Evil
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Treaty on existence and point of evil.
❖ 1 Evil is morally wrong action or state. 2 Evil causes suffering, evil is malevolent, evil is destructive or disruptive. 3 Evil is the opposite of good, evil is absence of good, evil is tolerance of evil. 4 Evil is a broad idea, it can be moral evil, but it can also be natural evil. 5 Evil can be relative. 6 Evil has victims, and can have perpetrators.
❖ 1 If we accept that God is omnipotent, omnibenevolent and omniscient, then we accept that God is in power to stop the evil, that God wants to stop the evil, and God knows of the evil so that he can stop it. 2 If God cannot stop evil, then God is not omnipotent, and is not such a god at all. 3 If God does not want to stop evil, if he permits evil to persist, then he is not benevolent at all, and he does not deserve praise or devotion. 4 And if God does not know of evil, then he is not omniscient, and with such state persisting, he is not relevant to our lives and worth time to speak to or listen. 5 Which is it?
❖ 1 In good times, it is hard to accuse God of anything. 2 When in 2020 COVID-19 pandemic started, evil became more apparent. 3 Today, in June 2022, the virus feels an irrelevant and forgotten subject, a mass psychosis of the past, but we can bring back memories of news reports with a hundred dead today, five hundred dead today, one thousand dead today, day after day, and the tearful realisation that this was not present before. 4 This was an example of natural evil, evil without higher purpose. 5 A virus is hardly alive: it is but the genetic code in a coat, it does not move or metabolise, it is a free floating particle, and its mutations work against us as often as they do against the virus itself.
❖ 1 Then we see war. 2 On the 24th of February 2022, Russian Federation attacked Ukraine in an open war, with tanks, cities taken, occupations, filtration camps, genocide attempts, massacres, rapes against girls, boys and children, tortures and psychological tortures. 3 The Russians created a situation so powerfully distressing that they turned normal boys into monsters. 4 For what purpose? 5 This was an example of a moral evil, anthropogenic evil, a human evil.
❖ 1 For both we sense a feeling of powerlessness and fragility, and we ask – wisely – why God made the world in such a way that this is allowed. 2 A lesson of forgiveness – but what of justice? 3 Justice will be brought for the victims in the world after. 4 Then why don’t we just kill ourselves and be done with such games? 5 A universal commandment that forbids killing also forbids killing yourself. 6 Then are we not brought to torture of suffering by this world’s very design, which is a design of God?
❖ 1 I tell you this. 2 God created the world, but this world was left spinning like a mechanism turned on to do its thing. 3 God mostly does not interfere in it. 4 We are alone, senseless suffering is part of the world, and the world is not fair. 5 Then again, we can continue to ask God for mercy and for interference and action, and for miracle, because who created this world and its suffering can just as easily end the suffering, who made evil and good can wish the good to happen just as much as evil happens, and who could design the whole world and its fate can predict the evil and stand against it.
Completed 2022-06-12.
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