An ideal God would be someone who doesn't let suffering be apart of life.

How can there be happiness if there's no suffering? What you're asking for sounds like hell.

"They say that God makes problems just to see what you can stand before you do as the Devil pleases."

I was always taught that the point of suffering was to prove your love of God, no matter what happens.

elliott (:

By suffering, I don't mean ooooh no my girlfriend dumped me. I need to cry.

I mean things like war, povity, disease.

You're saying that if there's no suffereing how would you know what happiness is? well, you'd still know what suffering and pain are, just on your own personal level.

He's testing us! :(

What is war but a conflict between differing parties? How is that different from the ending of a relationship? One is more likely to have a bloody outcome then the other but they're still cause by the same things, war tends to be a bit more complex but that's because you're dealing with states as opposed to individuals. Still difficult relations and war are both caused by a lack of empathy and understanding. The same can be said of poverty. As far as disease goes...I'm not going to get into it but from a technical aspect you're asking for a perfectly sterile world which is impossible.

It seems absurd to be you consider yourself an atheist and your problem with god is the fact that suffering exists. You're basically rejecting god on the grounds that the world given to you is imperfect; which is never really denied. Most religion acknowledges human folly, Christianity in particular talks about humanity haven fallen. The worlds imperfections are explicable in holy texts and obviously inherent in the observable world. As I said, your position strikes me as absurd.

I'm not rejecting God on the grounds the world is imperfect. War and relationships are similar? maybe so, but one ends bloody. The other, usually ends with a few tears, a few drinks, time on your own and you find someone else. I can see what you're saying with them having the same principles, but relationships build character and teach you a lesson. Millions dying in a war, it may teach you a lesson. But it's too much heartbreak and suffering. A young lad going off to fight in world war 1, get's killed, the parents of said boy are in bits, lost and heartbroken because their boy fought a war in which towards the end, they didn't even know why they were fighting. Playing football in nomans land. If pain is simply here to teach you lessons and strengthen you, why have 2 things that are similar such as relationships ending and war? why not just have the relationships ending to build character. Asking for a perfectly sterile world isn't impossible if God created everything. God created cancer, why?

This is really just the human perception of duality. What we perceive as suffering is really our own personal attachment to what we deem as good, and our own personal resistance to either its lack or the introduction of what we perceive as evil.
Cancer causes pain and death. two very essential components of pleasure and life. I don't know why God created cancer. Why did he create hangnails for that matter?

You're kind of defeating your own argument by acknowledging war and relationships have similar causes you know. To treat it like one can exist in your ideal world and the other can't, despite having the same/similar causes is to create an inconsistent world where there's no real structure other then arbitrary lines in the sand.

I also don't understand how you can argue that individual suffering is acceptable but mass suffering is unacceptable. Why? Because people die in a war? Again this goes back to the cause - it has to deal with men with too much power and an ego complex conflicting with men of a similar nature. Or forcing themselves on no men at all but a loose array of people. It's all Hobbesian brutality though, even if it's one individual deciding they don't love another individual as opposed to entire states. It's unpleasant but when you throw more people into the conflict you're upping the stakes that much. I honestly don't understand how you can treat it one as objectively bad all the time and one as an acceptable life lesson. Besides, who's to say war doesn't touch anyone anything?

Also, again, I think you're showing your own biblical ignorance here. Sickness and so on comes from man's falling and estrangement from god. The cure for cancer is divinity, even if it's not of this world (not including when that divinity becomes of this world in the form of Jesus) and it's remaining devout during that trial that leads to that divinity (see the story of Job which argues against most of your objections.) It's the lesson learned in the suffering that makes that divinity worthwhile. If faith was never tried there would be no real conviction there, only a hollow sort of acceptance.