Why does God allow the suffering of little children?

God-a stuffed animal for adults.

 

You know I cant understand how people cant accept that bad things happens. To say that God allows children to die is too say something like bad things only happend to bad people.

It's life.

 

Exactly. And here are people in this thread saying "science is great" but at the same time deploring the fact that scientific laws apply to innocent children and bad adults alike.

Imagine hypothetically that there was a God that really did reward good behaviour and punish bad in this life. Would we really be any better off? People would do "good" things just to get good treatment, which is just as selfish as doing evil for self-gain. There would be no opportunity to display compassion.

 

Exactly. Trying to understand why everything happens is futile. I don't think children suffering is an argument for or against God. Atleast my view of God.

 

Although I cannot accept determinism, I think a strong argument can be made in its favour.

 

St Thomas Aquinas said that there were only two serious arguments against God's existence. One was the problem of evil. The other was the apparent adequacy of the natural and human science to account for all that we experience without God—which does not conclude "therefore there is no God" but only "therefore it is not necessary to suppose that there is a God."

 

God doesn't allow the suffering of children, we allow it. God created a beautiful planet for us and created us with free will...a choice to make things good or bad. We decide that a child starves to death. We collectively as mankind, and individually. We allow the suffering, the disease, the pain. Our selfishness and greed and laziness causes suffering.

I do believe that everyone has a purpose. I also believe that everyone, children included, know their destiny before they are born and make the choice freely. Perhaps it is out of love for someone else that a soul chooses to enter this world of pain and suffering, perhaps knowing that their suffering will bring about a change for the good in another soul.

Our main purpose on earth is to learn how to love. For some people, it's tough going.

 

Would you like to take your focus away from sensationalising the admittedly present but comparatively minimal threats from man-made chemicals and zoom out for a moment?

I'm compeltely sick of sensible messages like "don't eat too much sugar" and "avoid inhaling fumigants" being so overdramatised that "chemicals" begin to be seen as the biggest demon and hazard to human health of all time. Please see the bigger picture. See the truth of the matter- That human beings are living longer and longer thanks to the incredible advances in medicine and technology, and while we do still have lessons to learn about what can be harmful, this isn't the cause of the vast majority of human illness. If it was, people would have lived much longer before industrialisation and medical science as we know it, but the fact is they did not.

 

"Sin" is the concept developed by the human brain to understand and shun "immoral" activity, or that which was perceived to be harmful to the self or others. This obviously served an important function in the evolution and survival of mankind. It made sense for people to try to spread the message by making others fear the consequences of "sinful" actions and attaching stigma to them.

Taking sex as an example, it is obvious why many sexual activities were perceived to be a "sin", or something to fear and avoid, for human survival. When people had sex with lots of others, disease spread, and there was no medical explanation for this. The "explanation" could only come from superstitious thinking, and punishment from some higher power seemed logical. Afterall, human minds utilised the idea of punishment, and human minds are naturally inclined to believe in "something higher", so it's clear how these two add up in an uneducated brain.

The harm in promoting the idea of "sin" in the modern world is that it encourages people to act out of fear and lazy thinking rather than a sincere desire to grow for the benefit of humanity. Also, as in my example, many things previously thought of as "sins" no longer have any logical reason for being seen as such. Thanks to medical science we can understand how sexually transmitted diseases spread, and how to stop them without stopping sexual liberalism. There is no longer a reason to say that gay sex or orgies or some of the other sex acts condemned by the bible are "sinful". This explains why the majority of christian believers discard these parts of the bible when it comes to forming their morality, despite claiming that it is the word of god.

 

In answer to the original question, the suffering of other humans is split between natural disasters and tragedies and blame lying with us and us alone. There is no "why" somebody has suffered or died beyond those two things.

 

We have two choices - either - 1) the world and all that is in along with the rest of the universe was created from nothing. or - 2) It was all created by God which has no beginning.
The things that you describe as immoral activities are simply lumped together under the heading Sin.
Should you believe that creation came from nothing - then sin simply has it's consequences here, in our lifetime - period.
Should you believe in God - then you assume that life, or consciousness, continues after the body has ceased to function. In that case the immoral activity is carried forward with your being.
The punishment, should there be an afterlife, is fully open to your imagination - for me it is an eternity without the entirety of the joy I could have had.

 

Do you not believe that "punishment" is a purely human concept, and not even a very effective or useful one at that? Surely believers in god, who they say is perfection and all-knowing, should see that such an entity would be well beyond this petty human behaviour. In human society, punishment is supposed to be a deterrent, an attempt to prevent further misbehaviour. So god, being the clever guy he is, makes his punishment eternal. What is the point in that? The person can't re-offend, so the punishment is pointless.

I suppose the other way to view it is that god wants you to act out of fear here and now. That seems like a terrible way to live and a waste of what may well be your only 75 or so years in existence.

 

Suffering is simply a painful experience, whether it be physical or psychological.

Pain or discomfort is a signal that integrity is being threatened. It is part of physical awareness, it is not a punishment.

 

there's no evidence of god

but there is the evidence of a decaying corpse, belonging to a seven year old girl who had been brutally rapped and murdered by one of gods children.

the end.

 

As opposed to tastefully raped and murdered?

 

It's time to be rational. Its time to use this wonderful ability to reason we have and stop falling back on lazy or convenient thinking. It's time to see that a lot of this religious stuff sounds like it has come from a child's nightmare and has no factual basis whatsoever. What we do have proof of is the issues we have and the fact that this human body which is making us right now only has around 8 decades to live in total. We should recognise our collective responsibility and stop pinning it on "god".

 

As the OP, I guess I should have been more attentive to this thread, but all of you are doing a much better job of exposing the hypocrisies and absurdities of the mythology that I would have. Thanks!

 

To what?