Should We Blame God for Our Suffering? | John Lennox at Harvard Medical 

Have you read Genesis ch 3 vs 16, god curst women with birthing pains? Go tell that to any woman, they would BLAME GOD FOR THAT.

@@gknight4719 after you do a totally wrong thing that changes the whole world and God is forewarning you as to how your life is going to be, You want to blame God for that?

@@michaelszczys8316 OK did your god know that this earth that god made would have tsunamis and earthquakes, These happen mainly from the decay of uranium 238 which creates heat at 6,000c that melts the crust that have killed millions of humans and animals, do you think, god had no hand in that?

How solipsistic and morally reprehensible of you to prioritise the integrity of your unevidenced comfort story over being properly alert to the fact of many infants and young children around the world dying of leukaemia and diarrhoea, for instance. As Hitchens rightly said, 'religious people say and do the most disgusting things'.

@@AM_o2000 they get to go be with Him in heaven. Still can't BLAME God, He knows what He is doing.

You do know that Jesus never wrote a word in the Bible, don't you? We don't know who wrote those words decades later but it most certainly was not Jesus.

7,000 gods proposed by humans over time in hundreds of different languages and in hundreds of different countries.there is not and never has been the slightest evidence that any of them are real.l

@@clarkelaidlaw1678What an amazing coincidence that out of all those thousands of gods, the god of the believer's time and culture just happens to be the right one. How fortunate the believer is to be born into the right time and culture!

Listen more closely…

@@tg2626 Me listen? you are the one who has been captured, he could say up was down and you would nod in agreement.

@@Shytot-1 Such anger, my friend. My point was that his answers are obviously short. The medium is manufactured to give you bits and pieces. To listen is to ‘hear’ his underlying assumptions and presumptions and then pursue more knowledge. That would mean digging deeper and investigating more widely. To listen.

Why should God let the devil to test our faith?

We are not in Job's day. We are in the Age of Grace.

If God allows the devil to introduce suffering into the world, God is not omnibenevolent. If I watch with indifference as my children beat an elderly neighbour to death, I cannot be exonerated morally just because I didn't throw the punches myself. It was within my power to stop it happening.

@@AM_o2000 why would you let your kids beat up an elderly person anyway?

@@AM_o2000 it is written in the Bible do unto others as you would have others do unto you

To die one has to born first.

Free will to what? What are you?

1) The freedom of the will is a moot point. That particular theodicy is therefore on shaky ground. 2) If I watch with indifference as my kids beat an elderly neighbour to death, I cannot be exonerated. The theists' claim that God is omnibenevolent doesn't hold water if God allows suffering.

@@AM_o2000 2) you don't own your elderly neighbor. God owns everyone, however, God is NOT everyone's Father or parent. For most people God is their judge. You didn't set up a system of freewill interactions that you would use for two converging systems. There's so much wrong with the simplistic point you are making. 1) freewill is merely one ingredient in a comprehensive multifaceted theodicy with lots of other ingredients. Sin being a potential byproduct of freewill is what God is dealing with in this temporary creation.

@@AM_o2000 as far as the opening comment here saying "we made it happen" and God is not to blame because we have freewill...etc. that's not a good answer either. Sometimes the simple answer is actually the wrong answer.

@@BreckminFirstly, on your response to my point 2, would you care to set out a case for why there is 'so much wrong with the simplistic point' I am making? At the moment you've produced a word salad. Secondly, on your response to my point 1, if God gave us free will and evil and suffering are necessary because otherwise we wouldn't have full freedom, then God is still not exonerated, for two reasons: 1) natural evils still exist (earthquakes, wildfires, volcanoes, disease, etc.), which the free will theodicy doesn't address; and 2) God could have created a world in which there is no suffering and no evil and yet still free will. How do I know this last point? Well, you would presumably say that there's free will in heaven and no suffering or evil there, so it _is_ possible.

Who is the author of life?

YES, if the god of the bible was true, it certainly would be, an invisible mass slaughter!

If it did exist (which is totally improbable), then it is a weak, narcissistic, vindictive, and vengeful foolish being, with one of the frailest, brittle, egos to ever to have been conceptualised. It is truly hilarious how anyone could even consider such a being "god like".

@@garyt.8745Well put, I think we made gods up firstly out of ignorance and fear, Then some bright spark turned it into a religion, to control humans and bleed money out of them, Religion is the best Ponzi scheme ever, and this would require a narcissistic/psychopathic god, to put the fear of HELLFIRE, if you do not fall in line.

​@@garyt.8745and from where did u get righteousness, justice and goodness? Just by urself? Or from monkeys?

Because suffering in itself is not inherently bad/good. We hear time and again from motivational speeches that suffering can make us better or bitter people. Without any type of suffering we grow stale and complacent. You decide on how you take them so the choice still falls in you.

Time is the problem for everyone, not God.

Baseless statement. I have a lie-in on Sunday mornings. My Christian friends head off to Church.

If you didn't keep inventing your ridiculous, invisible, friends, and insist on imposing them on us and our kids, then we atheists wouldn't have to bother continuously denying them, over and over, and over, again.

They often do ...some of my best friends are atheists. Some have a certain discomfort about belief in God .

@tomgreene1843 .... in about the same way it is uncomfortable to have a best friend(s) who believe(s) they are Napoleon, or that the world is flat, or that constantly claims "the end is nigh". So basically it is the feeling of being uncomfortable around crazy people.

@ascended1219 are we going to ignore that Genesis 3:16-19 exists?

Literally: "through painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return."

