Secular Humanism CelticBear’s Musings

"You can't have religious freedom without the freedom to dissent." -Anne Nicol Gaylor, founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation"You can't have religious freedom without the freedom to dissent." -Anne Nicol Gaylor, founder of the Freedom from Religion Foundation
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Extent of Suffering In Our World Makes the Existence of God Implausible

Posted by CelticBear on January 19th, 2007

John W. Loftus on Debunking Christianity has a long but fantastic essay on the problem of massive suffering and what it means to the Christian concept of god:

Extent of Suffering In Our World Makes the Existence of God Implausible.
There is just too many excellent points he makes regarding how the Christian concept of god simply does not jive with what we witness in human suffering.

He spends a deal of time at the beginning pounding down his point regarding the existence of terrible human suffering, most of it appearantly senseless. But then he starts asking some very, very poignant questions and making very thought-provoking and compelling points, such as:

  • Then why did God create something in the first place?
  • Then why didn’t God just create a heavenly world?
  • Then why did God create us with free will?
  • Then what is the purpose of creating such a world?
  • God should’ve had three main moral concerns when creating such a world:
    Concern One: that we don’t abuse the freedom God gave us.
  • Concern Two: that the environment God places us in will not cause us excessive suffering.
  • Concern Three: that our bodies will provide a reasonable measure of wellbeing for us.
  • Only if the theist expects very little from such a being can he defend what God has done.

It’s a really, really interesting read that will surely make you question theism. If you’re not afraid of that. *wink*

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 11:10 am and is filed under PERSONAL, RELIGION, SKEPTICISM. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • See, I've never believed the whole "original sin" concept, despite my fundamentalist upbringing described below. For me, I've always looked at it in a metaphorical sense, as well as the salvation from said sin. It's a cultural legend, much like Aesop's Fables, that was written to explain the rotten state of humanity, and the answer to it, for a small isolated group of people. Every culture on earth has one. The challenge is to look for the truth behind the story, and the problem arises when we take it literally.
  • My last straw involved "salvation." We know there was no Eden, Adam, and Eve. If there was no literal "original sin," putting aside the unmerciful and unloving and unjust idea of making everyone pay for the sin of one man, then what exactly are we being "saved" from?
    Every path toward answering that question ultimately leads back to a human-like god with insecurity creating a no-win situation and is fundamentally responsible for the very sin/condition humanity finds itself in. Supposedly we have to be saved from god's very own setup of totally needless damnation that is utterly contrary to any concept of mercy and love and justice. The Biblegod set us up to fall and then decided to save us from the fall he set up through a revealed religion that you can't know about unless someone with a book tells you about it. It's delusional.
  • It was you pointing me to the Why Won’t God Heal Amputees site that finally made the last straw crumble for me. We talk about the reasons God allows suffering, in the big cosmic sense of things, in theological terminology that sounds great in theory. But when you isolate a specific group of people such as amputees, and start trying to apply the various apologetics, the case just falls apart. There is no choice but to follow this through to its conclusion, which is what I did. All the nagging questions and inconsistencies harbored in my brain for so long suddenly crystallized.
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