Is there an answer?

[bluekelebek]

I wasn't raised religious, and tbh I dont know what/if I do believe in.. but is there an answer to - if there is a God, why is there so much suffering? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why do bad people seem to get on with life with no repercussions, regardless of thei actions?

El was the top deity of a pantheon in Ugarit. Henotheism was the norm. So deities battled to be the top god or goddess. Think of Astarte.
Anyway Yahweh was simply a Canaanite ba'al a local mountain god, the same with Allah.

It isn't coincidence that all of these quandaries cease to be any such thing if you simply postulate that god does not exist.

Introducing deities, higher powers, "creators" and so on is an entirely needless, superfluous level of added complexity. The universe functions perfectly well without them, which is the biggest giveaway there is that they are simply an invention of the human imagination.

Jesus gave an interesting answer when asked a similar question. Some Jewish leaders essentially believed that if people were ill or suffered it must be a consequence of that person's wrongdoing. Karma if you like.

They brought a man who had been born blind to Jesus and asked him who had sinned that he was born blind. Was it the man himself ( before birth) or his parents?
Jesus answered "Neither. He was born blind so that the glory of God could be revealed." Then he healed the man.

My own though is that evil of any sort is allowed foothold in the world because we as humans do evil. It isn't direct punishment though but something rather similar to the butterfly effect. I do something evil and that has repercussions in the world to others as well as myself. Sometimes we can see a direct cause and effect but sometimes it is indirect.

I think the point Jesus was making is that God is always good and on the side of rescue and redemption. The ultimate evidence of this was Jesus 's willingness to suffer and die unjustly to rescue humankind from the ultimate power of evil and death, his willingness to become part of a broken world and suffer for and with it.
No longer slaves to death and evil we are set free to grow in love and for our hearts and lives to start to change and grow to be more like Jesus.

Ultimately there will come a time when this process will be completed in every human and then, I think, evil and suffering will also end.

Jesus answered "Neither. He was born blind so that the glory of God could be revealed." Then he healed the man

I think the point Jesus was making is that God is always good and on the side of rescue and redemption

So are we supposed to accept that God is not responsible for the man being born blind in the first place?

If God is, it seems to me a rather absurd, and somewhat abusive way to display your own benign qualities, to first of all render someone blind at birth, only to later cure them to prove your "glory".

If God is not, then doesn't that call into question all the other stuff about omnipotence, omniscience, etc?

One of those Bible stories people trot out as though it's somehow good, or actually explains anything.

As mere human parents we wouldn't dream of inflicting suffering on our children in order to prove some point. And that story doesn't answer the question for the millions of other people born blind but never miraculously healed.

The idea that a diety, in the Christian version supposed to be omnipotent (so can set up the universe as it wishes) , omniscient (so knows how it'll turn out) but also loving would set up humanity to fail (set a test before^^ they know good from evil) and that failing this test breaks the world (disease, natural disasters etc) ... and then somehow the solution to this is to become a human and then temporarily die ...I'm sorry, but this makes no sense whatever. The whole setup is frankly perverse.

I don't for one minute think that God inflicts suffering on anyone to prove a point or sets them up to fail. The source of anything evil in the world is never from God. God is always in the process of redeeming all things. However it is also true that we do fail in many ways.

I don't know why we suffer other than that often it is caused by human action, either ours or someone else's however I don't think that suffering excludes the possibility of a loving God.

I've got a book by Jürgen Moltmann, a German theologian that I have yet to read. I'm waiting for some time where I'm not too exhausted by fibromyalgia and stand a chance of getting my head round his ideas. Moltmann first had to confront the truth of the Holocaust from British prisoner of war camps and his book "The Crucified God" has been said to to be about believing in God "after Auschwitz". I am hoping that it will give me more insights into things like this. Human suffering and evil is never something we should be glib about.

In my mind, human free will and choice has resulted in evil. Evil exists in huge and small ways in the world. We cannot deny the existence of evil. Would it have been possible for God to have prevented all human evil without "deleting" something precious about what it means to be human? I don't know but I suspect not.

I'm not always happy about this. My biggest argument and issue with God is about suffering ( mainly my own of course, I am totally and fallibly human !) I complain and shout at God about it sometimes.

Given that evil exists however, with the associated pain and suffering, then a God that enters our humanity, that suffers and dies as we do and in that weakness and surrender somehow begins a great reversal of things, a victory over death and the start of the redemption of all things seems hopeful and profound to me. It is like the descriptions in CS Lewis's "Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe" where whilst it is still winter there are signs that spring is approaching. "Aslan is on the move"

I know that to some people this makes little sense and this has always been the case but even they have to accept that for others it is a deep and awesome mystery, even if they also think those others are believing complete gobbledygook. But can believers really be less intelligent, less logical, less thoughtful than others? I don't see how this can really be true when you look at the breadth of those through history and now who have faith and the similar breadth of those who don't have faith. Are they all brainwashed and indoctrinated? Maybe it also maybe not! There are profound and deep thinkers in both camps.I think we do ourselves a disservice as humans regardless of anything else when we glibly dismiss another's thoughts, ideas, beliefs and unbeliefs.

So if you're born in a war zone, murdered or with some terrible hereditary disease; you're saying sorry that's your only shot at life.
That's unspeakably cruel to my mind.
Reincarnation gives all these poor souls another chance...

