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The Problem of Human Suffering
The Christian tradition is haunted by a significant mark: Suffering. The question that arises from this suffering is if God is the omnipitous being that Christians believe Him to be, why would He let His people, whom he loves, suffer great pains and horrible deaths? According to premises derived from theologians and followers of the Bible, God is "all loving". If that is true, then God would not want His people to suffer, but by just looking around us we see that suffering, in fact, is happening. If there is suffering going on that God does not want, then He would be able to stop that suffering since He also believed to be "all powerful", yet suffering still goes on. Why? Hopefully by the end of this paper I will be able to answer that for myself.
Suffering needs little support for its existence, for things such as the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel's book, Night, documents the suffering of the Jewish people and his own personal suffering during the Holocaust. This massive amount of suffering is very hard to justify. How could God let this genocide take place?
To answer that question we must further examine the original premises that we based the first conclusion upon: God is all-powerful and God is all-loving. To say that either one of these postulates are true would disrupt the foundation of the Christian beliefs. So we must dig deeper and look at the thought that "God does not want suffering". Since suffering indeed happens, and God being the all-powerful individual and could stop suffering from happening if He wanted, then God must want suffering to happen for a reason. That's strange, since we are saying God is also all-loving. God must need suffering to happen for a reason, but ...
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...ering is always going to be painful no matter if God is the one who is doing it to us or not. What we need to realize is that suffering with faith in God is much more justifiable than suffering without. In I Peter it says "However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name."(I Peter 4:16). So suffering as a Christian is all right because it means that you share an aspect of Christ's life, and you should continue to praise God. "So then, those who suffer according to God's will should commit themselves to their faithful Creator and continue to do good"(I Peter 4:19). This is our answer: Have faith in God, through the good times and especially the bad, for during the bad times is where our faith will truly be tested, and when the "Problem of human suffering" arises, it won't seem like much of a problem at all.
Many people say that God does exist even know there is unnecessary evil in the world. There are many reasons to why people believe God is real, for starters, they believe that without the bad, there is no good. In other words, if bad things didn’t happen in the world then we wouldn’t know that good things existed. Another way people justify evil in the world is by stating that if there was no evil and God prevented all bad things, there would be no virtues. In “Why doesn’t God intervene to prevent evil?” the author points out the fact that “without the suffering there would be no occasion for the production of such virtues as courage, sympathy, and the like” (Johnson 122). Take for example an alcoholic parent who throws their 5 year old child out on the street to fend for itself and the child ends up getting hit by a car. Some people would say that God didn’t help the child because he wanted someone to gain courage from the situatio...
Adam and Eve were expected to stay innocent but once Eve took a bite of the apple on the forbidden tree, we were seen as sinners and by default our children had to carry that with them. This self-inflicted pain was not manipulated by him but rather recognized and accepted as part of life once we chose to neglect his expectations. Many times we see that pain affects our lives in a negative manner and the atheist would assume that God should alleviate if not eliminate the pain since he is all powerful, good and knowing. Yet by intruding our lives in such a manner, He would be violating the birth given right of free-will. We will no longer have the ability to choose our pathway or learn from our mistakes because God has predestined our
After reviewing the work of David Hume, the idea of a God existing in a world filled with so much pain and suffering is not so hard to understand. Humes’ work highlights some interesting points which allowed me to reach the conclusion that suffering is perhaps a part of God’s divine plan for humans. Our morals and values allow us to operate and live our daily lives in conjunction with a set of standards that help us to better understand our world around us and essentially allows us to better prepare for the potential life after life. For each and every day we get closer to our impending deaths and possibly closer to meeting the grand orchestrator of our universe.
Not preventing suffering is the same as actively inflicting it. Humans generally believe that if they love another person, they should prevent their loved ones from suffering. Why shouldn't God be the same? If a human causes suffering for an...
Kusher gets straight to the point in the first few pages of his book. We, as humans, assume that we deserve what we get. Somewhere along the way we have sinned and deserve what happens. We focus the attention on ourselves so we can keep viewing God as a righteous judge. God is simply being like a caring parent in hopes we can see he only means well, and hopes one way we can see why he would cause such pain. Kushner believes that maybe God is not the cause of our suffering, but that God is there to help.
