of the example of a little girl whose parents tortured her in a freezing outhouse til she died covered in shit. It is therefore incumbent on us to turn our backs on whatever God is trying to cook up.

Bonus: Its linguistic slight of hand to say that Omnipotence functions at a metaphysical level - the ability to lift any stone is not the same as the ability to get Good things from Bad. So you have to be clear about what his Omnipotence is being used for. If God can just directly metaphysically change Bad into Good then you have the Euthyphro problem - can He make Sin Righteous?

If He can only retrospectively justify Bad things with Good consequences that occur later, then why should Bad be needed in the first place? Why can't He just do a plan that has all Good stuff, or maybe just skips the unnecessary, vicious and widely unheeded torture of little children?

And why do YOU get to make this argument on His behalf? Why do you get to say, against the evidence of History, that you are certain of His Goodness when you have defined said Goodness to be something beyond your ability to comprehend? What can you directly propose to me that is worth incredibly arbirtrary (or arbitrary-seeming) Suffering that God has created?

>>18754468
Put down the greeks for a second. The question of whether or not to bind yourself to a Will/Plan you do not comprehend is not precisely a logical one, but also an ethical and pragmatic one. You haven't boxed out the problem as effectively as you think you have.

>>18754458
>how could you not understand this
Douchebag language from a guy claiming to know about ethics, but I'll bite. Your argument is either irrelevant, because it pertains to a world without a Creator. Or, if it does pertain to a Created world, it simply fails to answer the question, because the question is not "how can we make this better?", its "Why did our omnipotent Creator choose to make things so shit, even if he only did so through allowing us 'Free Will'?"

>>18754409
Maybe its better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven?

Besides, if you believed what you said you would be living the life of an ascetic monk, don't lie

>>18754314
>don't include any scripture when making a theological claim
Did you specifically want a Deist rebuttal or some shit?

>>18754622
No I want all kinds of responses from all kinds of people and schools of thought but I reserve the right to rip into anyone whose post amounts to
>coz bible

>>18754209
>Please solve the problems of Evil and/or Useless Suffering ITT
1. God exists.
2. God is more akin to a force of nature like time or the concept of energy than a being like us.
3. Thus, blaming God for suffering or not preventing suffering is like blaming a hurricane for flooding your house or no putting out a wildfire. It makes no sense, the hurricane is not trying to screw you over. It simply exists, it is beyond good or evil.

>>18754646
Good and Evil are beyond a hurricane, not the other way around, because a hurricane is not conscious. But accepting your argument, all you are saying is that God is not good. That is more giving IN to the Problem of Evil than solving it. Anyone can say God's a faggot.

>>18754627
>>18754697
The conception of God you're trying to envision seems to be this weird mixture of a non-Abrahamic God who doesn't need theology while also being a caring and loving being who owes humans concern for their ethical systems.

>>18754708
Theology is fine. Even theology built on a scriptural reference is something to work with. Pure scriptural dogma is what's useless.

Can an All powerful God also be All Good if He created this world? That is the question at hand. And maybe the question of how we should react to God.

>>18754413
>does wrong
That's the fundamental question here. Whether or not something is wrong is debatable and not self evident as you make it seem.

>>18754209
>>18754336
This. Evil is allowed by God to make way for a good greater than the good, which said evil deprives momentarily.
But once we look as evil not as a force but merely a lack of good, things become even clearer. If we say Existence is good, and existence is Godwardness or accordance with the Logos, we can say evil is but the tendency of things to be forgetful or fleeing of God, which leads to their respective disintegration and decaying. The end of evil is thus intimacy with God, whereas its beginning is the opposition to God. And it can be said that he intimacy of adamic man was greater than ours, but lesser than that of man to come. For Adam was intimate with God out of being placed in Eden not out of willfullness! He lacked discernment and thus succumbed to the serpent, as was expected. The fruit than showed him, how he was evil for doing so, and it's man's lot to deal with that fact, to repeat the tale of the prodigal son, and thus gain a volition and conscience worthy of God. Man can become better than Adam, through Christ. For Christ tells man, how to be an conduit and repeater for cosmic will, how to face God and enact God.

>>18754209
Simulationisms infinite chain means a demiurge (evil) necessarily stands between us and first instance. First instance just needs to be indifferent with free will and suffering to be possible.

The problem is Christians think reality has inherent valence. If you’re a Buddhist suffering is emergent from consciousness.

>>18754476

I haven't read "The Brothers Karamazov" yet and I plan to once I've finished C&P and The Devils, so you win when it comes to your citation of Dostoyevsky's "refutation".

However, for the rest of your post, read this Anon's brilliant response.
>>18754989

>>18754989
If you take one of the horns of the Euthyphro dilemma, as you seem to be doing, and say that God defines the Good, you can say that creation is Good because God did it. You can then say that man's goodness (in the manner above defined) is his closeness to God and then you get your hierarchy of Future Man < Adamic Man < Modern Man, and you have your reasoning for why we suffer. It is partly based on scripture, but doesn't need to be, you are essentially saying that Man suffers because we are not yet close to God, and this suffering is Just because God defines what is Good. If God defines what is Good and his created this world then things SHOULD be what they are.

Okay, so walk into one of those Romanian foundling hospitals were the babies were dying because there were so many of them that the nurses couldn't even cuddle them all. Stare into the eyes of one of those infants and say that this anonymous tortured soon-to-be-deceased baby was manifested this way because of Justice and the Good.

Christians are habituated to be callous to this argument because they believe they have heard it before, but they haven't heard it properly if they are willing to surrender a concept like Goodness to the proven arbitrary whims of their creator. God does not determine the Good or the Bad. If the Bad is to mean anything it must mean the useless suffering of innocents. Our universe abounds with that universe. So you can't call it 'Good' and retain your moral sanity.

