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NoWhereMan
Guest
I Just reread, & I meant to post a reply rather than a quote, it was in error, sorry
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homogotohell
Guest
Don’t worry, if you eat a cracker that contains a 2000 year old man who sacrificed himself to himself to take advantage of a loophole he created, you’ll be fine. Don’t worry about this world.
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EmeraldWings
Guest
ooo, ok i’m sorry, i guess my confusion was well founded
lol
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Sonny1954
Guest
When I see children with birth defects I do ask God, in the silence of my heart, “how could you let this happen?” I understand murder, theft, war and other villany because some man or men used their free will to ruin some other peoples’ lives, and God gave us free will. But no child is born with life-long problem because of any free choice s/he made.
More and more I believe that God has an active will and a permissive will. And things like the Holocaust, birth defects, and all manner of injustices are part of His permissive will. His “hands-off” style of running the universe can lead one to believe that the Deists had it right, after all.
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NoWhereMan
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I agree with you, I think the way this world is, is the way God wants it, it`s all part of his plan, no matter how horrible it seems to us
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rotlex
Guest
I have trouble with this type of response as you see it over and over again. This is not an attack on the you as the poster, but I have a question regarding free will. Yes, I understand we are created with free will, because of it, people can choose to do these evils etc. etc.
However, with that said, where is the free will of the person being attacked, raped, murdered or tortured? Where is their free will to NOT be attacked? Why is a child, or any other innocent made to endure suffering due to someone elses “free will”? I am asking this seriously, as I struggle with it often.
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Sonny1954
Guest
Some might say that we will hear the answers to these terrible questions in the next world…after the questions and answers cease to matter. Maybe we should stop looking to some Deity for the solutions to our problems. Since many (though not all) of our problems are man-made, then perhaps they are soluable by humans. At any rate, it’s clear the Creator isn’t going to take care of them.
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tonyrey
Guest
The fact that a point is repeated does not mean it is false. It should be considered on its merits.
Free will means the power of choice. You can choose not to be attacked but a choice implies that you do something about it, e.g. take steps to defend yourself or avoid dangerous situations. You can minimise the risk but you can’t prevent it altogether.
Because there is no alternative. Otherwise God can and does intervene to prevent evil and suffering but there must be a limit to His interventions. Otherwise it would be obvious that He exists. We would lose our freedom to choose what to believe and how to live. We would aware we are being watched all the time. People already complain about Big Brother in modern society! When we lose our freedom we complain bitterly and many even die fighting for it. If we lost our inner freedom just imagine how frustrated we would feel - helpless spectators unable to think for ourselves or do what we want…
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crazzeto
Guest
What a beautiful response, I used the passion to put an exclamation point on how much God loves you [all] for my 6th grade CCD class as well. One should never question Gods love, God is love.
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Crumpy
Guest
I think the answer about all the evil in the world would include the realization that the horror is evil – this is not trivial, because a lot of people simply believe that there are no absolutes, even good and evil. They believe that they are good or evil simply in the eye of the beholder.
It might be easier for us to repent if we realize how much evil there is in the world and how much a part of it that we are.
It might be easier for us to repent if we realize how much evil there is in the world and how much a part of it that we are.
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djeter
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Splendid reply, Mark. What is it they say? “Game, set, match.”
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grace88
Guest
God has a divine plan for us all and whether we can fathom it or not there is a purpose for all this!! His grace be with us all and let us remember our brothers and sisters in need in our prayers.
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jrgiancola
Guest
God doesn’t cause the horrors in the world. Satan does.
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Metatron
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Great response from “Mlchance”. He that has ears to hear, let him hear.
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Et_Cetera
Guest
To be quite honest, we can’t even say that he exists.
