Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 4:05 pmThe “problem of evil” always involves a story, a mythology. Be it “the Fall” or any number of mythic tales about how we find ourselves in this jam. Is there really anything so complex and mysterious about ‘evil’?
FlashDangerpants wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 5:47 pm
No. The problem of evil is a very specific thing. A trivial paradox in which a contrast is drawn between an all powerful God who could alter the universe in any miraculous way he sees fit at any time, and all loving God who abhors evil, and the evils manifest in the suffering that exists in the world around us, frequently afflicting the innocent.
However I am not referencing any specific “problem” but rather attempting a more limited definition and also a simpler one. It doesn’t exactly matter who created the world. The world, from a conscious man’s perspective, is terrible from any “moral” position one can hold. It seems to me that there is nothing more clear as well as undeniable.
If you are talking about something other than the well known
The Problem of Evil, in a context of repsonding to people discussing the well known
The Problem of Evil, but for some reason are not actually talking about the well known
The Problem of Evil that everyone else is talking about, might I suggest referring to whatever you are talking about as anything except the well known
The Problem of Evil. You know, just to avoid looking like you perhaps don't know what the well known
The Problem of Evil is?
Your thing seems to be the toe-stub of teen anguish.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
Man “goes to battle” against this world, this fate, this reality, because the truth about it is that it doesn’t give a fig about his morals or his problems with the nature of natural reality.
Does he pull up his fighting trousers of rage to protect his knobbly knees of despair from the bitter winds of turpitude while he's at it?
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
But for an awakened, conscious man to become sensitive to ‘reality’ and to really see it, can rather easily drive him over the edge. It is in that sense like staring into an abyss. He might desire an answer but no answer can come (from nature) — just a swarm of aggressive army ants that mercilessly devours him, morsel by morsel …
You sound like Morissey complaining about a bycicle. Why such purpleness of prose?
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
The problem of attributing the creation of such a world to a divinity is another issue altogether. There is no way to reconcile the thought that a divinity that would create such a brutal world is likely a brutal being, or a sadistic torturer; and square it with the more desirable and hoped-for thought that God exists in a super-physical plane and might invite us to eventually take our residence there at some point.
Yeah... that's just your version of the well known
The Problem of Evil
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
In that situation, which is very kafkaesque, a man must “interpret”: Why is he in this realm with such hellish elements? He is torn between the astounding beauty of it all, and certain moments when the world smiles and for moments he is suffused with feelings of satisfaction and gratitude…but then in the next moment it all turns nasty. Again, when awake and aware he knows that he can rely on nothing. He must always be on his toes and must, somehow, outwit something in the very nature of the domain.
Now you sound like Morissey complaining Sartre punched his bycicle.
Alexis Jacobi wrote: ↑Sat Oct 24, 2026 9:13 pm
In one way or another he feels — what is the alternative? — that he is here because of some fault of his nature. And naturally what follows in that he must
do something to get out of the mess.
Staring into the face of Nature, no answer comes. But in the religions I have studied — and this is central in Christianity — there is an entity that effectively can bring not only the circumstance of incarnation to an end (man having been cast down into the ‘world’ as it is) but in fact desires this result and, with proper attitude and actions, guarantees a way out and as it were “up”.
And yet as far as I am aware you don't believe in any of that life after death stuff any more than I do.
How can a "system" have any motivations at all, let alone "malevolence"? 
