This post is a reply and examination of the recent website entry by the fundamentalist Christian blogger Deborah Drapper, Why Is There Suffering In The World.

To begin, the post is a very well articulated piece that quite clearly states the author's stance on the origin and reason for suffering in the modern world. In a nutshell the view point is that when God created the world it was perfect and that it was it's two sole inhabitants that doomed the future generations to suffering as punishment for disobeying God and taking the forbidden fruit.

For me and I'm sure many others, I find this view point to be somewhat disrespectful to people who have suffered severely during their time on earth. Everybody suffers through their life, but what I refer to in this case is what I would justify as real suffering. People who have lost family members to natural or man made disasters, victims of famine and disease, people tormented by mental illness, innocent bystanders caught in the middle of conflict. To state so matter-of-fact that this is God's will is ignorance of the highest-level. It alleviates the perpetrators of said suffering from any responsibility for their actions, or in the case of natural disasters side-steps mountains of evidence and research which explains how and why events such as earthquakes and tsunamis occur. I doubt that Miss Drapper could stand and look into the eyes of a survivor of the Holocaust and state to them without hesitation that it was the divine will of God. Or perhaps she should explain to victims of child abuse at the hands of the Catholic church that this is the punishment for your ancestors sins, that it is what your God has intended and actively promotes.

If as Christians believe we, the human race, were designed in the image of God, why did we have the obvious defect that allowed us to practice sin in the first place? Would this make God imperfect? Surely not! But if you make humans in the image of God and humans are capable of sin, then surely God must be capable of sin, which does not in turn make him not only imperfect but also a hypocrite for punishing us for something that we is responsible for us inheriting?

One particular part of Deborah Drapper's post uses the example of a car crash, explaining that it is not the founder of the car manufacturer that is to blame for the crash and similarly that it's not God's fault that there is suffering in the world, but our own through sin. The thing is that Mr Ford, the founder of Ford Motors doesn't claim to be the omnipresent creator of all things, whereas God and his followers do. Surely someone as mighty, all-knowing and all-powerful as God should a) be able to forcibly stop the suffering and b) perhaps not punish us in the first place for something that was instigated by our ancestral Mother and Father thousands of years ago. But neither of these will happen, and do you know why? Because suffering is part of the lottery that is life. Suffering is orchestrated by both nature and man. Earthquakes are the results of totally natural forces which unfortunately cause suffering to communities living within it's vicinity. It''s not a punishment, it's physics and to think otherwise shows great ignorance.

If God existed and was indeed the perfect being, he wouldn't be the one instigating the punishment through suffering for our sins, but instead would be the one protecting us.

The bottom line is, suffering exists because God doesn't.

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• Marilyn Roxie wrote ...

• at 20:33, Wednesday 24 June 2009

"I consider myself in an agnostic position, religions and philosophy has always interested me, and I'm always questing after what sounds right to me...the Christian reasons given for why there's suffering have never had the slightest ring of truth. Humans are fallible and subject to variation in their actions- this has nothing to do with 'original sin'. And nature is governed by itself. The belief system which makes the most sense to me on this point is Buddhism, which is structured all around why suffering exists and how to (potentially) liberate yourself from it, beginning with the principal that it is simply part of life, which is good enough an answer that I can come to!- and certainly more logical than attributing it to some outside force that puts some abstract eternal blame onto everyone whether they've done any harm or not."

• Alban wrote ...

• at 21:19, Monday 21 December 2009

"There is another option that may be acceptable to your reasonable arguing. Surely, if suffering is AND is real, God does not exist. That is so obvious yet totally denied by most of the people of this world that it should tell anyone that this place is not based on reason.

If we go back to your argument that if God created us in His likeness and image, we would have to be perfect and could not sin in the first place, we are faced with a reasonable conclusion that we would have to admit to, if God is our Source. We would have to be perfect, but have lost awareness of it, because we made ourselves in an image that is not God's idea. Now we seem to be stuck with it, hell-bent on justifying suffering to be our reality, and it takes a miracle to dis-lodge us from our thinking and perception. rnrnThe idea of live, being subject to suffering is senseless. There is a better way.rnrnOne way of expressing this option is realized here: http://www.acourseinmiraclesmovie.com/

Cheers,
Alban"