#the problem of evil

[i-am-trans-gwender]

If God is willing to prevent chasers, but is unable to then he is not all powerful. If God is able to prevent chasers, but is not willing then he is not all loving. If God is both able and willing then where do chasers come from? If he is neither able nor willing, then why call him God?

(i'm only half joking.)

[thepatristictradition]

Suffering is not What You Think

(The Penitent Magdalene)

So often you hear, when people leave their churches, their gripes surround suffering. Why would God allow suffering? Why would God allow babies to be murdered and die of cancer? Why would He allow war and cannibalism and pedophilia? Why did God allow me to see my mother die? Why did he allow this or that?

What I cannot help but notice is that the people saying this are never talking about their own suffering.

"Why does God allow war?" said a cowardly young man who has never seen bloodshed. "Why does God allow cancer?" said a woman who is perfectly healthy. "Why does God allow abuse?" said a man who had the privilege of watching the sex abuse crisis of the RCC play out on the TV screen and not in the sacristy. "Why did God allow my mother do die?" said a daughter who is still alive.

We may mourn, and we ought to mourn, the sorrows and the fallenness of this world, but witnessing suffering is not the same as suffering.

(Just Take Them and Leave Me Alone)

This was never more clear to me than when I spent a summer arguing with my anti-natalist, atheist sister. She would spend hours berating my poor mother and father for the heinous crime of having children. During one of these spats, my sister turned to me and said, "How can you support natalism?" which she said like a slur, "your grandmother abused you from the moment you were born."

Now, this is true. Truer than she knew, or, if I have it my way, will ever know. My grandmother (who was my and my sister's primary caregiver) always despised me because I was born with a deformity. Her hatred only intensified when my sister was born. My sister was, in her eyes, perfect. As a child, my sister would ask for me to be abused in front of her, for her amusement, by my grandmother.

My sister witnessed plenty of my suffering, but she experienced not an iota of it. And yet, she used my suffering as a way to say that all of human life is suffering. She used it to discredit the worth of all human life.

(Ophelia)

I find this is always the case. When I was an atheist, I was confused by people who brought up the "problem of suffering". I never viewed my suffering as something that made my life worse. Even as an atheist and a child, I saw clearly how the suffering I experienced and was experiencing was driving me toward a larger purpose. This pattern of thought followed me into the sexual abuse I experienced in middle school and into my conversion.

My atheist associates, whose suffering I know well, likewise never cite their suffering as a reason for their disbelief. When you really get down to it, "God is a big meanie" is not a reason to reject His existence, say these associates of mine.

It is only being a witness to suffering-- usually an impotent witness-- that causes this specific kind of apostasy. Even if my sister had stopped encouraging it, I still would have been abused. Her behavior would have made little difference. It is the same for the sufferings I listed earlier. Regardless of what we tell ourselves, no boycotting, no Instagram post, and not even tax evasion or immolation will stop the Genocide Israel is purporting against the Palestinians. We, far removed, poor, and powerless foreigners, are impotent. We can do nothing to help someone with a terminal illness not die-- it's terminal. We can do nothing to help the kidnapped children we see on the news, taken from their homes halfway across the country. We cannot bilocate, live forever, or have infinite money.

When these people say, "Why does God allow suffering?" they are actually asking, "Why does God allow my impotence?" The implication is that, of course, they would solve these sufferings if only they were not impotent. Is this the case? I don't know; who am I to judge the heart of another man?

Whatever the case, it is clear to me that witnessing suffering is of some different metaphysical nature than the actual experience of suffering. I've written a little about this privately, so I will get around to expanding upon it in further posts.

[eri-pl]

It will be chaotic, because I can't force myself to make a structured post about it, I don't know why. Also sorry if my autocorrect does something stupid, I'm writing on the phone.

So, the Legendarium and causality, and good deeds, bad deeds and their results. This is the main topic of this post.

Is this post about the Legendarium? About real life? Both? Well, it surely is about the Legendarium, but not only. It's fuzzy. One of the things I like with tolkien is that such discussions get fuzzy and thinking about the books gives me insights about life.

There is a rule which I try to follow when writing or even planning something more serious (in the Legendarium context, but in general too, unless specifically going for a genre that's different): if a long-term success (in something that matters) is achieved by doing something morally wrong, those conditions must be fulfilled (not necessarily all clearly written out, but I must at least have a vague idea):

1. It could have been achieved in a good way, and it wouldn't be lesser. Or it wasn't really that important. (Because I refuse to accept "necessary evil")

2. Either something bad came out of it, or someone has to put effort into it not happening. I'm not sure how to explain it better (see later about handling other people's bad choices)... Anyway this makes the story feel more satisfying, more interesting.

3. How much of 2 is needed is proportional to how bad the thing was. Also if the character couldn't be expected to know much better, point 2 is less intense, though it's often still more interesting to have it.

