A question for those who believe in God

[DivineSpark]

Why do you think God allows so much suffering and illnesses on earth?

 

[Forever Sleep]

I'm not sure whether there is a God or not. My hope is that there isn't one. Partly in response to this question.

There can only be a few logical responses to my mind and, only two main ones. That God either wants suffering to be a part of life. After all, everything was designed with a planned obsolescence to it and we were given sentience to be able to feel ourselves dieing. Maybe God has some sort of justification for it- we learn something or other but regardless, it's intentional- surely? Even if all the bad things came about because of a mistake- eating the forbidden fruit or whatever, God created the punishments and God created the huge temptation to eat the fruit to begin with! Seems pretty sadistic to me. Or- pain comes from another source. One that God is either complicit in allowing to exist or, is too weak to stop.

So, the frightening reality as I see it is either that God is a sadist. Whether a reasonable or unreasonable one is tricky to know without knowing the overall plan. Or, God isn't in fact omnipotent. They may want to stop suffering but, they can't. I suppose the third option is that God wants us to have free will. That all of our suffering is created by us primarily. I don't really buy that though. We've been created so that we have to kill things in order to live. That's hardly moral! Plus- if God's so smart, they knew we'd end up like this with enough free will. Why even let it play out like this?

 

[SVEN]

He wants company ? But, the company of essentially good or well meaning people. So, He turns His created humans loose with their own world to control, a limited lifespan and the freedom to make moral choices.
The built in 'sell by date' means that the basic biological blueprints of all living things contain imperfections. Hence we have disabilities, illnesses & the general malaise of biological entities.
Just a vague hypothesis.

 

[endofeverything]

no longer believe in god, but here's a few things i was taught about this question when i was still christian:

god allows suffering and illness because he works in mysterious ways. this is just a very lazy blanket-response. personally, i would hate to be the five year old toddler getting massacred by a semi-truck on a thursday afternoon for a reason god won't elaborate on. but that's just me.

god allows suffering and illness as a test of our faith. this, of course, is the deeply egocentric view that other people's suffering is actually about you specifically. god gave grandma cancer because everything in your life happens for a reason, and he's putting you through the pain of losing grandma because you have to learn a lesson or pass a test of some sort in the eyes of god. it's the false belief that, actually, everything revolves around you and your faith. the reality is that grandma getting cancer was about grandma, and not you and your sorrows.

god allows suffering and illness because of our sinful nature. personally, i think this is judgemental as fuck. imagine being a god, an all-powerful creature, who created weak-willed humans that are supposed to worship you, and should they fail due to the flawed nature you created them with, they must now be subject to great suffering and pain. in other words, imagine having an ant colony, placing an apple slice in the ant colony's cage and then smiting the ants for eating the apple slice. nonsense.

god doesn't WANT to allow suffering and illness, but the devil causes it anyway. even when i was deeply faithful and christian, i thought this was a weird one, since god is supposed to be all-powerful and much stronger than the devil, yet he gets overpowered at influencing his own creation on earth, by a fallen angel with a fraction of his power, apparently.

god allows suffering and illness because we have free will and therefore actually do it to ourselves by choice. we choose to be sinful, we choose to be horrible to each other, and suffering and illness are the logical consequences. again, i think it's fucked up that god would create us in such a flawed way and then get really upset at us for being flawed. that's not a god i would worship.


the bottom line, the reality, is that god had no choice in the matter, because he doesn't exist (at least, not in the biblical sense - maybe there is a creator, but it's obvious that suffering and illness have nothing to do with him or how he feels about us).

 

[Pluto]

 

[LifeIsASadist]

Why do you think God allows so much suffering and illnesses on earth?

If god exists then god simply hates me

 

[EternalShore]

Unfortunately, I should be sleeping rn and have a job interview tomorrow morning, so I can't really answer fully~ >_< My life, its misery, and my business is ever-increasing btw, so I don't even have time to vent about it anymore! :(((

However, it all comes back to free will! :) God allowed us free will because He wanted us to be perfect~ Unfortunately, we ultimately took advantage of that to sin and do bad things~ :( By sinning, humans have caused other humans and their own selves suffering.

Now, why is free will perfect then if it causes us to sin and causes us all this suffering?: "Which is better? An AI that's programmed to love you or a person who freely chooses to do so on their own? The person is better because they find you worthy of love while the AI is merely forced to. Now, we rather obviously, did not choose this perfection, but that's because God granted us free will as part of this."

Anyways, Jesus was sent to die on the cross to pay for our sins to make up for our faulty free will~ so instead of us paying for our sins and suffering with even more suffering, through belief in Him, we can get to go to Heaven which is perfect and without suffering~ :) All this time in the interim is giving everyone in the entire world chances and time to believe in Him and get to go to Heaven too~ :)

 

[inconstantprayer]

I think there are many answers to that age old question about if there is a "God", then why does "He" allow so much pain and suffering. I think it almost too complicated and near impossible to answer properly, especially for a small young soul such as myself, but I will try to give a short basic answer to it. The basic understanding I live in is that we are constantly learning, and making mistakes and having mistakes made against us is all part of this "learning environment" that this earth definitely is.

This is a learning world for learning young souls like you and me. First and foremost we need to realize that we are not the flesh but we are spirit beings, that nothing is forgotten and nothing is lost, and that we don't die. even though we lose everything, and we die, over and over, and we are born over and over, and lose everything over and over and over. But what we do not lose is the knowledge from the lessons we are going through.

Now to speak of why God cares about us learning. I believe that we are destined for a "higher station" and that actually is where we come from to begin with. That once we progress through each higher level of existence over unimaginably vast amounts of time, we will keep coming closer to "Heaven" that will last "forever" when we get "there". But its complicated and hard to undrstand, because we already come from there, and THAT is the birthplace of our very true selves, our undying souls.

After learning more, even just a little more, we decrease the amount of suffering we need to go through, by sticking with what the lessons taught us, and not back-tracking, to have to re-do them over again......

 

[Skallagrim]

If you grant freedom, suffering is inevitable.

Imagine being completely restricted from anything that might cause hurt or suffering - everything from contact sports, to drinking wine, to falling in love would be withheld. Look at the wider world; lynxes that kill deer and eat them, wasps that lay eggs inside spiders, viruses that use our very cells to reproduce inside us.

The thing is this - suffering isn't moral or immoral. It's just a state of existence.

I'm not someone who believes in a moral god, my spiritual beliefs run in a completely different direct, but I don't think there is any cognitive dissonance in believing in a god of some sort that permits suffering.