http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodicy

For those who still believe in God (like myself), but, are now ex-Mormon:

Now that you no longer believe Mormon Theology. What is your take on why a good God allows suffering/evil and continues to be an all-knowing, loving God?

I don't know about that, but that Gottfried Leibniz dude on the link reminds me of Jimmy Page (when he had dark hair).

Part of the reason I believe in both a heaven and a hell is the idea of some semblance of justice. As for allowing bad things to happen, especially to good people, I think of the fact that it rains on the just and the unjust and God has created an existance with much depending on chance and on the whims of other people which impacts on us and our actions which impact others. We do not determine by our actions all that will happen to us. Part of the value in life is negotiating the curves without despairing our lot. If God protected everyone there would be no life, no learning, etc.

I knew TBMs who figured that we have no control over the environment so global warming doesn't matter - all is controlled by God. I find comfort in the Book of Judith where the heroine chastisesed the leaders because they were sitting back in despair, soon to surrender, when they should be using their God-given noggins. I also note that while we cannot change everything, we can do our part, by using our brains and not by merely following some leader who claims to have been given powers to know all because of some process of divine revelation. No, our ability to predict the future and to even affect change, is what is God-given, but not in some supernatural fashion, nor in some delegation to some fraud perpetrated such as the FP and Q12, nor someone our brains prove was an utter fraud such as JS.

The only way that I know how to solve this problem is by dropping at least one of the three. I keep the all-knowing and the all-powerful part but drop the all-good part.

I can conceive what all-knowing and all-powerful might mean but I cannot conceive what all-good might mean. For example:

Pain in itself is not evil. It requires enduring a lot of pain to train for and complete an Ironman, for example. Torture is evil for many reasons, but one reason is that, unlike training and completing an Ironman the pain is unwanted and out of the inflicted's power to control, mitigate, etc. That God knows we will and do torture one another and has the power to stop it but doesn't suggests to me that God can't be good. (That's just one of many many reasons.)

But what of those times we must inflict pain on our children, without them knowing why or having the power to stop it, for their own good? For example, it is good that pre-speech infants get inoculated, but they do not know why the seemingly nice nurse is sticking a very sharp needle into their flesh. It hurts. But we as parents know that it is good and we also know that the pain is temporary.

Well, from God's point of view our pain is temporary, too. We die. And maybe there's something to the idea about our life's three score and ten being nothing more than a twinkle in God's eye, meaning we spend no more than the briefest moment from God's point-of-view alive and in the flesh, subject to all kinds of sorrow and suffering.

Time is a funny thing. The common denominator of the subjects from Dr. Rick Strassman's DMT experiment (DMT: The Spirit Molecule) is that in the course of a few hours *lifetimes* seem to pass for the them. This was also Dr. Eben Alexander's reported experience after returning from a week long coma, that *lifetimes* of time was experienced in the course of what was to our view no more than a week or so.


My bottom line: I affirm that life is good even when it feels bad, that life is good in itself. I cannot conceive of life sans temporary pain because what I find good in life often requires some pain. Learning to read is good, I found it somewhat painful. Eating is good and I think it universal that s.hitting is something of a pain in the ass. Climbing Everest is good climbers affirm, even when they return sans a few toes and full of tales of terror and woe.

Could an all-powerful, all-knowing God make a world sans pain? Presumably yes, but it wouldn't offer life as we know it. Since life as we know it ends, and since Time is a funny thing, I give God some wiggle room on the all-good part. --Having said that, there is absolutely NO wiggle room in that "we tortured a few folks" from our dear leaders. They are not God. Why God permits the evil that men do? I don't know, but I thank God that it is transitory.

Of course, if there be an everlasting Hell then God is everlastingly NOT good, whatever its power and knowing may be.

Human