Religion condones innocent suffering for it wants to honour God even if he is bad

 
PREFACE

 

Many wonder how some people have great devotion to God when God seems to stand by while innocents suffer terribly. People will find it disturbing when the devout will pray and worship this God when their lives are opulent and comfortable. It is vulgar to ask for good medical care and money and happiness for yourself while you agree with God letting others suffer.  Also, everybody in some way thinks they can feel good about something terrible and that helps.  They have no right to ask us to trust them that they are really about showing how good overcomes and not trying to downplay with some placebo.

 

IS FAITH A COVER FOR NOT CARING ENOUGH?

 

Religion manipulates people to assume that God tolerating and working with evil to turn it to good or something worthwhile is what is on the menu and alone should be on it.  Using evil to do good can be a form of malicious evil. A dentist may use a bad way to help or refuse to do the best way and even do the second best way.  Or he may be glad to hurt the patient even though it is for the patients good for the reality is that the pain by itself is still not good.  The vice at work in all that is passive aggression.  Only the passive aggressive have a God in their own image.
 
Suffering is unique to each person and who are you to say that somebody's suffering is a blessing in the big picture? You cannot say it about your own suffering either for you will never know how much those who care for you are made to suffer because of your suffering.
 
Why do they say it?
 
Is it because they are conditioned to? Religion has the power to make many people irrational and prejudiced. To say God is right to let suffering happen and to say it out of prejudice or because your mind has been warped by religion is to condone. True compassion requires that you have the faculties to be entirely realistic and fair.
 
Are religious people willing to overlook or water down the evils that happen to others so that they can please their God and call him perfect?
 
Is it because they don't care enough?  A person may care but still switch off the caring when it comes to some calamity that is seen as inevitable and which nobody can help with.
 
All these are terrible. If God wants you to love his scary plan then he is degrading you. And if you would condone him doing that you would condone anything.
 
Some say that all the suffering in the world does not put God on trial but puts his compassion on trial. But a being with godly powers who is not all good is not really a God but a defective being. By definition, God is that which is absolute love. God might be creator but the creator might not be God as in a good being. It might just be a being that is all.
 
We are not asking in this essay if faith in God is just a way of making oneself feel better about the terrible things that happen to others or if they adore God because they don't really care. We are asking if God makes you condone or take an unethical risk and risk condoning evil for the sake of religion. So we are talking about the principle not about feelings from now on.
 
THE "IF"
 
Hypothetical scenarios are good for working out what kind of person you are. If you would kill for money you are bad no matter how much good you do. The good is like snow over a manure heap.
 
You have a choice.
 
It is between praising God for evil (as in doing it or letting it happen - there is no moral difference for the reason that a woman who wants her husband dead and does nothing when a lunatic comes in and cuts his throat is effectively murdering him through somebody else) or not believing. Religion says God alone matters so it would follow that you should praise him for the evil. It is the only choice you have.
 
Whether they realise it or not, believers in God have made their choice. 

IT MATTERS
 
God is said to detest our evil and how we suffer for he loves us. Yet he lets these things happen. Is this a contradiction?
 
If it is, then God is not very powerful, or he is not all-good or he does not exist.
 
If there is no God we still worship. What do we worship? We worship blind indifferent nature and hail its activities as those of God. That would be as warped and sick as worshipping a pile of bricks that fall on you and injure you.
 
So to say God has a purpose that forces him to put up with our evil and suffering is therefore very very serious matter. If there is no all-good God then evil and suffering are inexcusable. You don't want to risk excusing the excusable. You don't want to be saying there is a purpose for evil when it is useless. You need proof that God and evil do not contradict each other. You need solid and strong evidence.
 
The believer worships God though there is terrible suffering in the world.
 
The believer may worship in spite of evil. Is God forced to tolerate evil? That is not much of a God! If evil is that strong surely you are better fighting it instead of worshipping God if it has to be one or the other! If fighting evil comes first then God does not come first. God is not God or allowed to be. Believers say that he lets evil happen for he has a good plan and stomaching evil is involved in implementing it. So God seems to freely let evil happen.
 
The believer may worship because of evil. This implies that God is right to let evil happen. It implies that you are happy that God is vindictive and cold as long as it is towards others. You don't care about suffering babies much if at all.
 
The believer may worship because of a mixture of both. Or they can jump to and from many times in the one day.
 
You never really know if the believer really abhors human suffering. They might not care or be vindictive or selfish. Their devotion to God could be a reflection of their disgusting nod to evil.
 
If you look at history, you see how vicious people are in their actions and the huge sacrifices they make to do evil. Imagine what they could be like inside even if they never show it! Humankind is perfectly capable of deliberately worshipping God for being evil towards others. It is more likely for them to nurture their bad side that way than for them to kill and maim.   It is a clever outlet.
 
The notion of a God who has a plan that is vague to us does not help our moral codes. There are people who use that notion to argue that immoral things such as pious fraud, tax fraud, hitting children or even adultery are not sins or at least if they are they are not that bad for they do some good. Both the religious terrorist and the Catholic saint take comfort in thinking God has included them in his plan.  Unless you prove you have to give the knife then giving it to a person who you know will as likely use it for cutting bread or cutting throats does not get you off the hook.  Your disdain for human life, your avoiding responsibility by saying, "It is up to them to do the right thing not me", are contemptible.

 

The argument that God's love might be real and relevant to us for we cannot tell for sure what he is trying to do in a world full of injustice and suffering is based on how he is supposed to have the big picture unlike us.

 

 

 

To get people to fail to see through evil you have to make it as complex as you can.  That is what is happening here.  Who says that the picture that is relevant to you and your community has to be big?  When you thank God for your cream bun you clearly think he has a series of small plans and may take a day to day approach with you.  Believers only haul in the bigger plan stuff when it suits but really they are about the mini-plans.

 

Also it is evil to make possibilities count which is what this kind of approach is doing. They don't.   Probabilities count.

 

Big claims need high calibre evidence.  Even if [this is hypothetical] they don't, you should not be repeating them without a careful and heavy level of study.  Laziness is a threat to truth.  Do it yourself for smart people are clever in fooling themselves.  Don't depend too much on running after experts.

 

Faith in God is a thing and its contemptable.