When we hear any headlines on the news of tragedies and war going on in the world, we look on with a puzzling question in the back of our minds, ‘why is this horrible event happening to so many innocent people’. Even more so, we may ask why God is allowing this to happen. I have personally never experienced anything tragic to ask God why he allowed this to happen, aside from minor hardships or obstacles being put in my way. So, my reasoning is going to have to be from an outsider point of view. From all the articles and book about the problem of evil or why god allows bad things to happen to good people, there is one common response, no one can explain this reasoning. All I understood from the readings were theories and understandings that …show more content…
God created man and woman and placed them in the Garden of Eden where a tree called the tree of knowledge of good and evil. They were told by God not to eat the fruit from this tree. Eve was tempted by this tree and specifically tempted by a serpent to eat from the tree. She plucked an apple and gave it to Adam to eat and this when it is said that evil was born. God created the world of free will and they were free to choose to eat from the tree but was warned not to by God. When they chose to disobey God, they created an absence of good within themselves. St Augustine of Hippo was a 4th century theologian that believed that evil was not created by God because when God, who is perfect, created the world he stated it was very good. Evil therefore is not a thing and must be an act of free will lesser than good that makes it evil. Therefore, evil is associated with free will in this instance since now the fall of man has now taken place. In an article by Greg Koukl in a Christian website str.org, he explains the Augustinian theodicy and gives the theologians theory on why evil exists. He states “He [God] not only wanted free creatures; He also wanted plenitude, that is, the greatest good possible. Plenitude--the highest good, the best of all possible worlds--requires more than just general freedom; it requires moral freedom, and that necessarily entails the possibility of evil” (Koukl 2012). This gives way …show more content…
This is another conundrum that during my research I could not find a defined answer. Most of what I read was on how to justify it or what made people feel more at ease about the tragedies that may occur to good people in the world. A mass tragedy that happened to millions of good, men, women, and children, is the holocaust. The evil event of race purification of the world from an evil-minded individual brought so much death and cruelty to so many innocent people who were born of certain attributes or of a certain religion. Upon reading the book “God at Auschwitz?” I gathered more information on what got those who were in the concentration camps through the experience of being there than trying to understand why God was allowing it to happen. From what I understood, their faith in God is what got them to endure every day. They would sing hyms in the lowest possible tone possible so the guards would not hear to keep their spirits up and it was their way of professing their faith to God. The author of the book, John M. Oesterreicher states that “without faith, human sorrow – in particularthe desolation of Auschwitz – would be unbearable” (Oesterreicher, 1993). When those within the camp witnessed, or learned of another’s death at the hands of the guards, they would take solace in the fact that the persons being was no longer suffering in this evil and they will go on to a better afterlife.
Not even the most powerful Germans could keep up with the deaths of so many people, and to this day there is no single wartime document that contains the numbers of all the deaths during the Holocaust. Although people always look at the numbers of people that were directly killed throughout the Holocaust, there were so many more that were affected because of lost family. Assuming that 11 million people died in the Holocaust, and half of those people had a family of 3, 16.5 million people were affected by the Holocaust. Throughout the books and documentaries that we have watched, these key factors of hate and intolerance are overcome. The cause of the Holocaust was hate and intolerance, and many people fighting against it overcame this hate
Evil’s origin begins with Adam and Eve using their special gift, free will, to commit the first sin. They sinned because they were tempted from the free will to choose between following or disobeying God’s orders. Paradise Lost is an epic written by John Milton that describes the fallen angel Satan and the fall of man. The Grand Inquisitor by Fyodor Dostoevsky is about an archbishop who talks with Jesus and wants to burn him as a heretic. Paradise Lost and The Grand Inquisitor both discuss free will and the stories of two benevolent characters that use their free will to choose evil. In Paradise Lost and The Grand Inquisitor, the main characters Satan and the Grand Inquisitor are evil because they use free will to choose evil over good.
The Holocaust has many reasons to it. Some peoples’ questions are never answered about the Holocaust and some answers are. The Holocaust killed over 6 million Jews (Byers.p.10.) Over 1.5 million children (Byers, p.10.)They were all sent to concentration camps to do hard labor work. Jewish people weren’t the only ones sent to concentration camps. People such as people with disabilities, Homosexuals, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Communists, and Socialists (Byers.p.12). Everyone that was sent to concentration camps was sent via Train cars (www.historychannel.com). They had no food, water, or rest rooms up to 18 days. Many people died from the lack of food and water (Byers, p.15.). They children under 12 and elderly were sent to death camps because they were too weak or young too do the hard labor work so they were exterminated quickly (Byers, p.17.). Everybody at the camps were ordered to wear a certain colored star so they were easily spotted. The Holocaust went on from 1939 to 1945. Throughout all those years it was BAD.
Suppose he had a reason to permit evil, a reason that was compatible with his never doing wrong and his being perfect in love, what I 'll call a justifying reason. For example, suppose that if he prevented evil completely, then we would miss out on a greater good, a good whose goodness was so great that it far surpassed the badness of evil. In that case, he might not prevent evil as far as he can, for he would have a justifying reason to permit it” (5). Even if God had a reason to allow evil, he who is all loving and powerful would want the least amount of people to suffer and feel pain. Since God knows what is going to happen before it actually happens, would he not be morally obligated to stop people from doing something evil to others, or preventing suffering by those who have been hurt by evil?