You will say that Free Will and our capacity to form an adult love and understanding of God is worth that Suffering.

Well if the world is fallen (in part) due to our Free Will, let's not forget that God created us to be this way. Out of his Omnipotence he chose THIS. Surely he is answerable then, and if the value of Freedom is so high, then only He will understand, and we will be forced to look at the little corpses and say Freedom was NOT worth what has happened.

1/2

>>18754989

2/2


You will tell me again that Free Will is very valuable because it lets us truly unite ourselves with God. Who are you to place that notional, hypothetical value above the suffering right in front of you? How can YOU, right now, comprehend something that will be WORTH the millions upon millions of suffering, ignorant, tortured lives that children and adults and animals have struggled through on this planet (and probably others) for untold millennia?

How can you comprehend ANYTHING on that scale? You can't, you can only say "It will be revealed in time." And the emptiness of that sentiment is utterly obvious when human suffering is right in front of you.

The only purpose it serves to look forward to a time when you believe you will be united with God (through Free Will or 'Greater Goods from Evil' or whatever) is that it makes it easier to ignore the horrors right in front of you. And if you stop ignoring them you will see that you can never comprehend a Plan that would make crib death necessary to Cosmic Love. You will see that you 'humility' is an evasion, and that you and God are truly, truly alien from eachother at the MORAL level.

And all of this assumes, of course, that you will be amongst the saved. But all but the most New Age of Christian doctrines present a criteria for Heaven that is both burdensome and circumstantial. Born to impulsive, weak, sickly, retarded or too far from the folds of Christendom? Sorry, it looks like Salvation is not for you. Elijah says that the number Saved will be 'some thousands'. And it doesn't matter if how you define Hell, whether its oblivion or brimstone or whatever, the point is that its eternal punishment and the litmus test was incomprehensible and blatantly unfair.

So tell me how a moral sane human being could possibly get on God's train save through fear of God Himself? Fear of the fire?

>>18755322
note: I put the 'greater than' symbols the wrong way

>>18755326
Why should the briefness that is suffering, be comparable to the eternal joys of the faithful soul? You can weep in compassion for those who suffer as you should, yes, but know that it usually are those who suffer, who get close to God quickly! They find the remedy to their ills. It is only those who don't suffer, who live in abundance, that experience true spiritual forgetfullness, and go on to complain, on behalf of the rest of the world! Those mothers in romania wept, for their cradle dead kids and pulled both the kid and themselves higher! It's divinity that aids those who are desperate, for the truly desperate people have an eye for it. To those who are ungrateful and wealthy, it remains hidden. May you find gratitude, anon.

ahh nothing quite like a theodicy thread to remind you this board is filled with demented bootlicking psychotics

>>18756487
The mothers did not weep. The babies were orphans and the orphanages were so overloaded that the babies were dying from lack of human contact. Literally anonymous neglected babies dying in pain. No plan could make that a necessity. Nothing we humans can conceive of. Nothing could make it worth doing that to a baby, let alone everything else that has been done.

Great pleasure in a hypothetical afterlife does not excuse the pain that was inflicted for no good reason - no reason that a human mind can comprehend and set its seal on. You cannot stand with God and be morally sane.

>>18755322
>Our universe abounds with that universe
I meant: "Our universe abounds with that kind of Suffering."

>>18756731
Rest assured they are in heaven. But in any case I'll pray for em.

Is theodicy a Christian philosophical problem? I’ve never heard of a Muslim or Hindu question the existence of evil. When tragedy happens I observe that other religions are even more affirmed in their beliefs

The agential source of Evil is the Demiourgos, Ialdabaoth; the root of Evil is the Dark, which is essentially, and principally, different, and distinct, from Good, the root of which is God.

The distortive perversion of Good into Evil is one of deflective mixing of the Light with the Dark, not one of absence of the Light, which merely entails nullity; this mixing, in turn, fosters ignobility, which ontologically constitutes the absence of nobility.

Theocide is a choice that is made in violation of one’s divine substance, not an inevitability.

Degree of suffering that is necessary for learning, and, consequently, for perfection, is directly proportional to degree of restitution that is required for nobility in spacetime, and to degree of glory that is imperative for nobility in timespace.

No noble one deserves to suffer, but, rather, it is the current conditions of the world that force, and necessitate, one’s suffering.

Read plantinga

>>18754716
No. God is not "all-good". Yes, he is all-powerful, so much so that he is not bound to morality, but instead morality is bound to him. It's best to consider God as morally neutral rather than just simply good or bad.

I don't understand what's so puzzling about this.

>>18758099
>To be significantly free is to be capable of moral good and moral evil.

Nope, I define sufficient freedom as being capable of ONLY moral good, and if you or Cucktinga had even an atom of nobility in you you'd know why. At least you aren't WLC denying that animals suffer and therefore God is off the hook for predation. Fucking reptoids the lot of you.

>>18758422
I define an argument worth reading as not including the terms "cuck" and "reptoid"

>>18758363
What's so puzzling is that you flat out admit to worshipping voluntaristic eldritch God who could wake up tomorrow and declare that murdering and eating your children is the highest expression of service to Him. No I'm not talking about Abraham, unlike you I've read Kierkegaard

>>18758427
>nothing to say
And I define a God worth believing as one that doesn't need midwits on tenure to weasel him out of accepting responsibility for a shit job. Next time just post the meme argument and don't speak when spoken to you fucking monkey

>>18757446
Yes, because Christianity binds Love to Power and doesn't possess the kind of finesse needed for the Zoroastrian solution to the problem (which similarly attributes omnipotence to God, but in a dualistic system)

>>18758439
OK, I still don't see how I'm wrong tho.

