Philosophy Now Forum

By way of spam six days before Canadian Thanksgiving Day, I attempted to rain on the parade of countless newspaper consumers who appreciate the news-media’s standard platitudinous paraphrasing of, 'we have so much for which to be thankful!' The bitter reality of large scale Earthly starvation basically translates into some arrogance on the developed Western world’s full-bellied part: i.e. by saying grace before a meal, we, the well-fed, are in effect assuming that our Creator has found one portion of this planet’s populace worthy of nourishment while allowing another to go hungry.
I would be quite willing to consistently say grace every day of every year if everyone on Earth—and not just a minority of the planet’s populace—had enough clean, safe drinking water and nutritional food to maintain a normal, healthy daily life; and be pray-fully ‘thankful’ if every couple’s child would survive his or her serious illness rather than just a small portion of such sick children.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe that God simply doesn’t care about the state of suffering amongst humanity, that I’m left bewildered by the notion that He would bless ‘us’ while neglecting so very many of ‘them.’
More so, the bitter irony regarding devout believers and practitioners of theistic prayer, is that by way of ‘unanswered prayer,’ which likely includes almost all such expectations from a supreme being, the human race becomes bloated with even more theists-turned-atheists (or agnostics).
Obviously, it’s not desirable to challenge one of humanity’s greatest institutions on record—i.e. praying and saying grace to a theist entity—a pathetic fact quite evident by the total absence of this missive in virtually every Canadian newspaper.

Perhaps it’s because I don’t believe that God simply doesn’t care about the state of suffering amongst humanity, that I’m left bewildered by the notion that He would bless ‘us’ while neglecting so very many of ‘them.’

This could be a very sensible sort of comment *if* we take a couple of things for granted, such as...

1. Our universe is Deterministic.
2. The Supreme Being's will is the only genuinely effective will.
3. People make no genuine choices.
4. Natural evils are an expression of the Divine Will (rather than, say, evidences of a cosmos out-of-step with Divine Intention, or something else.)
5. If God had power to intervene, He would have no compelling reason not to prevent both natural and personal evils.
6. The Divine purposes and activities are only legitimate purposes if we humans understand them.
7. Injustices aren't actually "unjust" or "evil," because nothing "deserves" anything, and the world "evil" means no more than "something that happens that we wish hadn't."

But you leave us with a very odd looking universe: your "Supreme Being" isn't supreme at all, but rather very tame and manageable by us. Evils of the sort you list are incurable features of reality itself, and so cannot be resented any more than the Law of Gravity can.

If there's no God there is not only no One for you to be thankful to -- there is also no One for you to be mad at. But your tone suggests you do believe in things like "evil," "injustice" or "fairness" of some kind: so why do you?