MIRROR THOUGHTS: Why Is There Suffering? Is God Malevolent Or Benevolent?
A variation of this question must have crossed the mind of even the ardent believer in any of the Abrahamic faiths but one must always reflect while trying to reconcile their faith in an All-Powerful Creator/God.
Methinks it’s part of the fullness of creation and JRR Tolkien in his works has a good analogy of this by describing the existence in his world as being a kind of music. When evil first shows up in Tolkien’s universe, God states that evil, no matter how grave will be harmonized back into the music, but as a bridge to a new chorus.
Read Also: Simp: Should Men Be Afraid Of Expressing Interest In Women?
Take one minute to ruminate on that, considering the revered author was a devout Roman Catholic from boyhood, and he described “The Lord of the Rings” in particular as a “fundamentally religious and Catholic work; unconsciously so at first, but consciously in the revision”. While he insisted it was not an allegory, it contains numerous themes from Christian theology.
Now it’s one thing to look back on our lives and see break ups, failed tests, and maybe even lost jobs as things that we can see as painful experiences at the time but ultimately rising action in our own stories. But it’s hard to accept that when things like cancer, war, famine, or death come into the picture.
To me, I can accept that the trials of our lives even the direst ones are here because they are human experiences and thus sacred.
Bone Of Contention
The contentious segue is that if God created the world that we are in now as purely good then it negates the freedom of choice that we have. Because then there is no possibility of a drive to compel us towards evil.
The issue with this question too is that, when there is goodness in this world, many would think “God has nothing to do with this”, and that it is just cause of nature and goodness decisions of humankind, but the moment there is an evil, immediately we say “Where is God?”
We blame God, for negating the cause of nature and the decision of humankind. It is simply the hatred of the premise of believing in God, not arguing the premise of the law of creation at all.
Let’s assume that we are all Gods. So when good things happen, yes we exist, and we do good. But the moment evil happens, suddenly we don’t exist, and we are all evil too? God created this world (a sandbox) and gave us a manual, for us to operate.
This does in fact ‘perpetuate a world that discourages belief’ – but it is an honest reality, not a manipulated one where all that is evil is veiled from us so that we can see and love God conditionally.
Conclusion/Big Question
Unless God wanted a manipulated and conditional world where the potential for evil was hidden under layers of God’s intervention, would we ever have a reality where innocent people would not suffer at the hands of others, or of Satan’s, or their own?
