AMUSING, INTERESTING, OUTRAGEOUS, or PROFOUND

One of my favourite discussions of the problem of evil is the chapter below. It's a discussion between two brothers regarding God and suffering in the world if the end result is eternal paradise. TW: child abuse, suffering and death. Children are used in the argument specifically because they don't deserve suffering, they are innocent according to Dostoyevsky (I easily agree).

https://philosophyintrocourse.com/the-course/part-2-does-god-exist-philosophy-of-religion/dostoyevskys-rebellion-chapter-from-the-brothers-karamazov/

It's heavy but worth the read imo, and not unnecessarily graphic.

You know what they say, the best way to make someone an atheist is to make them actually read the Bible from front to back.

You remind me of my wife.

When we met, she introduced me to lots of short stories that made me reconsider my perspective on things. This was one of them. She still makes me reconsider my convictions whether I want to or not. I sure do love her for that.

"Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?"

No one can convince me that abuse is not evil. Is it common? Banal? Sure. Is it good? No. Never. Causing truama is evil. I don't think there's a valid argument that it isn't.

Who are you to challenge God's word

* points to a book written and edited by humans

(Not arguing with you, just showing my amusement at standard Christian bullshit)

I don't know though the Americans managed to be super racist while being Christian. They got around that one by just classifying anyone they didn't like as not a real person.

Religion has always been the excuse, it's never been a preventative.

Frowned upon by whom? I seem to recall Christian theologians jumping through logical hoops for millennia to preserve both free will and an all-knowing God, specifically so that it would be just when God tortures people for eternity for sinning.

Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.

A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be "far from the center of the garden". IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.

The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It's not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?

If you're going off the old testament God is a jealous, vindictive asshole. New testament was a very successful attempt to white wash this with all that "love they neighbour" bullshit.

The Bible is wild.

Then isn't it wrong of the Abrahamic God to ask humans to do good if good is subjective anyway?