@@saltandvinegar4444 a consequence is not the same as a curse.

@@brightbite You're playing semantics to avoid an important point. If a supernatural entity forcing all of humankind to endure suffering for one transgression isn't tantamount to a curse, then I don't know what is, but even if we reject the word curse in favour of another noun, we can still be alert to your resort to euphemism to preserve the moral integrity of a morally indefensible god.

@@brightbite not all consequences are a curse but a curse, in this context, is most definitely a consequence. So, logically speaking, it doesn't negate the fact that god cursed human kind.

This is solipsistic and morally reprehensible. A two-year-old dying of leukaemia has 'earned it', has she? As Hitchens rightly said, 'religious people say and do the most disgusting things'.

There is no one innocent and pure.. children as young as they are are sinful in nature, they lie, just like adults.. without teaching them to sin, they sin.. bcoz all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..

It is interesting to know that the Jewish tradition think that all humans are innocent of sin at their birth. Hereditary sin is an invention of christians.

I'm a Christian and I believe what you said causes illness. Not God. You're right

You poor soul

Just because you can't see GOD doesn't mean he don't exist. In star wars they had a thing called the force they couldn't see it but they believed in it. I will pray for you

@KennethWilson-xq5uu And you can _see god?_ Seek psychiatric assistance. You see aliens too? What is the difference, exactly? So Star Wars now counts as _evidence god exists?_ You do _know_ that it's also a work of fiction, right?

We cannot see over 99.999% of the universe. We don’t even see 99.99% of what’s in eye-shot. We only see surfaces of some things. We simply take it on faith it is all there. Numbers are all over the place, but aggregated analysis tells us about 7% of the world population is made up of atheists and agnostics. The number of atheists in particular are large in countries associated with the former Soviet Union and other repressive modern regimes, where Atheism was/is a state imposed ideology. Atheism is also growing in the countries where it is easiest to disassociate oneself with natural life and to live emotionally and mentally within a digital culture that replaces reality- I.E. the developed world. Christianity does not deny the existence of gods other than God. Rather in the Christian faith (like in many branches of the Hindu faith) there is but one God who is creator of all, deserving of worship. In Christianity, unlike in Hinduism, only that one God has the right to our exclusive worship. Christians, believing people are made in God’s image, that makes sense. Images of the one all-encompassing God worshipping lesser gods - it does makes sense they should not worship these lesser gods. So we have about 3 1/2 % of the world population that believes no gods or God exists, 3 1/2% who don’t have a conviction one way or the other, and 93% who believe in a spiritual world. I don’t think it’s ever a sign of wisdom to dismiss 11 out of 12 people throughout the world as all being idiots.

Read the new testament. It gives you a complete answer.

The only sin is your separate existence as an individual.

Your premise assumes we have some idea as to what “matter” is in an essential way, which we don’t. Matter is exotic and unpredictable and those on the bleeding edge of physics are quick to say we have no idea what it really is. The idea that “matter is imperfect” assumes you understand what matter is (no one does) and also what it’s end is. Consider Jesus’ material body after the resurrection: it is physical, but in a different mode. He can eat, but he can also move through things like doors and hide/reveal his person at will. Matter is only “imperfect” so far as it is dis-ordered, or more precisely, not ordered to God. When our bodies are ordered rightly, the matter is perfected. We see the fruits of this in the resurrected body of Christ.

You're stretching the definition of evidence.

@@wierdpocket If you don't as yet understand matter might I suggest you get in a motorized vehicle and get on a nearby interstate, push the petal to the metal to 100 mph and direct that vehicle toward a 3 ft think cement wall and see what happens. I'm amazed someone wouldn't understand that "particles" of matter have physical properties, are guided by physical laws of nature and there existence can be proven with technical devices that measure them in structure, attraction, repulsion, etc. If you think that is all imaginary then have a nice ride. We may not COMPLETELY understand the basic definitive constituents below quarks are as yet. But if you think there is some "spiritual" foundation to matter then please point out the causal relationship between sprit and matter that you can "prove". It's insufficient to just make the claim, prove it.

God gave humanity 10 commandments. When we learn to keep all 10 Commandments all of the time, then we can hold God to account. Until then we can only bring ourselves to account! God tells us and has shown us how to live. We rebel and tell Him that He has no right to. When things go wrong, WE BLAME GOD! You can't have it both ways.

Of course, since it would be unfair to accuse him of the destruction of his own creation when clearly he gives free will to his creatures which are required to act like his image to expand on tye paradise that is given to them, but they choose to create this, an Era of bloodshed and destruction. I really don't know how one can't get this when it's clearly stated.

@@rutasa31821st: I don't want it both ways. The reality that I see makes WAY more sense if there's nobody in charge but us. 2nd: "God has shown us how to live"? God's solution to bad behavior is often to annihilate the offender, or make their lives a misery. Clearly any society that wants to last doesn't practice this type of authority. If you want godlike leaders, go to N Korea.

@@thesecretplace1055 Sure, he gives " free will". Believers are "free" to totally surrender like slaves, or be eternally punished/annihilated. Seems to me the only thing the OT god really wants anyone to learn is that He holds the high card. Do a I say, because I say so. It's an abusive parent.

@@drumrnva No, no, no. God's solution to bad behaviour was to 'annihilate' Christ - who didn't commit a single sin - so that the offender who believes in Christ can be forgiven, saved from eternal death (separation from God) and have abundant life in this life and the next. Read the gospels. God is amazingly merciful, longsuffering and forgiving!