So the basic gist I'm getting from here is that suffering is bad and thus God can't be all powerful and loving and that it serves no purpose. To say suffering is bad is a subjective opinion, suffering is just a part of life and is inescapable and should just be accepted as part of the design of the universe. To argue that suffering shouldn't exist is to literally argue against how the universe works and I'd say that the universe as it is works fine without the opinion of a human saying what should and shouldn't exist (trying to play God as if you as a human are some kind of authority on how the universe should or shouldn't be).
Nope. Some suffering "is just a part of life". When a comet falls from the sky and destroys your house, that will cause suffering and that's just what it is.
But what people do afterwards can have a significant effect on how you suffer too. One could imagine a town where the people loot what remains of your stuff, and you're stuck living in a tent or under a bridge because now you have no place to stay. You lose your job because you can't get enough sleep and stay clean and tidy, and you're not able to deal with the stress of what has happened to you. You get assaulted a couple of times because you're living on the street, and you start doing drugs just to try and cope with the nightmare your life has turned into.
That's a lot of extra suffering that didn't need to exist if the people around you had been kind and helpful. Maybe they helped you gather your stuff and offered to store it for you while you sort things out. Someone offers you a couch or spare room to stay in. Your boss cuts you some slack and work and only needs you part time while you sort things out. The medical system offers free mental health care for people who have gone through traumatic experiences. And all this lets you process what happened and work to get your life back on track with no more suffering than was necessary.
Pretty different, right? There was some aspects of "suffering" that were unavoidable, but they were direct consequences of natural events or significantly unlucky things that were not obviously intentional or negligent on the part of other humans.
That's not the case with something like child rape. Someone chose to rape a child and make their life worse in a way that did not need to happen. The world would be a better place if the rapist had not made the decisions that they did.
If you think that's subjectively wrong, you're a monster.
If you think that stuff just happens and people shouldn't have an opinion on it, you're a monster.
If you think that's an example of the universe working fine, you're a ****ing monster.
...but the fact is that it exists and it must exist for a reason...
Must it? Why? Why must everything exist for a reason?
You accuse others of not being open minded and then come out with this stunner.
You're just baffling on about how you don't like suffering and are trying to use your human logic to reason why something that exists in reality shouldn't exist purely because you don't like it.
Not liking it is in the definition of suffering. If people enjoyed it, it wouldn't be suffering.
Of course, there is a certain type of person who takes joy in seeing others suffer. We have plenty of words for those people and none of them are considered positive character traits.
This is the thread where if you don't align with the collective group think here you're basically disturbing the status quo and close mindedness of the individuals that commonly participate in it.
Mate, when the collective group think you're referring to is "raping children is bad" you might wanna take a step back for a moment and look at yourself in the mirror.
Is that the person you want to be? Is that the hill you want to die on? Or maybe if your belief system is leading you to the point that you're defending children being raped as inevitable and necessary there's something wrong here and you might want to examine whether this is really what you want.
That said, that's the kind view. You've been stoutly and explicitly defending this so long that I can only assume that it in fact IS the person you want to be. You are totally fine with children being raped, after all it is inevitable and necessary so why get upset about it?
One might even assume that in the right time and place you might contribute a little suffering of your own, given that it's inevitable and necessary. It wasn't your choice to do those things, it was God in his unquestionable wisdom that needed that child raped.
So because 8 billion people have a opinion and agree on something that automatically makes it a fact of reality? Guess what, 8 billion opinions don't hold a candle to reality itself and the truths of reality as they stand.
People are reality.
That you think that they're not is probably how you're able to handwave children getting raped without any empathy.
If an extinction level asteroid were to come into orbit of the Earth I'm sure most people would see it as being a bad thing. But guess what, the actual fact of reality would be that said asteroid would be on course to wipe out all life on Earth and reality wouldn't deem anything as being wrong or try to prevent such an event all because humans would view it is being bad. Opinion is opinion, reality is reality, you need to learn the difference.
Opinion would determine whether you did anything to try and alter the future course of affairs, or whether you just sat around with your thumb up your butt saying "this is good".
Humans have agency. We can do things. We can change things that we don't like. We can even choose NOT to do things that would cause suffering for others. We get to choose the amount of suffering that we personally add to the universe, and how much we act to mitigate suffering in others.
It's actually something that all the big religions tend to generally agree on in principle, even though their implementations in practice tend to be a bit inconsistent.
I know this is a lot of new information for you, but do your best to try and absorb it.
