Brief Overview: One of the most potent arguments challenging the existence of God, or at least a "good" God, is the reality of pain and suffering in the world, especially among the young and innocent. These are profound questions without easy answers. To explore the rationale behind how a benevolent God might permit suffering while providing guidance on how to cope with it, - Click - on buttons below (Complete Overview or "Display by Category/All" or Author Name)
The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference. DNA neither knows nor cares. DNA just is, and we dance to its music.
"It cannot be emphasized too strongly that Christianity has a vested interest in human misery. Christianity, perhaps more than any religion before or since, capitalized on human suffering; and it was enormously successful in insuring its own existence through the perpetuation of human suffering."
Humanism rejects religion. It attributes nothing to the so called "supernatural." In this there is an awakened liberty that releases us from the shackles and servitude mentality of old superstitions so that we may realize our full potential.
"When the death of a disabled infant will lead to the birth of another infant with better prospects of a happy life, the total amount of happiness will be greater if the disabled infant is killed. The loss of happy life for the first infant is outweighed by the gain of happier life for the second. Therefore, if killing the hemophiliac infant has no adverse effect on others, it would, according to the total view, be right to kill him."
Blindness to suffering is an inherent consequence of natural selection. Nature is neither kind nor cruel but indifferent.
"The only position that leaves me with no cognitive dissonance is atheism. It is not a creed. Death is certain, replacing both the siren-song of Paradise and the dread of Hell. Life on this earth, with all its mystery and beauty and pain, is then to be lived far more intensely: we stumble and get up, we are sad, confident, insecure, feel loneliness and joy and love. There is nothing more; but I want nothing more."
"Nature is not cruel, only pitilessly indifferent. This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous-indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose."
I can very well do without God both in my life and in my painting, but I cannot, suffering as I am, do without something which is greater than I, which is my life”the power to create.
This hideous doctrine of eternal torment after death has probably caused more terror and misery, more cruelty and more violation of natural human sympathy, than any belief in the history of mankind. Yet this doctrine was taught unambiguously by Jesus.
The procreation of the diseased, the feeble-minded and paupers should be stopped.
The God of hell should be held in loathing, contempt and scorn. A god who threatens eternal pain should be hated, not loved; cursed, not worshipped. A heaven presided over by such a god must be below the meanest hell.
If there is no god -- and there isn't -- then we made up morality. And I'm very impressed.
"When someone like myself points out the rather obvious and compelling evidence that God is cruel and unjust, because he visits suffering on innocent people of a scope and scale that would embarrass the most ambitious psychopath, we're told that? God is mysterious."
"The truth is, it is impossible to harmonize all the ills, and pains, and agonies of this world with the idea that we were created by, and are watched over and protected by an infinitely wise, powerful and beneficent God, who is superior to and independent of nature."
When one person suffers from a delusion it is called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it is called religion.
"The emergency problem of segregation and sterilization must be faced immediately. Every feeble-minded girl or woman of the hereditary type, especially of the moron class, should be segregated during the reproductive period we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded."
The world is fast succumbing to activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school educations.
The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.
Although many of us fear death, I think there is something illogical about it.
The Ten Commandments have lost their validity. Conscience is a Jewish invention, it is a blemish like circumcision.
“In ridiculing a pathetic human fallacy, which seeks explanation where none need be sought and which multiplies unnecessary assumptions, one should not mimic primitive ontology in order to challenge it. Better to dispose of the needless assumption altogether. This holds true for everything from Noah's flood to the Holocaust.”
Religion teaches the dangerous nonsense that death is not the end.
"It is a horrible idea that there is somebody who owns us, who makes us, who supervises us - waking and sleeping - who knows our thoughts, who can convict us of thought crime, just for what we think, who can judge us while we sleep for things that might occur to us in our dreams, who can create us sick, as apparently we are - and then order us, on pain of eternal torture to be well again. To demand this, to wish this to be true is to wish to live as an abject slave."
You're asking the right questions, and now you want to dig a little deeper.
