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Reading a book which explore the age old question ~If God is good, why so much suffering & evil~   I get bored with this endless dialogue over the stupidest off questions, yet this question is not a complete no brainer, but requires separation into what humans can exercise control over, & what we cannot.

Firstly what we cannot control.  Intelligent design & intentional purpose off the universe & life as a whole, while not certain, seems most probable.  In my view it is the safest assumption.   Yet whomever prime cause may be, he has to be presumed remote & have little direct interest in our day to day affairs.  He/she/it has bought about, & maintains, the processes which permit a living universe to be, & that may be his sole role.  A fairly important one from our point of view, so lets not knock it folks.  Count as a blessing, that we & our world even live at all. We have to accept natural calamities like earthquake or disease as being as legitimate a part of a living universe as ourselves.  They are part of the total process of a living universe, they are not Gods judgment off us.

Now to things we can control.  These, rightly, are a judgment of us.  They are a product off our success or failure in our own self management; basically, heaven & hell is the law of cumulative consequence. It is true mans capacity for evil is rooted in his base nature.  Yet the drive for fight or flight, & our sexual drives to procreate are essential to our survival & function.  Even greed, the human hunger for more & more, is the engine of our higher development.  Thus we needs accept these as God given necessities, & accept the Bible as a best practice guide to their management.

Against all the man-made wrong & evil in the world we posit a God of love & consequence, then get out off bed every morning with a drive to repent, learn & improve both ourselves & humanity as a whole.  Thy Kingdom come. If we did not uphold such a God, we would have no hope, so why would we even bother to live?  I make no apology for our God: humanity would be lost without him.

In sum… if the God of love & divine consequence did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.

Thus the created works of our creator & savior at work, are given in the Bible.

Islam rails against the perversions of Jews & Christians, who it claims, falsified by the human hand.  Like a 10 year old child throwing a tantrum when he finds out Santa Claus was only mum & dad all along. But what does Islam offer instead, a vindictive petulant child man, who is deluded & a common brigand.   For myself, I would rather trust my mum & dad. We all have to grow up sometime.

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On my two groupings of evil & suffering, on events within our control, I would subscribe to Augustine’s doctrine that manmade evil & suffering is the product of free will.

On calamity & suffering through causes beyond our control, I would cite the life forces of nature & physics.  I believe we have to accept disease & natural calamity as a mutation of the life forces, as other animals & life on this biosphere have to accept man as a mutation they would prefer to do without. Pagans tried to address this, why not they were forces that existed & had a profound influence on their lives.  They addressed prevention of disease by offerings & chants to their Gods, & perhaps tried to avert natural calamity by sacrificing virgins or fine young men to the Gods of storm, flood or earthquake.   As these things are beyond human control, these superstitions obviously could not work, but that did not nullify belief.

Next the creator God repudiated Paganism, earth Gods, their attendant magic’s & superstitions.  That left Christian theologians denying superstition, but lacking enough science to posit a valid alternate. In consequence some of the Christian doctrines purporting to reconcile natural harm & suffering with a God of goodness, are as bizarre & unsound as the superstitions they replaced.

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Reason & faith… two old saws.

The existence of God cannot be proven, because if he could be proved, there would be no need for faith.

For the religious, faith is a virtue.

Let me put this my way.

The sum of our knowledge says man occurred as a random accident, many say an accident it would be better had it not happened, our every existence is precarious, our future unlikely, & we are not even nice to each other.   Man is without hope & should just give up on himself.

Instead we get on with lives, children, projects & hope by vesting our faith in a positive hope.

Christ said…~Man lives not by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God~

To rephrase the point of commencement above…

The sum of all evidences proves the need for faith.

For humanity, faith is not optional, but a necessity.

Next issue… in which claimant to the title God, should we vest our faith?

Where should we vest our faith indeed…

A Buddhist saying is ~If you decide that this is good & that is bad, you have divided life & killed it~  As the mother said when Solomon wanted to divide the baby… ~No, no, NO!  You kill both halves~ Science & genetic engineering will deliver many marvels in the future, yet science can never duplicate the Immaculate Conception.  Good & bad are so intricately interwoven in human genetics, that any scientific attempt to separate one from the other would kill the whole.

The Immaculate Conception can never be duplicated; thus it stands unique & transcendent for all of human time. ~It is said that our God is light, & hath no darkness in him at all~ A human divine & pure who hath no darkness in him at all, yet in the Immaculate Conception… nobody died.

In the Immaculate Conception, wrought by the Holy Spirit, God divided life & saved it!

…….Blessed be the names of the Father, the Son & the Holy Spirit….reign forever…amen…

Ken Maynard   e-mail…    communichristi@gmail.com

Link to home-page… http://www.communichristi.org.nz