E. Invented by humans
In one of the Discworld books there are two gods. One is the mighty Thunderer, who has temples all over the vast Empire. The other is a Frog God worshipped by a tribe of about fifty people in a swamp. When they have a fight the Frog knocks the other guy out, because nobody really believes in the Thunderer and the Frog’s people have strong faith in him.
BeCaUsE hE’s MyStErIoUs!
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words ‘God works in mysterious ways’. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won’t be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
I make my room filthy and dangerous every day. My roommates are getting hurt!
Why doesn’t my mom clean it up for me? She certainly could. Does she want me to live in squalor? Perhaps she MAKES the mess!
IDK, maybe mom doesn’t exist.
Does your mom…
Put eye parasites that blind children in your room?
Force you to eat and breathe through the same tube?
Give you horrible cancers?
Put drugs in your room and then get mad when you use them?
Tell you to love her unconditionally after doing all of these things?
So anything bad that ever happens to you is your own fault?
Do you just walk around through life assuming cancer patients did something awful to deserve their disease? Cause that’s the only way this analogy makes any sense…
Everyone dies saban. Are you saying that if everyone doesn’t die peacefully in their sleep, and unless no one ever gets bruised or cut or hurt or harmed in any way, it means there is no god?
Everyone dies saban.
sabin FTFY.
But true statement based on empirical evidence.
there is no god
Also true statement based on empirical evidence.
Why can you understand one, but not the other?
No one claims your mom is omnipotent and omnipresent you eggplant. And if they did, you’d think nothing of such a ridiculous claim. Which is what a rational person would do.
“He gave us free will” aka he doesn’t want to.
Yeah I’m not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is “more good” than the bad things it leads to are bad.
The problem for Christianity is that it doesn’t fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn’t like what people were doing with free will.
You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you’re implicitly saying there’s no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
For that matter, the free will explanation isn’t even universal among Christians.
People have free will, because that is the greatest good, but not freedom of consequences (even from god) when they behave bad with that free will. Even though they behave bad, if bad is an objective scale, their bad bahvior was still less bad than having no free will. On this scale, god not punishing them for their bad behavior is more bad than gods punishment. So, because he always has to let the most good thing happen he both has to allow free will and people to do bad and also punish people for doing bad even though he knows they will be bad and he could prevent it. Again I think it’s bs, and there’s a lot of bad logic in Christianity, but that’s their subjective stance (usually but, like you said, not a monolith). It “works” because good and bad isn’t something you can logic out very wrll since it’s highly subjective.
It’s all a test. If you can’t put up with horrible shit while being alive, how you gonna become an angelic slave and sing happy songs for eternity?