What is good and evil and where did it come from? Everything in the world was created from the one God. The God theory infused all things in the world and that live beyond it. From this viewpoint good and evil both derived from the God law. They have both lived since the construction of the world. Yet, evil was in a dormant form at that juncture. Evil is in our mind, not inside our aspiring heart (http://www.srichinmoy.org/spirituality/spirituality/good_and_evil).
There are times in history when desperate people plagued by desperate situations blindly give evil men power. These men, once given power, have only their own evil agendas to carry out. The Holocaust was the result of one such man's agenda. In short simplicity, shear terror, brutality, inhumanity, injustice, irresponsibility, immorality, stupidity, hatred, and pure evil are but a few words to describe the Holocaust.
The Holocaust was very different from all other genocides in history. This was not a result of government issues, a power struggle between two groups, a holy crusade, or an attempt to defeat an enemy to win. Instead, the Jews were murdered simply because they were Jews. The Nazi group believed that the Jews were inferior to most other peoples and sought to literally wipe them from the face of the Earth. Many people saw this as wrong and unjust, but there was still other people like, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi leaders who still looked at the Jews as somehow less human.
Hundreds of people die each day. Two-thirds of the Jewish population was killed, not a big deal, right? Six million people died in a matter of four years because of a one ERRONEOUS idea created by a horrendous man. Not many people who believed in the Jewish faith made it out alive, but the people who didn 't die are being affected in many ways. The people who were involved in the Holocaust should have gotten a lot more help than they did at first. Anything would have helped them, even a loaf of bread. Many survivors continue to suffer from effects of the Holocaust; the world should have done something to stop these horrible effects on people such as survivor 's guilt. Some people don 't understand the multitude of the Holocaust. Millions of people never saw what the outside of the barbed wire fence looked like after they first entered the concentration camp. They found where their death bed was.The effects on these people have made their lives very hard. Not many feel like they should be worthy of living. The lives they live carry on with the guilt that they weren 't worthy of living.
During the Holocaust the mass murder of jews was a worldwide tragedy and when a tragedy happens usually your first question is why? The two groups of devoted researchers for the Holocaust are split into the Intentionalist group and the Functionalist group. As said by Mimi-Cecilia Pascoe in Intentionalism and Functionalism: Explaining the Holocaust “The intentionalist position suffers greatly from a lack of adequate evidence, and consequently cannot prove Hitler’s intentions beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the functionalist position is better able to compensate for the lack of evidence, and thus provides a more solid historical explanation for the Holocaust (Pascoe 1).” The on going argument of whether the Holocaust was intentional or a choice in the moment is the Intentionalist vs. Functionalist case and either side has many different ways of portraying their evidence on the topic; the arguments are both have convincing arguments but in
God is the source of evil. He created natural evil, and gave humans the ability to do moral evil by giving them a free will. However, had he not given people free will, then their actions would not be good or evil; nor could God reward or punish man for his actions since they had no choice in what to do. Therefore, by giving humans choice and free will, God allowed humanity to decide whether to reward themselves with temporary physical goods, and suffer in the long run from unhappiness, or forsake bodily pleasures for eternal happiness.
The Bible distinctively states that Humans were created good, in Genesis 1:31 “God saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” The Garden of Eden contained the tree of life and the good and evil tree of knowledge, God gave Adam a choice to choose from good and evil, He forbade Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, However, they made the decision to disobey God anyway and as a result of their disobedience they sinned, causing
To understand evil we must first understand the concept that good and evil are term or words referring to what one given individuals believes to be the right and wrong thing to do. Good, many times symbolized as god or light, is usually associated with an action that many individual see as helping one or many people. This definitions is again very hard to define due to it bias and opinionated nature. But many and most people will agree that good, is what helps not only the common people become a stronger as a community but also become stronger as in...
While in the Garden the serpent says to Eve, “… but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be open and you will be like divine beings who know of good and bad” (Genesis 3.13 Line 5). The serpent makes an appealing temptation to Eve, saying that they can have what God has, and can be like God. This temptation caused Eve to eat the fruit and also gives it to Adam. The serpent was not lying when explaining this to the woman but put the thought into her head. Being God like, and having the knowledge of good and bad could be an appealing thing to have, so Eve ate the fruit disobeying
The Holocaust is one of the most famous events in modern history. The senseless slaughter of millions upon millions of innocent people at the hands of Nazi butchers was incited when a man by the name of Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. The Nazis wrought terrible death and destruction on Europe in the following years, beginning with Aryanization and ending with the Final Solution in a maniacal plot to exterminate and purify the human race. The Holocaust should be remembered by all as a dark point in modern history.
Evil 's beginning can be found in Genesis chapter three when the serpent begins to tempt Eve. Evil can be anything of God 's creation that man has put a twisted spin on in order for it to be pleasurable or satisfying. Because humans find pleaure in evil, it begins to diminish the relationship to God, and blinds man from the truth of the gospel. Because of evil, some have tried to pin the point of evil onto God since He is the creator of everything, thus creating problems between God and evil by trying to draw distinctions between the two. The problem with evil is that it takes different forms, according to Erickson one form is that of religion when "some particular aspect of one 's experience has had the effect of calling into question the greatness or goodness of God, and hence threatens the relationship between the believer and God." 11 The next form is theological saying that "it is not a question of how a specific concrete situation can exist of light of God 's being what and who he is, but of how any such problem could possibly exist." 12 By identifying these different types of problems with evil, the soultion will be realized. One way of solving this debate is to leave the idea of God 's omnipotence. This approach is called finitism, which says that there are two principles within the universe, "God and the power of evil" 13