I wonder how close to canon is this rule. Anyway I like it. Also, I tend to assume at least 1 when interpreting the canon, which likely influences my opinion about the Feanorians and the whole Silmaril business.

I'm not saying this is a 100% rule in real life, or even a technically 100% rule in te Legendarium, because omniscience is tricky… but it is a good rule in writing, I think, and even more so it definitely is a good rule in approaching decisions. If something can't work in a moral way, it won't work anyway or is not worth it. Nothing really worthy can be permanently lost by making the right choice. And so on.

It seems like there would be a symmetrical rule of good deeds not resulting in bad events but then we have the Children of Hurin. And what did Hurin do wrong? I have no idea.

But then, the Men are generally... And you could also look at Maedhros, but then, the exiled Noldor, and SoF in particular are also, hmm, I think "marred" is the word I should use here.

Still, I really prefer if there is something good coming of from good deeds, even distant and not seen by the person doing the good deeds.

Also, there seems to be is another rule, it's outright said. Things always turn out into a good ending, and you can either go with it or fall under it.

Example: gollum. He could have cooperated and jumped with the Ring willingly. He chose to betray Frodo, fell with the Ring anyway.

You also can, obviously, do a creative mix of going along and falling under. (Must I say: the two oldest Feanorians, it is this obvious?)

And falling under makes things more difficult for everyone, not just the person doing it.

Darn, I made this sound ugly and tyrannical. It's not. But I remember when I would say it is, and I can't explain why it is not. It's kinda like when you do a weird thing with your eye muscles and start seeing double. It's just not. I just can't explain it in a way this deserves. My apologies.

Anyway, bad choices make things difficult for everyone. Because we are connected to each other. I've already made a post about it long time ago, but generally...

Maybe if Saruman wasn't such a jerk weed have a Sauron redemption. (Maybe, it's always a maybe)

Maybe if Maglor didn't take pity on the twins, Númenor would fall much earlier and Sauron would be more successful. And so on and do forth.

It's always a maybe, and nobody determines anybody else's choices, but still, we do impact each other. It's hard to think about, because it's over if the places where a) it's worth to try b) there's no guarantee of anything... (Which are most places, I guess). Both on the Silm and in life, people are interconnected. But also everyone is responsible for their decisions.

It's hard to not blame characters (or people) too much. It's hard... In general it's wonderful but difficult, the whole concept.

And another thing tired to this very closely, tied to the interconnectedness (is this a word?) is unearned suffering and Hurin and Nienor and Miriel (both tbh) and Feanor back before he was a jerk and many others.

Sometimes we get the outcome of someone else's bs without even consenting to it. Why? I suppose it's because the connectedness is now important than "not getting random bs thrown in your life". Maybe. Probably. I'm not wise, ok? I'm not sure it's my heart, but something's telling me it's something like this reason.

And what can we do

Argue. Rebel. Just take it. There are many things we can do. I'm not going to go on a rant about what Feanor (or Finwe) should have done and so on because I don't want dfw and others to have a bad time listening to me criticizing their guy, and also I wasn't in his position so I shouldn't be ranting. I should go rant at myself or something.

But the things aren't going to solve themselves or disappear. So yes, just taking it is a very noble and beautiful thing to do (and hard as... Idk what's hard. A Silmaril is hard, I guess)

Because it's so very infuriating when someone else's bs lands on your head.

Oh how I wish I could handle it better.

Back to the Legendarium. Someone handling it better generally yields results, see: the Long Peace. And probably many other situations.

And of course there are situations when the bs you have to handle is your own and if you don't handle it, it will fall of everyone else's heads. This doesn't necessarily make it easier to handle. :( Sometimes someone helps, and that's nice.

Yet another question is how realistic a book should be.

Should it portray lots of undeserved suffering, of badly handled undeserved suffering (CoH), because it's part of life? Should it portray hope triumphing against reason (B&L, and remember that Beren was just as much a Man as Turin was), to give people an escape?

I think (maybe it's rather obvious) that we need both, because depending on personality and circumstances, we need both validation and acknowledgement of our pain, and hope that things can be better. Both kinds of stories are necessary.

It may sound untrue, and sometimes I wish I was a kind of person who can live with only hopeful stories, because the day ones are what I need when I'm not doing well— but no. We do need both, at least in terms of "what most of the story consists of". We need ways to express pain without an immediate answer.

It's a sad song.

But we're gonna sing it anyway.

Until we finally get it right and the sad parts start making sense.

And let's not even get into "sad stories where people mess their lives up so much because that's how freedom works, yes, they can do that" because I have absolutely no idea what to say about those.

