Where was God during the holocaust?

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Michael_Anthony said:
I’m not saying we should be thankful for the evil, what I meant was, that any evil action that God was incapable of bringing a greater good out of (with our cooperation), would be prevented by God, rather, in order that free will be maintained (something he clearly views as an inviolable good) and that the greater good may be achieved, He may permit the evil to pass.
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So we should be thankful to Him for allowing evil acts because good will come of them.
 
0Scarlett_nidiyilii said:
How could God allow such evil?
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Believers have to be careful with this.

Humans actually intervened and fought WWII to prevent further massacre.
Some human beings did not let it happened and they risked their lives to stop it.

From the atheists perspective, if a good, all-knowing and all-powerful God expects mortal humans to intervene and be their “brother’s keeper”, wouldn’t that same God have an even greater responsibility to intervene to protect innocence from evil?

Stating that God doesn’t intervene because of “free will” would indicate that each human being should not intervene to prevent evil because their fellow human has a right to exercise their “free will” (from the atheist pov).

In other words, if a mere mortal human is expected by God to intervene against evil wrong-doers, then God who made each human would have even more responsibility to intervene and can’t toss lack of intervention up to “free will”.
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Yes, there were Catholics, non- Catholics and many, many priests killed during the Holocaust. They were put in camps for all kinds of reasons which were unreasonable and cruel, but (and u might agree) the Jews were put into camps for only one reason and that was because they were Jewish. The evil of those times are beyond our capacity to even try and comprehend and it would be wise for the sake of sanity not to understand that reality of evil. Evil is still with us, but as Christians we believe that our Divine Savior ,who was from David’s line, suffered the greatest evil as the Messiah. Who was sinless and the Son of G-d. He took on evil as an innocent victim for all of humanity. Shalom
 
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Yes, very true- but they do not constrict each other’s freedom of choice. They just receive rightful consequences. I imagine Orthodoxy teaches the same.
 
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MamaJewel said:
Stating that God doesn’t intervene because of “free will” would indicate that each human being should not intervene to prevent evil because their fellow human has a right to exercise their “free will” (from the atheist pov).
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Where on earth does this come from? And why is it repeated incessantly?

Free will (if it exists) simply means that you are free to make your own decisions. It DOES NOT grant you right to excercise those free will decisions. Society would simply cease to exist if we all did whatever we wanted with no thought of the implications to others.
 
Fair enough.
The thread title question is close to “why does God allow evil/pain/suffering”, which is a reasonable question to ask.
I find it a little un-reasonable for a person who’s an unbeliever to claim that a God they don’t believe in allowed man’s inhumanity to man, when we have been given a clear moral code, which humans decided to disregard. (Kind of when people get upset about the Old Testament stories of God telling somebody to kill another person, then come to find out the complainer is actually perfectly okay with abortion and euthanasia. At that point, I leave the conversation.

I think there’s about a zillion threads about the “why” of suffering, and like all these threads, they go nowhere.

This is what I can say. And it’s in no way an answer, but it is an insight.

Although God doesn’t always stop suffering, He did decide to Incarnate, to take on our human nature, and suffer everything we did. Not only the ordinary sufferings like hunger and cold and probably everyday accidents (He did, after all, go into the wilderness quite often. At least, He probably got a scrape or a stubbed toe), but He also suffered extreme agony—hatred, betrayal, the abandonment by His best friends, humiliation, torture, unjust arrest and excruciating execution.
 
We as humans have free will. God didn´t want us to choose Him because we were forced to. He desires that we choose Him and obey His will freely, and then the natural consequence of that is that a lot of people choose not to.