>>18754209
>solve the problems of Evil
There is no problem, evil doesn't exist.
>Useless suffering
No suffering is useless but: "To explain suffering is to consol it, therefore, it must not be explained"

>>18758684
retard

>>18754209
The silence of God is his most loving gift to us. Thus, evil exists, as a show of his love.

>>18758856
Stop using words if you've forgotten what they mean.

>>18758861
Read Simone Weil if you wish to understand such a 'contradictory' statement. Otherwise, if you intend to discuss out of intuition, go and get raped.

>>18758856

>>18758856
>>18758876
based

>>18758876
I've read Weil but I don't think she ever says suffering is a show of his love, only that suffering is. That nature is a great machine which occludes his light from us isn't exactly the same thing

>>18758909
Suffering is a way of recognizing his silence, thus a show of his love

>>18758915
Suffering is more a consequence of Nature's blind determinism than any intentional show of his Love, but fine, I thought you were another perfidious m*nist, in the context of Weil's thought I can accept that statement. I was wrong. You were right.

>>18758909
not him but I already quoted Weil's view of suffering >>18758684

>>18754209
>god is perfect
>only perfect cannot sin
>man is not god
>man is not perfect
>man sins

>heaven is perfect
>our world is not heaven
>our world is imperfect
>corrupt things happen

>>18758925
Yes, by glibly dismissing the problem, Weil was intensely preoccupied with suffering and evil. and the utilitarian view of suffering that is committed to the belief it is always and everywhere useful is exactly the kind of attitude she despised

>>18758932
>perfect being
>being an indirect cause of corruption
you can bake cope pretzels all day dude, the church hasn't had a satisfactory answer to this in 2,000 years.

>>18758942
God is by definition perfect (i.e. timeless, spaceless, powerful beyond our imagination, loving, and immaterial). Otherwise, it is not God. So there is God that is perfect or God doesn't exist, there is no in-between. Perfect can only create perfect. Therefore, God is not a source of corruption.

>>18758940
>by glibly dismissing the problem
No by rejecting that there is a problem or conflict with the existence of suffering and a loving God. You only frame it as a problem because you are unwilling to accept what she and others accept. Weil again, "How could a perfectly good God and a wholly wretched human love one another without suffering?"
It is the same rejection that you and those like you have to Augustine's answer to the unforgivable sin: blasphemy of the Holy Spirit is unforgivable and, by His Grace, God can forgive it. Like the other anon said if you are unwilling to give up your bind to your own intuition you cannot understand. No more than you can reconcile the origins for your perceived reason/logic that you impose on Him.

>>18758099
Why would I deny God's existence? It's also possible that he's just an asshole like >>18758363 and >>18758471 are saying.

>>18758684
Literally "Trust the Plan bro"

>>18758993
>Suffering is not a problem

>"How could a perfectly good God and a wholly wretched human love one another without suffering?"
God made a world where babies get starved and beaten by crackhead parents because He's so great that we couldn't 'Love' him if He didn't do this? What does the word 'Love' even mean at that point?

Let me have another stab:
God is so infinitely great that He has to be absent in order for us to rest in his 'silence' and thereby come to some kind of alignment/love with the Godhead whom we could not endure directly. Hence "Christ [on the Cross] is the silence of God." Hence why God lets us suffer.

He lets us suffer because that's the best way for some people (indeed a tiny minority in world historical terms) to best love Him without their brains overloading. And He created us and all things to be this way.

It seems that every new response derived to the problem of useless suffering casts the Christian God in a new and more horrifying shade of psychopathy. It's at the point now where your theodicies do not need to be refuted, simply COMPREHENDED and then they refute themselves. He made us such that we had to be majority tortured so that SOME people can partially perceive Him via his ABSENCE and give Him their Love?

In the words of Al Pacino:
"He's a tight ass, he's a sadist!"

>inb4 quoting a Miltonic figure makes Christian bros think they have the right to dismiss my opinions and spiritually unclean
Jesus ate with the tax collectors, anon, because only the sick need a doctor

>>18758993
I read Weil years ago, she is not the cuck advocate for suffering you think she is. She would not want Job to grovel.

>>18754209
define evil
if you mean when people do things that hurt other people then thats people doing bad things
but to some people those things might be good things
so there is no evil only perception
problem solved case closed

>>18759665
>Literally "Trust the Plan bro"
It isn't.

>Suffering is not a problem
Yes.

>He lets us suffer because that's the best way for some people (indeed a tiny minority in world historical terms) to best love Him without their brains overloading.
No. It is not by condition or causation but by correlation. Read Weil.

>>18759676
Nothing I said is in the advocation of or for suffering.

>>18760122
So you're saying "It just so happens that God's absence from His creation leaves a silence in which a select few people can meditatively come to know Him, even though this comes at the cost of pointless suffering for most of the humans/creatures that have ever lived."

and you think this means that Suffering is not a problem?

>just read
fuck you explain it yourself or don't claim it

>not by condition or causation but by correlation
So the whole thing is an accident, not even what God INTENDED when He removed Himself and let us all suffer?

This is some kind of fucked Buddhist Christianity. You are a joke. Most of the Christlarpers in these threads can at least be called moral psychopaths, you don't even HAVE an ethics to be judged by.

What a profoundly smug and unimpressive attempt at answering the big question.

>>18754209
why would God think we have learned anyhing, since we are still allowing Anglos, Jews and Mahometans to breathe?