[turins-inbred-child]

Nienna about to strangle anyone who says that orcs are unredeemable or shouldn't be pitied.

seeing wayyyyyy to many so called “fans” on twitter saying that orcs are “ontologically evil”. Tolkien was catholic and ontological evil doesn't exist according to catholic doctrine, since evil is defined as the absence of good so pure evil is just nothingness.

also orcs have souls and only God/Eru can create souls according to the silm, and all souls have some amount of free will to choose between good and evil.

and God/Eru loves all his children, he wouldn't create a soul that is going to be evil with no hope of redemption and salvation. that would be a Calvinist heresy.

that is why Tolkien struggled with the origins of the orcs so much in his later writings and regretted how they had been written.

there are a LOT of things to criticize in rings of power, but humanizing the orcs is not one of them.

[gospelborn]

An Unusual Response to the Problem of Evil

Again I saw all the oppressions that are done under the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead who are already dead more fortunate than the living who are still alive. But better than both is he who has not yet been and has not seen the evil…

[alevelrs]

Philosophy

AS:

ancient philosophical influences

mind, body, soul

arguments based on observation

arguments based on reason

religious experience

the problem of evil

A2:

the nature or attributes of god

[scobbe]

Last year in my classes I got fairly well acquainted with “The Problem of Evil” (“How can we believe in a good and all-powerful God while suffering exists?” — one of the major arguments for atheism) but most of the time the Problems focused on either natural disasters which cause harm to thousands or the atrocities of wars and genocides which seem impossible to reconcile.

But all that remains impersonal to the vast majority of people who have never been in a war zone or natural disaster. Get down to “How can some parents be incapable of properly loving their own children?” and suddenly the contradiction is in your face; it’s a vast plague that resounds through our society on an individual basis. It’s a juxtaposition of what we believe should be vs. what is. You brought me into this world - you damn well sure should love me. But that isn’t always the case.

And Christ on the cross cries out to his Father, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” And the curtain of the Temple is torn in two and the Holies of Holies opened up to all the world. What is going on here? What the hell is going on? Three days later he’s up for some broiled fish; “Have you all heard of eternal life? I’m ascending to my God and your God, my Father and your Father.”

The wounds on his hands and feet are still there yet he lives forever.

[mybeautifulchristianjourney]

by Calvin Smith | To be honest, answering the exact same questions over and over again gets a little bit tedious. “Could God create a rock so heavy he couldn’t lift it?” “If everything needs a creator, who created God?” Now, I know these questions are always new for the person asking...

[cupsofsilver]

"While a bulk of research links supernatural agents to human behaviour, only a few studies devote attention to the belief in supernatural evil. However, just as most religions believe in a god or gods, conceptions of evil may also prove to have similar utility across religious traditions. Beliefs in evil (in some form) are not limited by religion tradition since the majority of world religions believe in supernatural evil to some extent. Studies connecting the belief in supernatural evil to human behaviour reveal a correlation between the belief in an active Satan and intolerant views towards racial minorities and homosexuals, and an association between believing Satan is responsible for producing pornography with a greater likelihood of picketing in front of 7-11 stores that sold adult magazines. Furthermore, Wilcox et al. contend a relationship exists between the belief in an active Satan and attitudes towards political participation. They hypothesize that the belief in an active Satan led individuals to feel a sense of embattlement with evil forces causing them to become more involved in political activism. "

Brandon C. Martinez, Is Evil Good for Religion? The Link between Supernatural Evil and Religious Commitment, Review of Religious Research Vol. 55, No. 2 (June 2013). Source.

[thebardostate]

Is that the whole story?

No, it isn't.

The Adversary is actually on God's payroll. It's a classic Good Cop/Bad Cop play. Think about it, why would God create the Tree of Knowledge unless He (I'll observe OP's pronouns for God here) secretly wanted Adam and Eve to eat the fruit the whole time? God told them No. God said they would die if they ate it. All these conditions and fine print, like a high speed disclaimer in a pharmaceutical ad. How the hell are Adam and Eve supposed to understand the concepts of "dying" or "working" when they live in the Garden of Eden where such things are unknown? How were they even supposed to imagine it?

They weren't. God knew perfectly well they wouldn't understand and would disobey Him and eat the Apple, but first He had a problem: how to put the idea into their heads to disobey Him? For this is what humanity had to do to have Free Will, but God couldn't very well order Adam and Eve to disobey Him: if they obeyed Him, then they would be disobeying Him; and if they disobeyed Him, then they would be obeying Him. This was a logical paradox that could only be resolved if their disobedience to God was an exercise of their own Free Will.

Enter the Serpent, an Angel of God in disguise. God instructed the Serpent to tempt them into disobedience. Eve was the first human to acquire Free Will. She was in fact the first person we can recognize as truly human, with flaws and a mind of her own.

