Well that's just because God works in mysterious ways you lil silly Billy.
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If this were multiple choice, then I would go with #2.
What god and satan was Epicurus talking about here? Just curious what idea of an omnipotent, omniscient, loving god existed about 300 BC. My little Roman mythology knowledge has their gods closer to Greek gods: limited in power, easily fooled, and extremely flawed.
AFAIK there is no proof that this paradox was actually coined by Epicurus, despite later being attributed to him. Epicurean philosophy holds that the gods exist, but don't interfere with anything, so it's pointless to fear or appease them.
Hence, it would be a later invention attributed to him.
One of my favourite discussions of the problem of evil is the chapter below. It's a discussion between two brothers regarding God and suffering in the world if the end result is eternal paradise. TW: child abuse, suffering and death. Children are used in the argument specifically because they don't deserve suffering, they are innocent according to Dostoyevsky (I easily agree).
It's heavy but worth the read imo, and not unnecessarily graphic.
Here's your answer.
You know what they say, the best way to make someone an atheist is to make them actually read the Bible from front to back.
The simple solution is that there is no "evil."
I like the story The Egg by Andy Weir. It gives an example of that idea.
Alan Watts also talks a lot about that sort of thing.
You remind me of my wife.
When we met, she introduced me to lots of short stories that made me reconsider my perspective on things. This was one of them. She still makes me reconsider my convictions whether I want to or not. I sure do love her for that.
This is the most wholesome, loving thing I've read on Lemmy. You're truly a gem.
No one can convince me that abuse is not evil. Is it common? Banal? Sure. Is it good? No. Never. Causing truama is evil. I don't think there's a valid argument that it isn't.
I learned fairly early even as I was in Sunday school that I'm a better, more moral person than god. And I'm just a flawed person. So what use is such a god to me or anyone?
I mean DUH, obviously it is impossible to have any objective morality without appealling to my own personal, internally inconsistently defined God whose written word I am certainly interpreting correctly after being filtered through tens of thousands of writers and editors and translators through thousands of years, whose objectivity morality also 'works in mysterious ways' whenever it seems contradictory!
Its simple!
Who are you to challenge God's word?
To get around this, ancient fuckers in my country invented reincarnation and karma. That conveniently also gave them the license to be supremely racist.
Oh no. You have to want to believe and repent ... But that's free will, which is also ... Frowned upon
This is sorta the beginners philosophy question. There are plenty of answers, it's not the "gotcha" it appears to be. Those answers unroll into all sorts of branching other conversations but they exist.
Maybe it's because free will exists.
Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.
Maybe it's a definitional thing, where "evil" to us is always going to be the most-evil existent thing so if existing evils were gone "evil" would still exist but it would consist of aggressive kitten licks or something. So "evil" can't not exist, but it's not because God can't get rid of what we call "evil" now.
Maybe there's a greater purpose for what we call "evil" that results in more good.
A work of fiction I very much enjoy called UNSONG uses a variant of this as the answer to the question of evil. The basic notion being that at the level of abstraction that God operates at two identical things are essentially one thing and so in order to maximize the total net good he creates universe upon universe, all slightly different but each ultimately resulting in more good than bad in net. The universe the story takes place in is recognizably similar to ours until the Nixon administration, and it is explicitly said to be "far from the center of the garden". IOW in a region of possibility space in which few potential universes are good on net.
The story is also an absolute master class in foreshadowing to the point that if you just listen as the story repeatedly tells you how one should interpret text, you can derive the ending from like the first paragraph of chapter 1 by just digging deep enough. And it goes a lot deeper than that. It's not just an aesthetic choice that every chapter name is a Blake reference, or that the story is arranged into groupings of four, ten, twenty two and seventy two. It also manages to analogize itself to both the works of William Blake and the song American Pie because why not?
Is Scott Alexander a dickhead like Yudkowsky?
I'd be shocked if he wasn't, depending on one's definition of dickhead. Everyone is a dickhead for some definition of dickhead.
UNSONG is still a great fantasy story and a master class in foreshadowing, regardless of how one feels about the author.
Could god make a butt plug so big his ass couldn’t take it?
Or more PG, could god make a burrito so hot he couldn’t eat it?
Which god was he talking about anyway ? They had thousands of the fuckers at the time.