>>18754476
weak

>>18754314
>unbaptized babies burn in hell

name me literally any denomination of Christianity that actually believes this. All of the ones that I can think of that have the strictest doctrines of hell dont even believe in the sacramental power of baptism. Orthodoxy certainly doesnt believe that babies burn in hell so idk what you are talking about

>>18758439
>eldritch
Funnily enough, that's a word which I think is perfectly apt to describe God, in that God's just beyond human comprehension, terrifyingly huge, etc.

>>18760494
Burn in Hell, stuck in purgatory, no Heaven - doesn't matter, the point is that there is arbitrary punishment (and Suffering) for no humanly comprehensible reason.

Besides, the fact that Christianity is modernising to confirm to a more sensible and humane morality is not a point in its favour. It comes at the cost of adherence to your dogmas and scriptures, it shows the weakness of the foundation of your religion and the fact that you cannot functionally commit to its tenants.

>>18760467
disprove it then

Also, the weight of human suffering over the ages can be described as anything but 'weak'. That weight is the evidence stacked up against the goodness of your God, and all you can say in His defence is 'Free Will' or 'Mystery'. That is the DEFINITION of a 'weak' argument

>>18760555
t. has not read enough theology to know what I mean by "strictest doctrines of hell"

and this has nothing to do with modernity either, some form or other of the doctrine of universal reconciliation is as old as the faith itself, even if some of them go a bit too far either in their fundamental assumptions about what reconciliation means (Origenism) or in asserting positively what cannot be known except to God (Universalism). The denominations that are most serious about a geographically separated hell with conscious eternal torment that you instantly go to after you die are the most legalizing and folkish protestant denominations, which are extremely modern by Christian standards, and most of them dont believe that the rite of baptism actually washes away a sin or achieves a new birth, and that achieving peace with God or repentance or whatever they call it is a matter of mystical intervention. Thus, no burning, since depending on the view a baby is either too innocent to be condemned by a just God or just incapable of understanding salvation and thus incapable of making a free choice about it, thus also being secure in its salvation.

>why is there evil
Because free beings (humans and demons) continually choose to sin
>why is there useless suffering
I dont know. Sometimes it is obviously caused by sin but other times it seems to be just bad luck, as in the example of birth defects or natural disasters. Those are the ones that really fuck with my head.

>waah waah but why did God let us commit the original sin anyway
I hate atheists so much

>>18760648
Christcucks always want to tell you about the larpy difference between their different doctrines instead of facing the big issues.

Even if every Christian and every piece of Christian scripture agreed that ALL souls go to Heaven after death, it still would not solve the Problem of Evil, because the suffering we experience on Earth would still be mostly pointless, or rather its possible Divine justification would remain incomprehensible to the human mind.

Justifications like 'Free Will' and 'Mystery' are not morally sane because they seek to excuse God from His crimes by placing an arbitrarily high value on abstract, empty notions with no inherent ethical content, whereas as the suffering and murder of children (to simply take a commonly occurring real life example) is an inditement on God's Plan of the most salient moral importance that it is possible for humans to conceive of.

Merely by pretending that ANYTHING is more important than alleviating the torture of babies you are placing yourself outside the sphere of human morality, just as denying the law of cause and effect would place you outside of discussing science. The argument is about compassion and human dignity, and references to the future revelations of an alien mind such as God's can hold no relevance. Either you are hungry right now or you are not, either you are horny or not, either you abhore the suffering of babies of you do not, this can't be changed in retrospect - or in fact fact it CAN, but only by changing your essential hummanity into something alien.

>not about modernisation because some recently founded denominations believe this or that
Christianity as a whole is being modernised from within and without, and has been for centuries. The current Pope is a reformer who is endorsing things that would have been unconscionable to the Church mere decades ago.

>inb4 not all Christians
So what. Majority goes first and the hardliners die out in isolation.
Besides, my point about the modernisation of Christian morals was a mere sidebar, I'm not interested in learning about the internal differences of a doctrine whose main fault is not epistemic or theological or metaphyiscal or even ethical but profoundly MORAL: It is wrong to make excuses for an aloof babykiller

>>18760750
why tho

>>18760744
>all the suffering makes sense except for the 'luck' based suffering. ie the suffering that makes no sense.

Also, Free Will isn't worth it if the price is torturing innocents, anyone who would consent to that price is a sociopath or a Yaweh-bootlicker

>>18754627
>>18754209
God doesn't care about your suffering. God is. The world is. Only these Abrahamist insist on a personal God. It is limiting to say God is all good. Did God not create everything, even the bad? But if God is more than all good, then there is no problem, no argument.

>>18754209
doesn't matter if God isn't real, to abide by him is preferable over the alternatives

>>18760793
>If you concede the argument, then there is no argument.
Teach me your ways, o great sage

>>18760805
coward

>>18760793
>picrel but unironically
And Dostoevsky was actually trained as an engineer

>>18760752
Let's address a few things. First, I replied in that way to your post because you made a specific theological/historical mistake, and an important one, that I was trying to correct. You made an inaccurate historical claim about Christianity that I was correcting. I wasnt dodging, because you hadnt addressed your points yet with me directly.

Secondly, free will is literally the wellspring of all ethical content, period, even for an atheist. There is no such thing as ethics in a deterministic universe.

Three, suffering doesnt matter on its own, and I mean this completely seriously. Why? Simple, because it is not permanent, except maybe in the afterlife. Call me inhuman all you want, but you will also reach this conclusion if you think about it intensively. At least, your own suffering doesnt matter. There were probably plenty of times as a baby where I suffered from hunger or exhaustion, but I dont remember any of them, and thus they have completely ceased to exist for me. I was suffering just yesterday, and nothing remains of it now but a shadow and a narrative memory. Outside of the moment in which it occurs, it is totally and utterly without content. Do I want to suffer in the future? No, but I recognize that whatever suffering I do go through, it is 1. possible to become accustomed to it, and 2. it has a definite and necessary end date, namely my death.

