That’s the assumption that god is benevolent and would like to not murder people. Any other god doesn’t deserve any admiration.
If there was nothing to tell you that those gods exist then you’d never know and wouldn’t be bothered by connecting bad or good things to the existence of a god.
But as we know, Gazan people and Ukrainians are being murdered every day for ~the past 5 years. At any point of those 5 years of suffering god could have stopped it. But nah, ratchet it some more instead. and that’s reason enough to not believe in a god or to even hate an asshole in power who won’t move a finger to prevent suffering. And I don’t need to stand on moral high ground. I think most of us could agree that feeding the hungry is the logical thing a good person would be doing at this time.
That really only addresses one kind of conception of deity, namely the mono-theistic, primarily Abrahamic variations. As one alternative, if you let go of the idea that a God or Gods must be omnipotent, then things become relatively more sensible. In polytheism for example, you have deitys who are associated with all kinds of things, some that we consider positive, and others we consider negative. These kinds of models at least tend to more accurately fit the way things actually go in life - sometimes justice prevails, sometimes it doesn’t.
Or as another model, there’s the highly dualistic Cathars. For them there was two principles, one Good, the other Evil. Their argument was essentially that God’s power was inseparable from God’s nature, and thus God is incapable of doing anything that goes against their nature to do - including any harm even to evil itself. This model is very reminiscent of the kinds of criticisms people often have of those who practice strict nonviolent ideologies - that their ways and methods lack potency, or any efficacy to adequately deal with malicious forces.
Not all models even assume God is benevolent. Most Gnostic branches outright believe that the chief deity of this universe is either blind and inept at best, or outright malevolent.
At least as far as I understand some Buddhist cosmologies, the Devas, while being powerful beings roughly equivalent to most polytheistic religions, they are neither considered to be the creators of reality or the universe, nor even have complete dominion over it, or even complete knowledge of it. They are also subject to samsara just as we are, and suffering ultimately is inherently baked into reality. An interesting quirk of some Buddhist sects is the notion that even deitys from other religions can be persuaded to follow Buddha’s teachings to follow the path out of suffering.
And then of course there are the pantheistic and panentheistic models, which stress the inseparability of deity and universe. The “we are God” groups. Why doesn’t God end the suffering and evil in the universe? Yeah, why don’t we do more?
Just wanted to give some examples to illustrate that there are a lot of religions with a lot of perspectives on what’s called the problem of evil. Want to be clear that I have no interest in changing whatever your beliefs are. I just think it’s boring and unfortunate that people usually only bring up the problem of evil when they’re using it to criticize the easy punching bag religions.
Pretty simplistic conception of god.
That’s the assumption that god is benevolent and would like to not murder people. Any other god doesn’t deserve any admiration.
If there was nothing to tell you that those gods exist then you’d never know and wouldn’t be bothered by connecting bad or good things to the existence of a god.
But as we know, Gazan people and Ukrainians are being murdered every day for ~the past 5 years. At any point of those 5 years of suffering god could have stopped it. But nah, ratchet it some more instead. and that’s reason enough to not believe in a god or to even hate an asshole in power who won’t move a finger to prevent suffering. And I don’t need to stand on moral high ground. I think most of us could agree that feeding the hungry is the logical thing a good person would be doing at this time.
That really only addresses one kind of conception of deity, namely the mono-theistic, primarily Abrahamic variations. As one alternative, if you let go of the idea that a God or Gods must be omnipotent, then things become relatively more sensible. In polytheism for example, you have deitys who are associated with all kinds of things, some that we consider positive, and others we consider negative. These kinds of models at least tend to more accurately fit the way things actually go in life - sometimes justice prevails, sometimes it doesn’t.
Or as another model, there’s the highly dualistic Cathars. For them there was two principles, one Good, the other Evil. Their argument was essentially that God’s power was inseparable from God’s nature, and thus God is incapable of doing anything that goes against their nature to do - including any harm even to evil itself. This model is very reminiscent of the kinds of criticisms people often have of those who practice strict nonviolent ideologies - that their ways and methods lack potency, or any efficacy to adequately deal with malicious forces.
Not all models even assume God is benevolent. Most Gnostic branches outright believe that the chief deity of this universe is either blind and inept at best, or outright malevolent.
At least as far as I understand some Buddhist cosmologies, the Devas, while being powerful beings roughly equivalent to most polytheistic religions, they are neither considered to be the creators of reality or the universe, nor even have complete dominion over it, or even complete knowledge of it. They are also subject to samsara just as we are, and suffering ultimately is inherently baked into reality. An interesting quirk of some Buddhist sects is the notion that even deitys from other religions can be persuaded to follow Buddha’s teachings to follow the path out of suffering.
And then of course there are the pantheistic and panentheistic models, which stress the inseparability of deity and universe. The “we are God” groups. Why doesn’t God end the suffering and evil in the universe? Yeah, why don’t we do more?
Just wanted to give some examples to illustrate that there are a lot of religions with a lot of perspectives on what’s called the problem of evil. Want to be clear that I have no interest in changing whatever your beliefs are. I just think it’s boring and unfortunate that people usually only bring up the problem of evil when they’re using it to criticize the easy punching bag religions.