Comments on: Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen?

By: Ouroboros

Ouroboros — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:09:58 +0000

Congratulations, Dreamvigile. You’ve composed the most horrifying answer to the problem of evil I’ve ever heard.

By: Christian Carnival CCCII « who am i?

Christian Carnival CCCII « who am i? — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 14:10:34 +0000

[...] Face Man presents Why Does God Let Bad Things Happen? posted at Glowing Face Man, saying, “In this article I respond to one of the classic atheist [...]

By: Alsu

Alsu — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:30:10 +0000

God doesn’t let bad things happen. He sends us.

By: Jonadab the Unsightly One

Jonadab the Unsightly One — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:02:01 +0000

The Biblical answer, of course, is free will. God allows bad things to happen because the alternative is to never give anyone any meaningful choices. As soon as you give people choices (not inane “do you want chocolate or strawberry” sorts of choices, but decisions with any real import), they now have the option of screwing things up, and so sometimes they will.

> In fact it isn’t really even God who deliberately
> allows bad things to happen, so much as it is mankind.

Bingo. Well, it’s technically both, but invariably God is allowing what man has chosen, either directly or indirectly. Sure, we choose without understanding all the ramifications of our choices, because we have imperfect knowledge of the world. But also, we frequently choose without even *caring* about all the ramifications of our choices, because we are basically selfish a lot of the time. That has consequences.

Why does a child starve in Africa? Mostly because the governments in Africa are horribly corrupt. Why do we have hurricanes? Because of the flood, a result of man’s sin. The details for any given bad thing that happens can be all kinds of complicated, but the high-level view is really simple: God allows bad things to happen because the other option would be to *disallow* anyone from ever doing anything bad, i.e., reduce everyone to automata.

By: loswl

loswl — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 04:01:57 +0000

very interesting topic, found your post on Christian Carnival. As a gamer myself, I can really relate to how you approached the answer to the question. Very true that the game would be quite boring without the good and the bad co-existing. I think one of the challenges of this question is that we equate “bad things” with “evil things” so people will say God is evil, because He allows “bad things” to happen, but we know that God being evil is quite impossible. We sometimes look at things from a human perspective and not God’s perspective…for example, we could easily say pain is evil from our perspective, but look a little closer at pain, it is actually a blessing from God..why?…because pain is a signal to our bodies that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, when we fall we try to break our fall, because we know that if we do not, then we may break a bone, we may place our hands in a hot oven to take out a cookie and eat it at its optimum temperature and burn ourselves but pain actually protects us from ultimately killing ourselves.

So contrast that with “bad things” I would suppose that something is wrong with our world, that is why we feel and experience so much bad things, it is a great signal to where we are in relationship to God, we continue to pull away and disobey Him and even deny His existence and the more we turn to the evil things in life the more the pain is increasing in the world, we are falling, but we refuse to break our fall with the one cure that was sent…Jesus.

I believe that we will see an increase in the “bad things” happening in the world the more we stray away from God. We are a generation that love to blame things on others, whether it be a blame on our Mother, Father, Society or God, as human beings we have to take responsibility for our fall away from God and our ultimate redemption on Christ alone. Can’t wait for the day that the good and the bad will not co-exist anymore )