Where is God in the storm?

Oops.

+ Blessed be our God.

Yet, it's still easier to believe in God than to believe that Hamlet was deduced from the molecular structure of a mutton chop, [to borrow a phrase].

"Where is God in the midst of suffering?

On the Cross."

-- a priest I know

Don't you see? This is another example of His profound love for us.

Ahem.

God may or may not exist, that is not for me to say, but it seems to me that He doesn't really care about us one way or another. And if this world is fallen, ruled over by the devil, why not just get on with it with the rapture? What's taking so long? What's the point of just letting us suffer like this? If God is all powerful, why allow the devil to continue ruling over this world? Why infiltrate it 2,000 years ago with His only son and then just wait an unspecified period of time for all the world's souls to voluntarily come to believe in Him and at some point just come back and kill everybody who didn't do so and take all the believers to paradise? It doesn't make any sense. I have no contempt whatsoever for those who believe, no, but it just seems so preposterous. If it were the premise of a sci-fi film it'd be ridiculous.

May God have mercy on these peoples' souls, they are innocent.

"If our existence is solely the result of a random fluctuation in the quantum vacuum, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. But if that is the case, profound contempt and censure are a ridiculous waste of time for a grownup."

Charles didn't say that he is spending his time feeling profound contempt and censure for God. He simply said that if there is a God and that God knows what he is doing and still allows such suffering for his own (perhaps whimsical and mercurial?) purposes, then such a God is not worthy of worship and reverence and is worthy of those other two responses.

I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I suspect Charles's belief is that there is no God, or if there is one he is so distant and aloof from our struggles here on Earth, and in either case he doesn't spend much energy feeling love or hate for God.

and what's with all the killer storms in the Bible Belt?
where's God in those storms?
absent...
at least the Absent God is consistent in allowing killer storms no matter what the religion of the people being killed...
so that's the Reality...
the Creator has left us with a Creation that brutalizes so many people...
God is responsible for the death and destruction...
let's give credit where credit is due...

safety faith hope love joy peace to all...
Forgive God...
yes, Forgive God...

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain;...

"Where is God in the midst of suffering?

On the Cross."

So 12 hours on the cross is the equivalent of the whole of human suffering before and since? Not the most equal of exchanges.

"If it were within my power to prevent the death of a hundred-thousand people - at no risk to myself and with no effort on my part - and I did not do so, would I be morally culpable?

Would I deserve to be called 'good'?

Dunno, but I find the idea that God's gonna dry all our tears in the sweet by and by somewhat less than compelling."

People, you really need to read Hart's whole piece, or better yet, the small but profound book he wrote after the tsunami (The Doors of the Sea) to grasp his point. He is definitely not posing a 'sweet-by-and-by' answer. Exactly the opposite, actually -- in the book he rails against them as false comfort.

In response to Scott Walker:

"Evil exists in the world as a consequence of free will."

Following James Wood, I would argue that the Free Will Defense falls apart because

(1) the objection can surely be raised that we have too much freedom, much more than we need. It would have been easy for God to create a world in which his creatures have the power to act freely as moral agents - yet this world would lack the murderous freedoms that allow the existence of Hitlers, Stalins, child rapists, slave masters. In his post-tsunami attempt at theodicy, David Hart seems to acknowledge that enormous human suffering is at bottom what is sometimes called "dysteleological suffering" - that is, meaningless suffering that plays no necessary role in a grand cosmic narrative. What God and Heaven offer is solely (or at least primarily) release from suffering, not comprehension of suffering. In my view, this resembles nothing more than a release from torture, the magnitude of which God is morally culpable of creating. (That is, if he exists.)

(2)as Wood writes, Heaven, as an intellectual category as much as an actual place, depends on the idea that the highest state of human happiness - having God wipe away our tears, and so forth - is a state without freedom, or with strictly limited freedom. If our souls had freedom in Heaven, they would merely replicate their lives on earth and, hence, Heaven would not be Heaven. But why would a benevolent God test us with seventy years of freedom and then reward those who passed the (rigged) test with an infinity of unfreedom? (I say rigged because God, being omniscient, surely knows who can successfully excercise free will and who cannot, before anyone is born.)If unfreedom is the state our Creator longs to have us in, why was it not instituted on earth? Hart admitted that seventy years of freedom on earth was cosmically pointless beyond our release from it; and, again, this verges on a definition of torture.

Human reason cannot absolve God of the enormity of human suffering. So I am driven to atheism. To modify Wittgenstein, a nothing will serve just as well as a something about which nothing can be said to justify.

I'll check out his book. I'll try to read it alongside Dawkins' 'The God Delusion,' which I finally got around to starting today.

Tim: thanks for engaging. I'm no philosopher, and lack the rhetorical chops to play on that field. A couple of questions: what is the metric by which one determines whether there is "too much freedom"? Who gets to make that call, and what are his or her qualifications? Would that sort of judgement call be left, perhaps to a level of omniscience that even Wittgenstein lacks? And whoever James Wood is, Heaven is a state of ultimate freedom, wherein we are the gods we were created to be. The proper relation of a created being to the Creator is obedience, but a sort of obedience that is much more like a dance than a parade ground. Elizabeth: natural disasters are the inevitable consequence of living planet instead of a stage set. If you have a molten core, you are going to have tectonic plates driven by convection currents that bang into one another. If you have a hot equator and cold poles, there is going to be circulation of air, and occasionally that circulation is going to be violent. It is possible, I suppose, to imagine a god who would suspend the laws of physics every single time a bad consequence would attend their operation, but I cannot then imagine a world where our actions are truly free. Thinking about the disaster in Myanmar, I note that, bad as the storm itself was, the suffering of those poor people is magnified manyfold by the disgusting actions of their paranoid military junta in refusing the aid the rest of the world is trying to offer, and try as one might, it seems hard to blame God for that.

Thanks for posting that, I do tire of people trying to convince themselves that death and sickness and decay and war and natural disasters are all somehow part of God's plan. I have seen the death of men I loved, and men who were my sworn enemies, and in both cases my most basic reaction is that death is wrong, death is a waste. (There are a small number of things worse than death of course, but this does not change the fact.)

God works in spite of them, and occasionally through them, but these events do not emanate from him and are in fact diametrically opposed to his Kingdom. Trying to comfort ourselves or others with little platitudes about "God's will" may in the end lead some to a crisis and loss of faith. None of us can truly comprehend God's will, except perhaps, occasionally, in the smallest matters.