Original sin is the answer to everything in Christianity. Why is there pain in childbirth? Original sin. Why do you have unpure thoughts about your neighbor, or her ass? Original sin. Why does stepping on a lego hurt so much? Original sin.
The Joker comparison isn’t too far off, at least the version of the Joker that follows the trickster trope and tries to prove moral points by setting up ridiculous traps for the protagonists. Sacrifice your baby to me. Haha, psyche, just playing! Hey, I’m going to make your life shit but still believe in me, OK? Here’s my one and only son, I’m sure you’ll treat him to a good time.
All those things you mentioned, by the way, are yet more things on which Christians would disagree among themselves on the nature of. As well as entirely sometimes, as you say.
Mormons were the ones I was thinking of; fairly odd-one-out-ish, but hey, they’re Christians and there’s a good many of them. I don’t really know much if anything about Unitarians other than that they exist.
The vast majority of biomass on this planet is incapable of suffering as we know it. Single celled organisms, plants, invertebraes, insects, etc.
In fact I think only mammals can feel negative emotions other than physical pain. I assume various animals feel physical pain, but you need a mammalian limbic system to have more ‘advanced’ emotions. Yay for that, our brains are complex enough to have a wider range of tools to torture us with.
Also consider that humans were just monkeys or other creatures until a few million years ago. All this philosophizing is pretty recent, and I think we are the only species that can do it.
Here is a better way of looking at it:
Our emotions are designed to force/compel/motivate us to engage in behavior that is beneficial to our ability to survive and thrive in our environment (or to be more accurate, an environment that doesn’t exist anymore and hasn’t existed for thousands of years). Also justice doesn’t exist and all that truly matters in the world is power.
Probably true, but one thing virtually all theists agree on is that humans are Special to God, and whatever shit is going on in our lives is somehow really important.
So the amount of non-feeling biomass is as irrelevant to the problem of evil, as the vast amount of matter in the universe that doesn’t have living things on it at all.
Personally, I’ve never had any major problems with the issue of why there is suffering. I think it’s just a matter of humans having a different perspective than God’s. If an immortal God exists, he’s looking down and wondering what practical difference it makes if you die after a few hours of life or live to be 120 years old - to God both lives were just a momentary flicker in the span of eternity. And the same thing applies to whatever suffering we endure - to God, years of suffering was over almost instantaneously.
And it’s not just God who will see things from this perspective. If you subscribe to Christian belief, people who follow the rules will spend eternity in paradise. Do you really think that somebody who’s had a million years in paradise is going to look back and complain that they suffered during the few decades when they were alive? That’ll seem like a papercut that happened to you thirty years ago.
Now if you want something that’s unjust, consider the flip side of the coin: eternal damnation. Who could possibly commit enough evil in a single human lifetime to deserve eternal damnation. Even Hitler will eventually be punished enough. I have no problem with Hitler going through a few thousand years of having pineapples shoved up his ass but a million years? A billion years? Eternity? No, that’s too much.
I have this mental picture of a line, a long line waiting at a gate. I can’t see the writing on the gate because it’s too far up there. But I ask the guy in front of me what the line is. He too didn’t know so he asked the guy in front of him. This went of for some time until the word finally came back. It seems the line is at the Pearly Gate and there’s a guy there named St. Peter who’s busy searching the SDMB on his computer.
Power meaning influence within the laws of the universe. I’m not talking about political or economic power. We are creatures created in a universe of physics and chemistry, and whatever force can mold and influence us has power. We were molded by natural selection so that has all the power. Science gives us some of that power back to mold ourselves into a more palatable form.
As far as justice my point is it doesn’t exist outside of our survival driven philosophies. Justice is something we use to keep our society functioning.
Death: Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape. Susan: With tooth fairies? Hogfathers? {(G)god(s)} Death: Yes. As practice, you have to start out learning to believe the little lies. Susan: So we can believe the big ones? Death: Yes. Justice, mercy, duty. That sort of thing. Susan: They’re not the same at all. Death: You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder, and sieve it through the finest sieve, and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet, you try to act as if there is some ideal order in the world. As if there is some, some rightness in the universe, by which it may be judged. Susan: But people have got to believe that, or what’s the point? Death: You need to believe in things that aren’t true. How else can they become? Terry Pratchett - Hogfather
There is no “justice” in the Universe, there’s “just us”.
I was taking objection because you used all that matters. It’s a human value judgement, not some fundamental property of the universe.
Sure the gravitational effect of a large object on a given object is larger than the effect of a small object on said object. But it takes a human to say that that makes the larger object more important, let alone that largeness is the only important thing.
FWIW, I disagree; we’d have to make the definition of “power” ridiculously broad for it to be the only important thing.
Agree about the origin of justice but I think saying it doesn’t exist is misleading. We don’t normally say Economics doesn’t exist, yet it is equally man-made and abstract.