Evil

Ok, I'm slow, I know. We talked about this the Wednesday before last at the Conversation. So, here's my thoughts:

The first thing we did was split evil into natural disaster type evil and suffering to moral evil (as in people doing bad things which hurt others).

A lot of people use the existence of evil and suffering as an argument against the existence of God. They say that how can an all-loving, all-powerful God not step in to alleviate suffering. And how come the world has been created flawed.

Now, I'll start with the moral evil. It's a bit simpler in my mind. The whole thing is, God gave us free will. That means the ability to chose for good, or for evil, the ability to say yes to God and God's laws, and also the ability to go against them. When people go against God's laws, suffering results. Oppression results. Evil results. It's that simple. I'll take a couple of the ten commandments, you tell me if you think they're reasonable. Do not kill. Well, I think you can see where that's coming from. If you kill people, you're obviously hurting them and people who love them. And you're hurting yourself too, because you have to live with the fact that you took a life. Do not steal. Again, this does hurt people. If you take from a shop, that shop loses out on the profit, the owners don't get what they need to live on. Now, you might say 'oh, it's different to steal from Tesco, they can afford it, I can't'. If you really were stealing because you were completely starving, I do think that's a slightly different matter (same with killing someone by accident in self defence, but that's not really what we're talking about). But let's face it. If you steal from Tesco or anywhere, you are breaking the law, you are doing wrong, and if you have the ability to read this, I highly doubt that you really are starving. It's still just as wrong to take from Tesco. What would happen if everyone did it?

Now, on to natural evil.

One of the things we were saying at the Conversation was that if we didn't have this suffering to alleviate, we wouldn't get anywhere. If there wasn't something to work against, there would be no point in working. Much as I hate it, some of the greatest innovations have come during times of war, originally for a military purpose. They were created to defeat opposition, but they have come into use in everyday life to help to save people's lives and make things easier.

Another theory was that suffering was the world's way of making sure that there weren't too many people on it to sustain. I can agree with that too. In an eco-system, if you get rid of the predator, you get an explosion of the prey. While this might seem nice and you might think it's wonderful that the cute little rabbits are spared from the ravages of the nasty foxes, the rabbit population will explode. When that happens, they're all going to suffer. If people didn't die, callous as it sounds, there would be no room on the planet for any more.

Another thing that was said is that if we didn't have suffering here, we wouldn't appreciate the perfection of heaven. I don't think that's the primary reason for it, I don't think it's even really a very good reason. However, I'd like to throw in a little perspective. Some people think they're suffering because they have a rotten teacher. Others see themselves as suffering because they have no teacher. I'm not saying that other people suffer so that we can appreciate what we have, but if you don't suffer some hardship, you don't appreciate just how much you have.

Famine was thrown in a lot as an example of natural suffering. There is enough food in the world for everyone. In fact, I dare say we even have the technology to get that food to everyone. The trouble is, we're too greedy. I think this is one of the primary causes of suffering. Our own greed and selfishness means that we don't help those in trouble. And another thing with this natural suffering. No offence to those of you in California, but I have very little sympathy for millionaires who moan that their wonderful mansions have been damaged by earthquakes. We know now that there's a fault line running under California. So loads of people go and live there and fear the big one that's bound to come. Volcanoes are not intrinsically evil. Earthquakes are not out to get you. They're there. We have the knowledge now to avoid them, but we decide to live right on top of them. Volcanoes, you have to admit, are pretty amazing to watch. You can't say God's evil for creating volcanoes. He put them there because they're spectacular, and then people just decided to go live on them. What was He supposed to do? I admit, that knowledge wasn't always around, but as a response to earthquakes, volcanoes etc, people have done lots of research into them. Wouldn't life be boring if there was nothing to be curious about?

A final point on natural evil. The world was created perfect. Humans then proceeded to sin. That put flaws into the world. That's where a lot of suffering came from. You know in movies when someone does something terribly wrong and the whole thing starts exploding and having mega problems. Thing of that being what happened when sin was introduced. A perfect world rebelling against the imperfection that had been inserted into it.

Just remember: God made you special and he loves you very much.