This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
We’ve had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We’ve had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can’t blame the Spanish Flu on “nature” because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can’t dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can’t blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words ‘God works in mysterious ways’. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won’t be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to “You can’t adjudicate the morality of the Divine.” And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
One of the earliest forms of copium
I mean, dealing with the Problem of Evil (or Suffering or however you want to describe it) isn’t unique to Christianity. It certainly isn’t one that’s gone unanswered. Hell, a cornerstone of the orthodoxy is that the Original Sin of defiance of God’s Will is at the root of all evil.
I think there’s a superficial knee-jerk response to these beliefs that boil down to “No, that sounds like some made up bullshit”. But you can dig deeper and talk about the fundamental impulses toward pride and gluttony and conclude there’s a kernel of truth over the religious pastiche.
God is, at the end of the day, an unproveable/unrefutable hypothesis. But the immediate causes of human suffering are knowable, tangible, and preventable. Whether you’re blaming a god or snubbing one, if you’re doing so on the grounds that nobody stopped one human from abusing or neglecting another it would seem like your accusation is misplaced.
Human suffering doesn’t just come from human actions.
It also comes from natural causes, genetic defects, disasters, disease and parasites
Virtually all modern human suffering is the result of deliberate aggression or institutional neglect.
We’ve had the technology to mitigate or eliminate these problems for decades.
We’ve had tools to minimize their impact and insulate against their consequences for centuries.
Natural events are nakedly exacerbated by greedy, gluttonous administrators. You can’t blame the Spanish Flu on “nature” because it was the direct result of factory farming and poor hygiene during mass troop mobilization.
You can’t dismiss the catastrophic storms wrecking major cities as we hit climate change peaks.
You can’t blame famine on deserts that formed in the wake of industrial mining and deforesting.
At some point you have to recognize humankind as an enormous global force within its own right. One that is responsible both for its own preservation and destruction.
The Garden of Eden is metaphorical in that sense. Eating the apple of knowledge means assuming control of your own destiny in a way no other organism on the planet can claim.
You take a very narrow view of history.
If all that exists was the last hundred years thwn you may have a point.
But you can’t just shrug aside the thousands of years before that.
I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words ‘God works in mysterious ways’. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won’t be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.