"cruel" is a human concept. Nature doesn't give a solitary fig for what humans think. Even if we perceive certain aspects of our universe to be "cruel" and merciless, it is just how the universe functions. It's often arbitrary, and seemingly without good cause, but that is because there is no underlying purpose, controlling influence, or wilful intent behind most of the things that happen in our universe, a great deal of it is just random happenstance.

"shit happens", as they say.

I doubt anyone would argue that the extinction event that wiped out most of the large dinosaurs was "cruel", yet humans are just another random species that inhabits the same planet, we have no greater right to existence, and if some misfortune befalls one of our species we perceive it as cruel because we have a shared experience with that other human being, but also because we're a pompous enough species to believe that we are, in some way, superior and subject to special favour by nature, when we aren't at all. We're successful, undoubtedly, because we happen to be the lucky species that hit the evolutionary jackpot, but the universe couldn't care less about humanity, and doesn't subject us to a special ruleset just because we have a degree of sentience, hence why it sometimes has absolutely no compunction in crushing us like the insignificance we are.

It's us humans who give humans special status in the universe, not nature itself, so I don't really understand anthropomorphisising nature and attributing human characteristics to it, as if it has some sort of conscious will, or a table of priorities and desires.

From a purely human perspective, yes, sometimes things happen to humans through no fault of their own that we would certainly regard as unfortunate, or even cruel, but nothing about that necessitates that nature gives us a second shot just because we were unlucky the first time around. That's just the human pomposity and ridiculous self-importance rearing it's head again. The universe doesn't make exceptions just because humans think it would be nice if we were treated differently or subject to special, magic rules.

Watch some near death experience stories on YouTube and you will find out.

It's almost as if the world could be explained by the complete absence of any gods...

That completely depends on your world. Your world might be able to be explained without gods, mine can’t to my satisfaction. We might disagree on what those gods are but they are necessary to my universe. But I’m not purely a materialist, I guess you are.,

I’ve started to believe Jesus might actually be a god. But I’m not sure I trust him

That completely depends on your world. Your world might be able to be explained without gods, mine can’t to my satisfaction. We might disagree on what those gods are but they are necessary to my universe. But I’m not purely a materialist, I guess you are.,

Well yes.... gods of many sorts, and different explanations for suffering 'exist' as products of the human mind. Some minds can accommodate the idea of gods that allow (or even cause) suffering. Some can tolerate higher levels of cognitive dissonance.

How does the 'free will' hypothesis explain natural disasters, diseases, parasites etc?

OP you are never going to understand it. St Augustine said something along the lines of...if you think you can comprehend God, then what you comprehend is not God.

The only really interesting thing about NDE is that people who experience it often report things that you'd expect them to experience depending on their cultural background, where they are in the world, their religion, and so on, and the experience is not universally identical, which suggests that yet again, there's a whole lot of human imagination, personal interpretation, and wishful thinking in play.

The mere fact NDE exists as a phenomenon is, in no way, any indicator that the human notion of an afterlife or controlling greater powers is reality. All it shows is that human brains, totally unsurprisingly, react in extraordinary ways when the body is subject to extraordinary circumstances.

The one thing that all people who report experiencing NDE have in common is that they are alive to tell the tale, so I don't know how anyone can credibly claim it's indicative of what happens to people who die in any case. It's not as if every person who experiences similar circumstance even reports NDE anyway, so yet again, another irreconcilable contradiction, unless you conclude that it's yet another aspect of human imagination, and how people choose to interpret something.

I can vividly recall being subject to general anaesthetic, the feeling of descent down a long, dark tunnel, and feeling myself floating around the room looking down at the operating table, then coming around and realising that I had no concept of how long exactly I had been "absent" for. There was nothing remotely spiritual or euphoric about it, it was just an "out of body" type experience the likes of which I've only ever encountered otherwise when I was off my nut on psychoactive drugs. Hardly then, a surprise to me to experience it when anaesthetised, but then, I'm a sceptic, and an atheist, so I'm naturally going to conclude that whatever I experienced had very earthly, pragmatic causes, whereas someone else might interpret a similar experience entirely differently.

Yes, the waste of human energy in the vast and tortuous type of mental gymnastics that is an attempt to make the idea of a benevolent, omniscient, omnipotent creator gel with the mess of human suffering, is mind-blowing.

That’s cool, I’ve had an experience of looking down at myself in a hospital bed while I was unconscious in intensive care. There were other “out of body” patients and nurses walking around too

Exactly

why does humanity need god, gods or goddesses to begin with ?

but then how can anyone truly know or understand god if its all written down as a product from other humans ?

"but then how can anyone truly know or understand god if its all written down as a product from other humans ?"

It isn't possible to know or understand God. It would be like an ant trying to understand humans. But I think, for Christians, reading the Gospel is all important. God in human form to help us understand as much as we possibly can.

Life is a mystery and we have a need to fill the gap

We really don't...

It's very convenient that rewards are in the afterlife. This is always purported by people at the top who are rich now. Very convenient for them!

Of course they want you to be their slave and wait till you are dead to begin to enjoy life.

I think you don't have to believe in a god to believe in miracles and wonder.

The universe is amazing. It's magical. We are too. Humans are amazing and awful in equal measure. We can do anything good and bad. We are both god and the devil. They fight it out in us for supremacy.

A miracle happened that created earth in all its beauty. Doesn't matter if it was a god or not.

The fact that there are multiple gods all over the earth kind of disputes that there is any god!

We aren't just some experiment! By an underachieving megalomaniac.

I do believe in some kind of spirituality and goodness in people.