The question of suffering comes up much when talking about, or practicing any religion. Many ask why people suffer, and what causes suffering? The various religions try to answer these questions in their own way. Pico Iyer’s editorial, “The Value of Suffering” addresses the questions of suffering and how it is handled. This article could be compared to the Bhagavad-Gita which also addresses and explains suffering through different stories of the interactions of humans and different Gods. One can specifically look at “The Second Teaching” in the Bhagavad-Gita, which explains the interaction between a man named Arjuna and the god Krishna. In it Arjuna is suffering because he does not want to fight in a war and with people whom he should be worshiping. Krishna says to fight because the souls of the people will forever live on, and because he needs to fulfill his Dharma. With what is known about the Bhagavad-Gita and how Iyer thinks about the subject, Iyer would agree with how the Bhagavad-Gita address suffering.
Why do the innocent suffer? This question has been asked for ages. Jewish sources, from the earliest to the latest, have tried themselves to answer this. It occurs to every single person with an interest in religion or not. We all know cases of good people who suffer terrible pains for no obvious reason. From a religious side of life this disturbs me because it seems to contradict certain basic Jewish beliefs. In particular, we believe: God is omniscient (He knows everything), God is omnipotent (He can do anything), and God is just. If these beliefs are right then how is it possible that innocent people suffer?
God is all kind then why is there suffering? Who or what is the cause
In order to understand where God is in suffering, it is important to first analyze why God cannot intervene in suffering. Rabbi Harold Kushner’s Why Good Things Happen to Bad People concisely explains this mystery. He states that God cannot intervene because “God can’t stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human." Essentially, the only way God can stop suffering is by not allowing people to cause it, taking away their free will. One of the most prominent examples would be the German concentration camp Auschwitz. Millions of people suffered and died there, but Rabbi Kushner asserts “. . . it was not God who caused it. It was caused by human beings choosing to be cruel to their fellow men.” Man’s evil choices cause human suffering, not God’s complicity. Rabbi Kushner’s observations give a strong foundation to the argument that God cannot intervene. This concept of God meshes with the idea Marcus Borg presents in The God We Never Knew. In his book, Marcus Borg suggests the notion of a panentheistic God, that is, a God that is “. . ....
quite a good thing and that God is doing the right thing in letting it
The concept of suffering plays an important role in Christianity, regarding such matters as moral conduct, spiritual advancement and ultimate destiny. Indeed an emphasis on suffering pervades the Gospel of Mark where, it can be argued, we are shown how to "journey through suffering" (Ditzel 2001) in the image of the "Suffering Son of Man" (Mark 8:32), Jesus Christ. Although theologians have suggested that Mark was written to strengthen the resolve of the early Christian community (Halpern 2002, Mayerfeld 2005), the underlying moral is not lost on a modern reader grappling with multifarious challenges regarding faith in the face of suffering. In his article "A Christian Response to Suffering", William Marravee (1987) describes suffering as an "experience over which we men and women continue to stumble and fall". The way we view God is crucial to the way we view suffering according to Marravee, who delineates the disparity between a view of God as an ‘outsider’ and the biblical image of God – where God is an ‘insider’ who suffers with us in our struggle. This essay seeks to explain the Christian view of suffering and the purpose suffering can have in our lives.
The traditional Christian answer to why God allowed the death of Christ is for the absolution of humanity’s sin. However, this begs the question, as an omnipotent God why was it necess...
Why do people suffer? That is a question man has been trying to answer for hundreds of years. Two men attacked this question from very different angles. Their names were Buddha and Zarathustra. Buddha was an Indian and founded the eastern way of thinking. Zarathustra was from Persia and believed in a more western theology.
As previously, stated God uses difficult situations as a way to improve the relationship we have with Him. Why suffering though? Frederick Sontag wrote in his book that evil or suffering are the best circumstances in which to find a God, unlike times where everything goes well
Evil has plagued the lives of all creatures and has existed throughout all of time. The problem of evil is that since God created the world and is all omniscient; omnipotent; and omni-benevolent, and since a good thing strives to rid evil; and because there are no limits to an omnipotent being: then because God is all three the world would therefore not contain evil. But fact is that evil does exist and from this some conclude that God does not exist because he would possess all three omni’s and rid evil. He knows of evil because he created it and had knowledge of what it would be, but he does not stop it even though he is omnipotent then that would explain the conclusion against God’s existence due to the problem of evil. If he exists then why does he allow suffering? pain?