God doesn´t desire that we kill each other and oppose him by doing such horrible acts. God desires for us to be fully human, fully in relation to Him, and fully loving. God loathes evil. He hates it, even more than we do. He hate the fact that sin came into this world, He even hate it so much that He sent His own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ in order to pay the price of sin on our behalf. We as Christians, who believe in Him and seek to do His will, will be saved by His blood, but anyone who rejects His sacrifice in words and deeds is putting themselves outside of His promise of eternal life. (John 14:6)

The justice of the wrong belongs to God. We might not get to see it for ourselves, and it seems like injustice goes without punishment, but it doesn´t. At the end of the day, when humanity is finished at earth, there will be the day of judgement. At that day, Christians will rejoice, and those whom have chosen hell for themselves will get to go there. Because by our Faith and our actions we choose for ourselves.
 
Things could be a lot worse if God was not restraining evil.

God could change everyone’s personality so that they cannot sin. This would also mean that we would not have a free will. We would not be able to choose right or wrong because we would be “programmed” to only do right. Had God chosen to do this, there would be no meaningful relationships between Him and His creation.

Instead, God made Adam and Eve innocent but with the ability to choose good or evil. Because of this, they could respond to His love and trust Him or choose to disobey. They chose to disobey. Because we live in a real world where we can choose our actions but not their consequences, their sin affected those who came after them (us). Similarly, our decisions to sin have an impact on us and those around us and those who will come after us.

God could compensate for people’s evil actions through supernatural intervention 100 percent of the time.

While this solution sounds attractive, it would lose its attractiveness as soon as God’s intervention infringed on something we wanted to do. We want God to prevent horribly evil actions, but we are willing to let “lesser-evil” actions slide—not realizing that those “lesser-evil” actions are what usually lead to the “greater-evil” actions. Should God only stop actual sexual affairs, or should He also block our access to pornography or end any inappropriate, but not yet sexual, relationships? Should God stop “true” thieves, or should He also stop us from cheating on our taxes? Should God only stop murder, or should He also stop the “lesser-evil” actions done to people that lead them to commit murder? Should God only stop acts of terrorism, or should He also stop the indoctrination that transformed a person into a terrorist?

In summary: Rather than [blaming God] and questioning God on why He does not prevent all evil, we should be about the business of proclaiming the cure for evil and its consequences—Jesus Christ!
 
I was reading a book on Pope Francis, he
suffered from an illness that the doctors
could not diagnose, he went from a healthy
young man to an invalid, and was denied
as a missionary to Japan w/ the Jesuits.
Once a wise Nun told him that suffering
makes us more like Jesus, if we allow God
to work in our suffering!! See Romans 8:28-29
 
God’s only Son suffered a horrible death.
Life on Earth is not the important thing. Gaining the next life. Going to Heaven, that is the important thing.
 
PatK63 said:
That is not true! Read the lives of the saints and you will see how much good people can accomplish!
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I have read the lives of the saints. No isolated good they did makes up for the senseless murder of 11 million+ people.
 
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Wozza said:
So we should be thankfull for evil acts because if they didn’t occur things would be even worse. At least, that’s how it seems to work.
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I should be thankful for the Holocaust? I would take a hard look at what you wrote so you know how horrible that sounds.
 
How do we know he didn’t allow this evil to allow a greater good? We don’t know the long term plan of God. And how do we know He hasn’t intervened before?
 
I think the notion that there is even a sense of an evil is proof of God. What makes it evil if looking at it in a lens of Darwinism? Darwinism touts survival of the fittest and basically eugenics if taken further. So in that way what is evil?
 
Prodigal1984 said:
I think the notion that there is even a sense of an evil is proof of God. What makes it evil if looking at it in a lens of Darwinism? Darwinism touts survival of the fittest and basically eugenics if taken further. So in that way what is evil?
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That’s not what Darwinism is.
 
YHWH_Christ said:
How could an all loving good God allow the unspeakable and horrific war crimes of the holocaust that resulted in the tourture and death of 6 million Jews and numerous other groups including ethnic Poles, those of African decent, the Romani, the mentally disabled, homosexuals, and many many more. How could God allow such evil? How could God allow the most evil and vile man to ever exist so far rise to power?
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It’s pretty amazing. On one hand, non-believers say that the problem of evil is proof that we’re wrong about God. (To wit: human evil is orders of magnitude less significant than eternal punishment (or beatitude) that it’s unfair and even evil that a mapping from human-act to eternal-consequence exists!)