This understanding helps, a lot. However, other people dont see it this way, and tend to obsess about their own suffering, thus amplifying it. A baby has no way to learn this either, and so in those cases I do say that suffering is a big deal and that it should be avoided/ameliorated where possible.

>merely by pretending that ANYTHING is more important than alleviating the torture of babies

oh come off it. This is just a random assertion you are making based on a moral outrage that you have invented. Where did you get this notion anyway? Natural law? Instinct? Your "fundamental humanity", which I guess must be superior to mine? Have you ever seriously reasoned out the actions it would take for you to end the suffering of all babies for all time? It's a pretty grim track, I can tell you that right now.

>God is an alien mind

Yep. Literally every one of his revealed characteristics is incomprehensible. It's the most convincing part of Christianity to me.

Look, Im not pleased that babies suffer, or even pleased by the possibility that some humans will suffer eternally in Hell. However, the only way to understand this more is to be purified by grace and illumined by the presence of God within me, and that means repenting of my evil desires and embracing Him, so that is what I am trying to do.

>>18754209
>God is infinte, and as such, can be understood, in our limited, finite capacity, as being the predecessor of all attributes of our perceived reality, a true first cause
>creation as an expression of God must therefore contain all things capable of existing, as God could not be infinte while simultaneously denying the existence of things capable of coming into being
>humans, as an extension of God, are possibly the purest expression of this reality
>as such, humankind is a representation of the infinite, of all possibilities, the thoughts, the actions, the varying physicalities, that the form allows
>our consciousness complicates this for us because it brings about the illusion that the free will we exert on an individual, micro level is representative of the species as a whole
>each individual, of sound mind, is capable of either the highest good or the most horrific evils, but on the whole the balance of good/evil on a macro scale is likely a wash
>for as many good men as there are, there are as many who do evil
>nothing will change this; no social reform, government, or strong leader will eradicate the evil, or thevgood, from the human heart, as humans, as an extension of the infinite, must represent all facets of it
This is all I've got on the matter right now. I've been reading Spinoza and Schopenhauer lately, so it's largely derived from that.

>>18760814
The stool has the three legs, if you remove one, it no longer stands. Only Abrahamists have problems with this ridiculous stool. All the other religions think they are a bunch of unsophisticated yokels.
You are the one, I assume, who keeps saying this is just calling God is a dick. Yeah, that's it, from the human perspective God is kind of a dick. There's no eternal heaven either. Bummer man.

>>18760921
>Schopenhauer
He never used the "G" word for his system and he hated all religions.

>>18754209
If Christian God is real then he already knew everything, literally everything. The past, present and future and whatever exist beyond. So it doesn't really matters what what is good or evil or what people do with their lives. It's all predestined. He already know who will end up where.

So chill out it doesn't matter if you believe or disbelief because you're a retarded puppet.

>>18760852
>First
I truly believe we are in the weeds here, but you can press me on it if you like and I will continue to defend my assertion that, regardless of which denomination define x as y, Christianity entails a belief that innocent beings will suffer (and possibly be consigned to damnation or purgatory etc) without knowledge of the God who is consigning them. I also stand by the point that, even if ALL souls went straight to Heaven, God is still answerable for His crimes here on Earth. At least He is in the human mind, which is the only tool we have on hand.

>suffering doesnt matter on its own... because it is not permanent, except maybe in the afterlife
This speaks to the same point I made above. If we are being tested, and some of us fail in our ignorance/weakness and are damned, this is unacceptable, God is cruel. If it is not a test (because we all pass), if it is merely an ORDEAL, then it is both a flagrantly arbitrary/unequal one and it is still unacceptable, because a being with the power to grant me eternal bliss does not therefore have the right to also torture me, not for ANY length of time, and certainly He has no right to torture babies. Believe me I am getting sick of typing phrases like 'torture babies' but it is the absolute crux of the matter and must be stuck to at all times lest we lose our moral sanity in abstractions and non/post-human possibilities.

>unremembered suffering doesn't matter
If God did not exist it would not be okay to torture innocents. And yet it would be a logical certainty that any suffering you inflicted in such a case would eventually cease to be remembered. Suffering matters because of Justice. Justice matters because of human dignity. Human dignity matters because of human sympathy and self-consistency, which is part of self mastery which is part of goal seeking - which is living. And indeed, Justice could be rooted in many other ways, such as how Plato did it in Republic. Memory is not the deciding factor, that is callous.

>>18760852
(continued, 2/3)

>All things pass
I really don't like the Buddhist-y turn that this is taking. You can take up a doctrine of impermanence, take it to its logical extreme of no-self and the rejection of desire/temporality... you can do this, but you cannot deny that it flies in the face of your duty to your fellow man, who may suffer from your ascetic indifference. Just like there is such a thing as Justice, there is also such a thing as Responsibility.

>random assertion
>moral outrage
All I did was frame the argument in the way that can't be ignored because it gets at our most basic moral sense. There is no "what if they deserved it?" or "what if they learned a lesson?" with babies. Especially not the ones who don't survive. The Evil is absolute and apparent.

>Where did you get this notion anyway
I'm not going to insult you by pretending that you don't have the same notion inside you, or that it would not overwhelm your other spiritual notions if you properly confronted with it: properly confronted with the real and present deadly suffering of helpless infants. It's only our inability to readily call it to mind that leaves any room open at all for the standard theological responses a la 'Mystery' and 'Free Will'.
Like Lovecraft said: "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

>it would take some grim things to end all suffering for babies etc
Doesn't mean I can't rage against the God who made our world this way. I didn't choose how high the moral stakes were set, all I can choose is whether to ignore those stakes or not.