After kicking them out of Eden (read: being born into our world) God spends the entire rest of the Bible trying to wrest Free Will back from us by demanding our blind obedience to His will, as enthusiastically aided in recent times by self-interested orthodox evangelical Christians. Perhaps this is part of the ruse, to constantly force each generation to grapple with God's Word anew. Or perhaps each generation has to figure out for itself that a God who demands blind obedience at all times is not worthy of their worship. Even God casts a shadow.

TL; DR. The Adversary is God's elegant way of conning us into having Free Will, which entails keeping our con going through all the generations of humanity. The Gnostic Christians got this, and had a very different read on Genesis and the role of the Serpent - one which the Early Christian Church vigorously suppressed.

[eri-pl]

...he's gonna have a go at Morgoth making things and hoping Saint Augustine isn't gonna notice.

(from this video) (it makes sense in the context)

[welcome-to-the-indulgence-phase]

Also the problem of Evil never bothered me. I make jokes but God ✨️being like that✨️ is just because death is nothing to an immortal God. My issue is more of the idea that God gets jealous or wrathful. As in He is unsatisfied with the creation He is 100 percent in control over.

"Idolatry makes me sad. :'( Stop feeling sexual attraction. 😔🥺" My brother in You You created the conditions of our life.

[problemnyatic]

"I think this Category of human being is disposable" okay that not only sucks and is fascist but also makes getting you to deem someone to be disposable a simple matter of convincing you they're in The Category regardless of the truth. Also The Category is often misapplied to a vulnerable minority because it makes people like you agree they're disposable.

"Anyone who disagrees with me about The Category of people being disposable is a Category apologist or probably also in The Category themselves" Oh so you're just totally unconcerned with truth or justice or ethics or human rights and just are feeding your bloodlust for the sake of revenge fantasies. got it 👍

[thebardostate]

Instead of thinking of evil as some intrinsic aspect of (human) nature, I think it's helpful to regard evil as akin to a disease. I don't mean that evil causes disease, but rather that evil IS a disease, where the nature of the disease is out-of-control psychological projection. Potentially, evil can be prevented or cured - by dealing with one's own projections, and not foisting them onto others.

"humans are inherently evil" "humanity deserves to go extinct" okay. if that's the case why are we such a community based species. why have we seen evidence of careful amputations in ancient humans that allowed them to live longer, fuller lives. why do we have thousands of years of evidence of toys made for children by their guardians. why do we consistently find burial sites where the deceased has been buried with items of significance because the people in their life cared about them even after they were gone. why do strangers help strangers without any reward. why are most of the people you meet each day not cruel. we have ALWAYS been kind. I know it is so so easy to get swept up in all the horrible happenings in the world. these things can be extremely important to know about. but please, please please know that there are so many kind people in the world. you are one of them!

I BLOCK DEBBIE DOWNERS ON SIGHT. REEVALUATE YOUR WORLDVIEW OR SCROLL PAST AND HAVE A LOVELY DAY ALSO READ MY TAGS

[alevelrs]

John Hick

John Hick further developed Irenaeus’s theodicy. He describes the world as a ‘vale of soul-making’, where things happen to us for our own good. He argued that evil and suffering in this world are not accidents or problems that God could not overcome, but rather deliberate. God gave us a world in which we would have the best circumstances under which to choose a free and loving relationship with Him, including struggles and hardship through which we develop human virtues, and these virtues are more meaningful than if they were simply graced to humans by God.

It also includes ‘epistemic distance’, a distance in knowledge. God deliberately chooses to remain partially hidden from humanity so we can make genuinely free choices about whether we want to believe in Him or not. If there was no doubt of his existence, then faith would not be a choice, but God wants us to have this choice, turning to him because we want to and not because we were forced to.

He justified evil by arguing that something’s goodness relies on its purpose: instrumental good, in which something may not be good in itself but good for something. This is however highly controversial as it leaves no room for dysteleological evils.

Hick’s theodicy only works if there is a possibility of life after death – if someone dies from a long and painful illness or a baby is abused, then it cannot be seen as ‘all for the good’ unless it works out for the best ‘in the end’ i.e. the afterlife. In his view, during the afterlife people continue with their growth and development towards a relationship with God, and eventually everyone will be saved, which is again controversial.

Discussing Hick

Universal salvation can be criticised: what was the point in Jesus dying on the Christ if everyone will go to heaven?

If everyone will freely come to God eventually, can this be free? We can be free to choose different options, but if in the end we all arrive at the same destination, perhaps our choice is only an apparent choice and not a genuinely free one.

Is it really worth having to live in a world where evil and suffering is so apparent just for the sake of human freedom? Wouldn’t it be better if God never made the world?

D.Z. Phillips argued that it is wrong to suggest that God allows evil and suffering, and actually plans for it to happen, and worked it into His design for the world. This would be an evil God. It is also immoral to justify God by looking at the usefulness of evil.

[darthmatthewtwihard]

This is so true.