WISDOM IS OPPOSED BY DOCTRINE THAT GOD USES SUFFERING TO TRAIN US WITH

 
The Christians defend God letting so much evil and suffering befall us by saying it trains us or that that is what it is for. It is to keep the saints saints and to make the sinners change and become better servants of God.

The defence urges people to have trust in a God they know nothing about. Against the evidence that he does not care they have to trust that he does and that is hard and painful. Christians will say he proved his love in Jesus Christ. The defence implies the suffering should be urged to trust in God. That is a cruel request and it cannot be right for everybody so it is also an arrogant one. Millions get comfort from not trusting in God but just expecting the worst to come that they will soon die and cease to exist.

The trust asked for is bigoted and unethical. There is no way of knowing if God will deliver. Religion will state that you can trust a strange doctor so why not God. But you know the chances are the man is genuine and that the chances are he will not kill you and that if he hurts you, you will be able to bring him to justice. But you have no guarantees like that with God and it is man who reveals God to you not God so man is trusted instead of God when God is supposedly trusted.
 
If God really wanted us to be right and do right he would teach us the self-help principles of The Gospel According to Atheism in our dreams or make sure the state makes us learn them at school for hurting people without teaching them how to not need to be hurt is sheer sadism and it is repulsive to approve.
 
Goodness without intelligence is a bad thing. The good then becomes the enemy of the best. Therefore the supreme virtue is being as bright as you can be and then as good as you can be. You cannot really help others without helping them to help themselves. But for the vast majority of people who have ever lived it has been terribly difficult for them to get the right information on anything important. This is God’s fault and shows that God does not allow evil to produce good. He could have done better. He could have given us a mysterious angel run Internet that was providing education for the world since the days of Adam and Eve. Who would blame them for eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil when they had him for a maker? When God prevents the supreme virtue even if he holds so many as two people away from it then it is clear that God is not sending suffering because he wants us to grow through it but because he is the master of malevolence.
     
The most important thing of all is truth. You cannot make the world a better place without recognising as much of it as you can. So God should put making us see the truth before making us mean well because meaning well is more difficult the less sure we are we are doing right. He is truth himself and truth is his main aspect for he cannot be good unless it is true that good is good and good is right so truth comes first. It follows then that human suffering would lead us to one faith and one religion and one Lord and one baptism if there were a God and if it were good for anything at all. It fails therefore there cannot be a God.
 
If we believe in religion the basic belief we will have is that God is good. We should find that belief plausible on its own merits first and then work out if God may have spoken through Jesus or a specific religion or holy book or whatever. But the belief in God should be able to stand on its own without these for it is the basic belief. To believe in God because you believe in the resurrection of Jesus is to put the resurrection above God and to have a polluted faith even if he did raise Jesus. It puts human testimony that the resurrection happened before the signs that God has put into the cosmos and the heart that he is real and that is blasphemous. We cannot base such big doctrines as God and divine discipline on human testimony. To do that is in fact choosing to look at the suffering of others in a way that reinforces your assumptions. People suffer objectively and their suffering needs to be perceived objectively.
 
God needs to make it clear to our logic that suffering is justified by discipline if that doctrine is true and if it is good for us. We cannot risk being wrong. If we accept the doctrine and are wrong, then we insult sufferers. We need discipline for believing the defence then! The discipline defence cannot work unless God makes sure everybody knows exactly what he is up to. Otherwise he is asking us to give him our complete loyalty while there is no reason given to believe that he is loyal. He expects evidence from us that we keep our vows while none that he keeps his is forthcoming.
 
I shout to believers, “What right have you to make out that evil and suffering are sent by God to benefit us spiritually by making us holier when you have no surveys done and no statistical proof that this is true? You need very serious evidence before you can make a claim like that. If anything your belief in evil being discipline only exacerbates arrogance and hypocrisy when it has led to you speaking in such a way. What you are doing is wrong and you cannot ask us to respect these actions.” They should be treated like Glen Hoddle who did a lot of good for people but then lost any right to praise for it when he said that sufferers were simply enduring karmic punishment for their sins.
 
The will to evil comes from the conflict between the rational will, the will to be sensible and the will to gratify feelings. If God had harmonised our feelings and our reason better there would be no need for as much discipline as the incredible evil and suffering of the world suggest we need. Some people are from birth more balanced between reason and feeling and do less evil than others. All should have been made like them. Discipline coming from God is really just an excuse for his perceived cruelty. The reason gratifies feelings when we do wrong at the expense of itself so to say that we need to be able to do evil at all is incoherent for evil is incompatible with free will which starts in the reason. Evil is a breakdown rather than a choice for evil. Despite the thinking and consideration that may be done before one decides to do evil the evil is a breakdown. It is the same as a woman thinking about having a mental breakdown and intending to have one and then one happens like she intended it. The breakdown just happened and had nothing to do with her will. Perhaps it was the way she was made that simulates the carrying out of a choice for evil.