I have never done two posts in one day, however, the previous one was during the middle of the night, while Sunday is my usual writing day. So, I will put this series to rest with the final.

Here are the options I can think of, logically, for a theistic system where cruelty occurs.

1. God is a cruel god like the inhumane or psychopathic pet owner, who tortures their own animal (humans) for his/her pleasure.
2. God is a loving god, but impotent to protect people from real harm.
3. God is omnipotent, but a biased god, loving at times, but unjust, protecting those of his/her choosing, while allowing or choosing to inflict significant harm on the others.
4. God is a loving and omnipotent god, who does impose justice reasonably and protects all people he/she love from harm; it is only our delusional minds that think they see injustice or cruelty.
5. God is a loving and omnipotent god who deliberately allows cruelty for mysterious reasons to punish or correct people’s behavior. That in our finite eyes, we don’t see his/her purpose in the suffering, but it does have a reason. So, when a school shooter kills twenty-six-year-olds, or a baby is born with terminal brain cancer and succumbs to a horrible and painful death within months of their birth, that was part of God’s loving plan to teach us something or punish us.
6. God is a loving and omnipotent god who has given people freewill, and their choices have real consequences. The working out of the laws of nature also has real consequences, such as in natural disasters.
7. God is a loving and omnipotent god who, for reasons we don’t understand, allows nature, including the behavior of other humans (and sometimes animals), to play out for good or evil and rarely or never intervenes.

Now, you may have other answers I haven’t thought of, and you are welcome to share them in the comments.

Discussion:

I belong to a Calvinistic church, which, according to the teachings of John Calvin, centers on the five points of TULIP . When taken to their logical conclusion, they would make God fit best under #3 and possibly #1. The author Mary Ann Shaffer wrote, “If there is Predestination (Calvinism), then God is the devil.” If #1 is valid, I would agree with her. In that paradigm, God creates most people for the very purpose of, irresistibly, being evil people designed specifically for His eternal torture in Hell. While evil people have no choice in that model, my conservative Calvinist friends, in a grand paradox, blame the people they consider evil more than anyone else I know. When I was a true Calvinist, oddly, it was the most judgmental period of my life.

Most people, including myself, would find this answer for why cruelty happens absurd.

Without dissecting out each domination of Christianity,  I will say that most colloquial Christians in America adopt a mixture of #5 and #6. You will hear the cliché in both the colloquial Christian and in Eastern pantheistic traditions, as well as in popular secular culture, “All things happen for a reason.” I’ve also heard Hindus say, “All things are good in the end; if it is not good, it is not the end.” I often hear from my Christian friends the term “Providence,” which evokes a good feeling, but also can give us an excuse not to get involved in trying to shape history.

While these views are not rational, in my opinion, they are comforting… until something awful happens to you; then they don’t work, and you become disillusioned. At this juncture, many have left their religion or other ideals.

The Problem of the Single Book

I believe that many reach absurd answers for the problem of evil, because they are people of one book only, the canonical scriptures. These scriptures were first written to and by people in the late Bronze Age and early Roman periods. It was when the cosmos was defined in hundreds of miles, the entire cosmos contained within the earth and its atmosphere. To create a God big enough, higher than the Roman gods, you had to assign to God the traits of absolute control, in the model of an autocrat. With the second book of God, nature or reality, you can start to get a glimpse of a God who is so enormous, creating a cosmos that is measured in tens of billions of light-years, that micromanaging human behavior is not required. That is my humble opinion.

The Deists

During the late Enlightenment, many of the thinking Christians became Deists. Even Issac Newton, on his deathbed, left a note stating that he, too, had become a Christian Deist. While evangelicals, especially the Reconstructionists (who want to rebuild a “Christian Nation”), have a revisionist history that our founding fathers were evangelicals. Most of them, in fact, were Deists, including George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Tyler. While there was a spectrum, some, like Newton, ascribed to a Christian Deism, while others lost their connection to Christianity altogether. This mass conversion to Deism was prompted by the problem of cruelty, the irrationality of the other answers, and the unfounded claim to miracles.

Deism, of course, describes a God that would fit #7 the best; however, a God that never intervenes. Some call it the great clockmaker. In that model, God creates the cosmos with all its incredible mathematical framing, sets it in motion, and lets it run like a clock.

I’ve had evangelical friends accuse me of being a Deist, along with even more unflattering names. I am not a Deist. While I mostly agree that #6 & #7 are the most rational answers, I hope and expect that God does intervene at times to change history, but I am also honest that God’s interventions are not common.

While I was an evangelical, we believed and claimed that miracles (God intervening) happened daily; looking back, I now know those claims were self-delusions or outright lies. Yet I pray and hope that God will change the course of history through my prayers; I avoid delusions, calling things miracles when they are not.

I spent the first three years of my cancer when I prayed day and night, literally in so much pain that I could not sleep for more than a few minutes at a time. As I was dying, so it seemed, In tears, I prayed supine on the floor or in my bed. It was an intimacy with God that was mind-blowing, far exceeding anything I experienced as an evangelical… so I am always surprised when some of my fellow Christians, some who have never met me in person, feel compelled to inform me that my relationship with God is not legitimate.