>no such thing as ethics in a deterministic universe
God had the choice to make a universe like ours (full of Freedom and Suffering, much of it pointless suffering not related to Free Will) and he made that choice. It was the Evil choice, because of the horrors that it caused Him to manifest.

>>18760852
(continued 3/3)

>the only way to understand the alien mind of God is to become more like It by actively conforming to its demands
I don't deny this for a second, the question is whether or not that's right.

There is a popular ethical problem about Gandhi and a magic pill. Gandhi (for the purposes of the problem) is 100% Good. Substitute in any mortal sage that you prefer.

Gandhi is offered 1 million dollars to take a magic pill that will turn him 1% evil. He reasons that he will still be %99 Good and can use the million bucks to do good in the world so he takes it. But then the next time he's offered money to take the pill, he's not as good, so it takes less money to convince him and he does less good with the money. Until finally he's fucking evil.

You can only make decisions based on your current ethics/morals, and you must acknowledge that, being a fallible mammal, your morals can be changed over time BY your decisions, behaviour. Reasoning over this totality its clear that you face a decision between endorsing baby murder and not endorsing it.

Also ask yourself why you want to be on God's good side. Is even just a little bit of it fear of damnation? You admit to being unable to comprehend him and his often painful ways, so it can't fully be love that draws you. Are you unwilling to admit a little bit of fear even to yourself? And what would the implications/ramifications of that fear truly be for the ethical conduct of your mortal life/outlook?

Thank you for reading my blog tho, this went way long lol

>>18758975
>i.e. timeless, spaceless, powerful beyond our imagination, loving, and immaterial
That's a weirdly long definition for perfect. I just say God is the noncontingent origin like Leibniz.

>>18754209
>Useless Suffering
No suffering is useless. We're meant to suffer.

>>18760932
Its not sophisticated to ignore premise of the question and treat it like a knockdown answer. If you and the cool kids are looking down on Christendom from your mud huts then fine. But Christians believe in a Good God. And the rich tradition of Western thought in which Christianity exists makes it both interesting and important to interrogate its point with them. Pagans, heathens, gnostics etc need not apply. This is between the (proper) Christians and their passionate critics. No one cares about your dude weed answer

>>18760452
>fuck you explain it yourself or don't claim it
I have explained it. It is a literature board. Read Weil if you need more of an explanation. It is only a big question because atheists refuse to accept the sufficient answer that has been provided. Again, it is no different than atheists' rejection of Augustine's answer to the unforgivable sin.

>>18760939
Just because I'm influenced doesn't mean I agree with him wholesale. I used the terms which I thought best expressed what I was going. God, in this case in the Spinozan sense, is infinity. Schopey might call it Nature.

>>18761086
https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-12-28/half-million-kids-survived-romanias-slaughterhouses-souls-now-they-want-justice

If your faith survives reading that article then its not something you should be proud of. Christ's own faith was shaken on the cross.

>>18761110
>Christ's own faith was shaken on the cross.
Also answered by Weil. Just read Weil.

>>18761104
>Schopey might call it Nature.
No, he never called anything God so stop applying your wishful onto Schopenhauer.

>>18761091
Explain it adequately then, or explain why my latest paraphrasal of your supposed explanation is not correct. I'm not going to read your recommendations any more than you will read what you're told to read, that's not how it works.

>atheists don't accept
Its a weak argument that depends on believing your opponent is stupid. Atheists claim to recourse to nebulous ideas lie Mystery and Free Will and even this stuff about 'Silence' amounts to nothing in the face of real innocents and their suffering. No morally sane person would accept abstract significances or promises of deferred Divine understanding in the face of tortured babies. You don't get to say that you are the misunderstood ones here.

>its a literature board
Its a literature DISCUSSION board

>>18761112
You can't talk to me until you've read the complete works of Dostoevsky and his correspondences, including his unsuccessful attempts to refute his critiques of Christian faith. You must also read Nietzche and Russell, even though they mostly contradict eachother. You can then proceed to listen to the complete audio and print works of Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens including debates, even though I think Hitchens was a faggot. And Tolstoy's Confessions, because he's better at disproving than proving. And a bit of Camus.

Then it will be less of a chore for ME to explain to you why I'm such a literary megabrain and should be agreed with on this anonymous forum. Its really the least you can do.

>>18761088
Yes, you've tried hard to narrow down the group that might converse to only those few devotees willing to discuss how many angels might dance on the head of a pin, but the argument is just as insoluble and, to those not fanatically blinded, just as dumb. The real problem is you already have the answer you want to hear in mind and you are just waiting for someone smarter to explain it. However they can never come, because it isn't intelligence that will make 1+1=85. The Christian God cannot exist and thinking really hard won't change that.

>>18761110
People post examples of suffering as if it were the first time suffering came into existence.
History of mankind is simply a history of suffering. One can only conclude that, by design, we were meant to suffer.

>>18761069
>>18761063
>>18761061
Part 1
I will totally admit that part of wanting to be deified is fear. Of course I fear eternal damnation. But that fear isn't what started me on this path, and it isnt the goal either. It is the absolute, minimal, beginner state of spiritual purification, and it is replaced over time by increasing love. The primary utility of fear of Hell is actually just in fighting the passions. What keeps me in faith is the love and grace of God. And frankly, the ethical implications of that fear dont matter. Why? Because alone out of all human beings, I am the single abomination, the filthy rebellious criminal, the utterly disgusting and unrepentant sinner. Nothing I do can actually make me worse than I always have been, I will only be expressing the truth of my nature. That is why I need God's help. You have framed this in a way that would suggest that I am an accomplice to some sort of universal, transcendental all-tyrant and that if he exists, the only moral choice is to resist him with all my might, when the fact of the matter is that I am a lunatic wrapped in a straitjacket desperately trying to escape so I can continue to destroy everything around me, while God is my all-patient and loving doctor.