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Bookcat
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Here is a couple of snippets from **Pope Benedict XVI’s Encyclical Deus Charitas Est **which shows on the one hand Christians in humility know that they do not see whole of the universe …the whole of reality…and on the other that we know God…we know and trust him …
"Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: “Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?” (Rev 6:10). It is Saint Augustine who gives us faith’s answer to our sufferings: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”—”if you understand him, he is not God.” [35] Our protest is not meant to challenge God, or to suggest that error, weakness or indifference can be found in him. For the believer, it is impossible to imagine that God is powerless or that “perhaps he is asleep” (cf. 1 Kg 18:27). Instead, our crying out is, as it was for Jesus on the Cross, the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in his sovereign power. Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.
"Often we cannot understand why God refrains from intervening. Yet he does not prevent us from crying out, like Jesus on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Mt 27:46). We should continue asking this question in prayerful dialogue before his face: “Lord, holy and true, how long will it be?” (Rev 6:10). It is Saint Augustine who gives us faith’s answer to our sufferings: “Si comprehendis, non est Deus”—”if you understand him, he is not God.” [35] Our protest is not meant to challenge God, or to suggest that error, weakness or indifference can be found in him. For the believer, it is impossible to imagine that God is powerless or that “perhaps he is asleep” (cf. 1 Kg 18:27). Instead, our crying out is, as it was for Jesus on the Cross, the deepest and most radical way of affirming our faith in his sovereign power. Even in their bewilderment and failure to understand the world around them, Christians continue to believe in the “goodness and loving kindness of God” (Tit 3:4). Immersed like everyone else in the dramatic complexity of historical events, they remain unshakably certain that God is our Father and loves us, even when his silence remains incomprehensible.
- Faith, hope and charity go together. Hope is practised through the virtue of patience, which continues to do good even in the face of apparent failure, and through the virtue of humility, which accepts God’s mystery and trusts him even at times of darkness. Faith tells us that God has given his Son for our sakes and gives us the victorious certainty that it is really true: God is love! It thus transforms our impatience and our doubts into the sure hope that God holds the world in his hands and that, as the dramatic imagery of the end of the Book of Revelation points out, in spite of all darkness he ultimately triumphs in glory. Faith, which sees the love of God revealed in the pierced heart of Jesus on the Cross, gives rise to love. Love is the light—and in the end, the only light—that can always illuminate a world grown dim and give us the courage needed to keep living and working. Love is possible, and we are able to practise it because we are created in the image of God."
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Bookcat
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From Catechism:
Providence and the scandal of evil.
309 If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.
310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.174 But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.175
Providence and the scandal of evil.
309 If God the Father almighty, the Creator of the ordered and good world, cares for all his creatures, why does evil exist? To this question, as pressing as it is unavoidable and as painful as it is mysterious, no quick answer will suffice. Only Christian faith as a whole constitutes the answer to this question: the goodness of creation, the drama of sin and the patient love of God who comes to meet man by his covenants, the redemptive Incarnation of his Son, his gift of the Spirit, his gathering of the Church, the power of the sacraments and his call to a blessed life to which free creatures are invited to consent in advance, but from which, by a terrible mystery, they can also turn away in advance. There is not a single aspect of the Christian message that is not in part an answer to the question of evil.
310 But why did God not create a world so perfect that no evil could exist in it? With infinite power God could always create something better.174 But with infinite wisdom and goodness God freely willed to create a world “in a state of journeying” towards its ultimate perfection. In God’s plan this process of becoming involves the appearance of certain beings and the disappearance of others, the existence of the more perfect alongside the less perfect, both constructive and destructive forces of nature. With physical good there exists also physical evil as long as creation has not reached perfection.175
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mmarg77
Guest
I haven’t been able to read the replies of others, but God isn’t the cause or the reason for suffering – sin is. This is evident when efforts to bring food and medicine into needy neighbourhoods are thwarted by bands of bullies who take it and make money from it. No sin is small. Sins join into clusters like cancers and block and even kill Charity. This is an over-simplification, but God did give us free will. Adam and Eve were the first to use it for their own rationalities. same old…same old. There is so much evil in the world blocking good efforts that evil is able to swing around and pile on top of us. God gave us free will. We have to live with/under the choices of all mankind.
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