And then, they turn around and assert the exact opposite: if God is good, how can He allow evil human acts?

(Ummm… because they pale in comparison with eternal consequences, maybe? 🤔 )

I think that non-believers don’t realize that they’re arguing opposites as if they both argued against God! “Law of Non-contradiction”, people! 🤣
 
The problem of evil is the greatest emotional obstacle to belief in God. It just doesn’t feel like God should let people suffer. If we were God, we think, we wouldn’t allow it. The atheist philosopher J.L. Mackie maintained that belief in God was irrational, for if God were all-knowing (omniscient), he would know that there was evil in the world; if he were all-powerful (omnipotent), he could prevent it; and if he were all-good (omnibenevolent), then he would wish to prevent it. The fact that there is still evil in the world proves that God doesn’t exist, or that if he did, he must be “impotent, ignorant, or wicked.” As keenly felt as the problem of evil may be, however, it doesn’t represent a strong intellectual or logical obstacle to God’s existence. Mackie was wrong: The existence of God and the existence of evil aren’t mutually exclusive. Let’s look at the three attributes of God that Mackie named. Omnipotence: As we noted in the prior answer, omnipotence doesn’t mean the ability to do what is logically impossible. It’s possible, therefore, for God to create beings with the kind of free will that can choose between good and evil, but having done so he can’t also force those creatures to choose freely to do good. If he forced their choice, it wouldn’t be a free choice. Omniscience: If God has infinite knowledge, then he knows many things we don’t. This means that he may, in fact, have good reasons for permitting things—such as evil and suffering—that seem inexplicable to us. Human beings have a very limited vantage point, and so we often lack knowledge of things of true significance. What appears to us to be a tragedy may have effects that bring about great good, and conversely, what appears to us as a good thing may, in the long run, prove harmful. Consider the analogy of a small child being taken to the doctor for his immunization shots. He knows the needle hurts, and he can’t understand why his own parents are allowing the doctor to cause him pain—that the inoculations help prevent the much greater suffering of disease. He’s unable to perceive the greater good. Likewise, we should recognize that a being with more knowledge than us—like God—may have good reasons for things, even pain and suffering, that we are unaware of. And so he allows evil to exist because of his omniscience, not in spite of it. Omnibenevolence: As we think about the goodness of God, we must be careful not to impose on him our inadequate understandings of what goodness is. In his book The Problem of Pain, the English author C.S. Lewis writes: By the goodness of God we mean nowadays almost exclusively his lovingness; and in this we may be right. And by love, in this context, most of us mean kindness. . . . What would really satisfy would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, “What does it matter so long as they are contended.” We want, in fact, not so much a Father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven—a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
 
Furthermore, most theists don’t believe that God created us merely for happiness in this life, but also—and more importantly—for eternal happiness with him in the next. So, his omnibenevolence should be judged neither by our limited human standards of goodness nor by what happens in this world alone. Putting these things together, we can recognize that an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent creator might have good reasons for tolerating abuses of human free will that lead to evil and suffering. We may not know what all his reasons are, but we sense the value of freedom, including the value of being able to choose good freely rather than by compulsion. We can see how in both his power and knowledge God can bring good out of evil in ways that we, in our limitations, aren’t always able to comprehend. But in faith we can say along with St. Paul, “We know that in everything God works for good with those who love him” (Rom. 8:28). In fact, rather than disproving God’s existence, the reality of evil actually points to it, in an indirect way. If evil exists, then it follows that real morality exists. Why? Because evil, by definition, is that which acts against the good. If there were no objective good, then we could say there are things we dislike, or what we call suffering, but there could be no such thing as evil. Therefore, if objective morality exists, then it follows that God exists. Objective moral laws point to a perfect and unchanging moral law-giver.
 
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