>suffering matters because of justice
If there is no God, there is no justice. It simply doesnt exist. The only place I have found justice in the real, actual world, is the dictionary. It is impossible for humans otherwise.

Memory is completely the deciding factor. If you cease to remember something, it ceases to be for you. If everyone ceases to remember something, it ceases to be for everyone. As you said, all we have is the human mind. You may think it is callous, but it is true.

>I face a decision between endorsing baby murder and not endorsing it

Again, I believe in the resurrection of the dead, so the murder thing is not as operative with me. I certainly do not endorse baby torture. But here's the thing about Christianity; in every element of the doctrine, Christians face either an uncertainty or a seeming contradiction. God and His works simply cant fit into our minds. The Trinity, the dual natures and wills of Christ, the limits of Love and Judgement, the operation of uncreated grace; these things are all crosses for the intellect, and I believe that this is intentional. Part of repentance is enduring tensions. I believe that I will probably go to my grave enduring the tension about suffering babies, and I certainly dont see a way to reason it away, but this is a cross I am called to bear out of love for Christ, the most innocent sufferer in all creation, who died loving me, and rose from the dead to conquer death.

I honestly understand your position and would have agreed with parts of it a few years ago, but I have recognized that I am incapable of even creating and living a consistent morality on my own without Christ's help. I pray for the dead, especially those in hell, constantly.

>>18761061
>>18761063
>>18761069
and you have reminded me that I should also start praying for the children of the world. I believe that God can and will make all things whole that were broken by the first sin, though it may come to pass in a way that I cannot understand. And that is the essential difference between our points of view. I have spent years trying to tell myself what the world is, and I have failed miserably. Now I am trying to listen for God, and waiting for Him to be ready to tell me.

May God bless you and everyone more than any of us can imagine, and may He save every human being from all evil and suffering, from now until Christ comes again in glory. Amen.

>>18761139
>No morally sane person would accept abstract significances or promises of deferred Divine understanding in the face of tortured babies
But I'm arguing against the explanation or justification of suffering >>18758684

>Its a literature DISCUSSION board
I'm recommending you literature based on the discussion. Also, I'm not the 'Silence' anon. That is a different Weil shill.

>>18761155
I haven't read any Nietzche or Russel at all but I have read much of Doestevsky and probably all of Tolstoy. Not sure why you are bringing up Tolstoy and his Confessions, he echos a similar sentiment, especially towards the end of his life:
>There is no evil. Life is a blessing. If it is not, then know that you are at fault. And you have been given time to correct your error, to have the joy (the highest blessing) of correcting your fault. That is the only reason for time. If you do not correct your fault, it will be corrected against your will—by death.

There is no problem, Tolstoy knew this.

>>18754209
Wouldn't God NOT being evil be a potentiality? If God is pure existence, then he would both the greatest good and greatest evil.

>>18761204
God is neither good nor evil. God just is. As existence just is.
Casting moral judgement through the lens of human rationality is meaningless.

>>18761215
Wouldn't God being all existence, also be all types of morality, and none, at the same time (and beyond time)?

>>18761224
Again, you're using morality as humans conceive of it to cast moral judgements on God or creation itself. God operates on a different level, beyond our understanding.

The problem of evil and suffering is long played out, and not particularly interesting.
When people complain of evil and suffering, they might as well be complaining about death, or to put it more accurately, mortality.
Imagine your objection to suffering, if we were immortal then the suffering would cease, yes?
But that's missing the point. You're not supposed to wish that you're immortal, you're supposed to transcend the suffering (and by transcending it you'll gain immortality in the afterlife, if you go for that sort of thing).

>>18754209
there is no problem of evil. God is omnipotent so everything that happens is his will, and he is omnibenevolent, so everything he wills is good. so everything that happens is good, evil doesn't exist, prove me wrong, you fucking CANT

>>18761241
(Diff anon but) Then humans cannot be moral actors. We ate off the tree of knowledge be still have no understanding of sin. What is the point then?

>>18761259
>God is omnipotent
If that's true, why would he bother creating anything. Creation implies that he isn't omnipotent.

>>18761268
what?

Why is this on /lit/?

>>18761267
Since suffering is universal (to greater or lesser extents), regardless of the time or place, it seems that humans ultimately have only 2 things universally in common.
Self awareness and suffering. Use former to overcome the latter. That's the point.

>>18761164
Hey man I have to shoot off but I've made a throwaway email that you can contact me on if you want to keep up the debate. I find your points interesting and have also wrestled with the whole 'taking responsibility for the sins of the world' idea through thinking about Dostoevsky's Father Zossima character.

>theodicy555777@gmail.com

Anyone else can email me too with serious arguments.

>>18761182
I think we have more to discuss as well if you want to email the throwaway I set up. Cheers

>>18761269
If you were omnipotent, and knew every single outcome of infinite actions before they even took place, why would you bother creating anything?

God here.

I filled this universe with somewhere in the order of a hundred billion galaxies. I filled each of those galaxies with somewhere in the order of a hundred billion stars. On the surface of a speck of dust orbiting one of those stars, some sentient beings wonder why they suffer. Some of them even use the existence of suffering among themselves as an excuse to criticize me.

>>18761281
love

>>18761286
Yes

>>18761286
Hey big G, imagine the balls on these little microbes of the universe that call themselves humans.
Imagine criticizing something you can't even scarcely comprehend. Crazy shit.
If I were you, I'd send a meteor, or several down their way. Do with them what you did with the dinosaurs.

>>18761276
I don't really see how this relates to our apparent inability to be moral actors due to God's incomprehensiblity but crows and dolphins suffer and are self aware. Did Jesus died on the cross to save the dolphins too? Did they also eat of the forbidden fruit? Like how did they even pick it?

>>18761310
>but crows and dolphins suffer and are self aware.
We don't even have a grasp on our own self awareness or where it comes from, so I'm always skeptical when the science fags proclaim there's other forms of sentience.

>>18761317
*self awareness
not sentience.

>>18761287
4 years old kid on my street got burned and suffered from a slow brutal death after 10 days. My friend who stayed with in hospital can't forget his screams that he heard and watched him bleed from all over his puss filled body. Doctors gave kid pain killer injections and but kid's kept screaming from pain. And to imagine that such pain has happened on this planet millions of times is too much. No, thank you I don't need such fucking love.

>>18761326
Plus his mother was inside house praying to God and her kid went outside and started playing with fire.

>>18761317
It doesn't take a PhD to figure out some animals attack their reflection in your windows over and over and some don't. Nor are the other mirror tests so unbelievably esoteric.

>>18761326
>And to imagine that such pain has happened on this planet millions of times is too much
It has. And it will again. Your own inability to transcend it won't change that. The suffering will still be there.

>>18761335
Sentience =/= self awareness.

>>18761339
Good thing the claim wasn't about sentience then.>>18761276

>>18761351
So you think a cat has self-awareness because it paws at its reflection in the window?
That's not what self-awareness means.

>>18761336
It's not the question about myself but the collective pain of every living organisms. That kid is the evidence of what happen s on a wider scale. Not amount of smiles of little kids or love can cure what happened to that kid. Nothing can cure the trauma of my friend who heard those scream and wiped the puss and blood from the body of that 4 years old kid.

>>18761355
No ... that's actually a cat failing the mirror test. Cats aren't self aware, at least in that way. But yes, being able to recognize yourself is self awareness. I'm not sure what definition you are using maybe you'd like to consult a dictionary and get back to us.

>>18761358
It's one of the worst things that can happen to someone, but is it any worse than the countless slaughters we've enacted against each other in the past?
Even if God didn't exist, the purpose of life would remain unchanged. You'll never eliminate suffering, the only logical action then is to overcome it, if you can.

>>18761374
You're the one with the wrong definition bud.

>>18761380
Yes? And? What is it then? I'm on pins and needles here.

>>18761377
My objection is with the statement that this world is built on love. And I don't see it how it is based on love. Why there was a need for creation in which such horrible things happen innumerable times?

I would rather burn in hell for eternity than bend the knee in front of such brutal nature.

>>18761390
Well again, the manner of someone's death isn't as important as the death itself.
If the child didn't burn alive, but was instead killed by any number of ways, the suffering of the parent would still be great.
What you're asking for is immortality, but then love wouldn't exist.

>>18761403
>the manner of someone's death isn't as important
Easy for you to say but not for someone who has seen or felt the slow agonizing death. My friend told he wished at one point the kid would die when saw him suffering. Yes, suffering of parents is concerning but NOT at all more than the kid who suffered. I guess the kid also experienced love in those 10 days? I am not advocating for immorality I have seen the world isn't built on love.

>>18758099
Mackie: let's just define God out of existence instead of into it

This world exists because God loves me.
QED expo facto

>>18761429
Suffering exists because mortality exists.
Immortality would eliminate suffering, but you can't have love without suffering.
So one must choose between love and suffering.
>Easy for you to say
It is. And it doesn't change the fact that I'm right.

>>18761443
>can't have love without suffering.
not true

>>18761446
It kinda is though, no offense.

>>18761449
I love my mother and our relationship has never suffered. I love my girlfriend and our relationship has never suffered. You are simply wrong and fetishize suffering.

>>18761454
Your mother will die one day, and then you will know suffering.
If you were both immortal, then neither of you would ever suffer, but neither would you love each other.

>>18761443
The amount of coldness which is required to justify the excruciating suffering of an innocent kid for saying that all this is for love. Just fuck off.

>>18761460
Your definitions are retarded

>>18761463
Coldness or not, it is what it is anon.
>>18761464
How so?

>>18761466
It should be obvious why I think so as I told you. That reply was also retarded.

>>18761469
>it's retarded because I say so
okay anon

>>18761466
>Coldness or not, it is what it is anon.
Thank you for showing me the true colors of Christianity.

>>18761477
I'm not Christian though.

>>18754336

This would make him more Evil than Evil.

>>18754209

There being a Phenomenal world is Evil therefore it is Evil.

>>18761443

These are the dumbest posts I've seen in months. Your lack of comprehension of the initial question is only matched by the incoherence of your own replies. I'd rather read what the frater anselmo guy copy-pastes from his shitty blog.

>>18761519
What did I fail to comprehend? That evil and suffering exist because we're mortal? Please, by all means, illuminate me anon. How am I wrong?

>>18761527

What is there to explain? You're mapping Evil and its alleged opposite onto mortality and immortality using nothing but your (terrible) wishful thinking.

>>18761555
Nice trips. But no, even if you solved every problem humanity faces through governance, political or economic systems, you still wouldn't be able to solve the suffering caused by death.
Even our strongest biological desire, to pass on our genes, stems from the fact that we're mortal. This in turn causes all sorts of problems and further increases suffering, being that almost all of human endeavors exist due to our desire to pass on our genes.
It's precisely because of this fact that man cannot solve his problems through politics or economy.
So yeah, feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

>>18754209
Jesus is the answer of the thedice problem.

>>18761575
>restating the same shit again

zzzzzzzzz

>>18761606
>you're wrong
>but you're only wrong cause I say you are
thanks for playing anon