THE PSYCHOLOGICAL NON-RELIGIOUS TENDENCY TO SEEK THE BEST SIDE IS STOLEN BY RELIGION FOR ITS GOD OF LOVE IDEOLOGY
What is really behind the religious assumption that an all-good God could be looking after us while evil happens? The doctrine is not like how you would describe the father here:
"Jane is in indescribable agony and her father looks after her but that is limited to just sitting there with her." People of faith invariably think they are getting real help even if they cannot see it. Even when depending on their God and prayer lets them down they won't admit it. Religion is taking advantage of how people forget that looking after somebody does not necessarily mean making a difference. Perhaps Jane would rather her father would just go away.
Religion is clear that God is not caring for us in spite of evil. There is no competition for he is God and it is not. It is an aberration. He is there for us because of evil. They will add that he is invisibly supporting us as we do evil in the sense that he gave us free will and we use it to do wrong. He maintains our free will and we abuse it. And we need him to help us correct ourselves.
This really is, "Evil is not harm or some kind of divinity. It is simply what is against God." That is a circle, "There is no evil if there is no good God for evil means that which a God does not allow." This circle is a pretend argument and thus a lie. It is evil to abuse our thinking ability. This doctrine far from protecting good is actually itself evil.
What if evil is real and supernatural but there is still no God or say the Christian type God is a fiction? Then religion is fighting the wrong thing. It is myopic and on the battlefield with no contact lenses in.
Religion acts towards evil as if it were some kind of supernatural enemy. It is spoken of in that way and feared as such and it is treated like some kind of invisible malign entity that needs prayers and holy water to banish it.
Yet it teaches that evil is not a power or force but just a failure of something to be better. This is how it avoids the accusation that it is worshipping a deity who creates evil and mischief. Religion may say evil is a lack of a good that should be there and not a power in its own right. But that only stresses how mysterious and ineffable evil is. A lack that does what it does is so supernatural it is beyond our comprehension. We could consider an empty space that makes tea for us to be supremely magical. Reality would be putty in its hands. So how do we detect this supernatural enemy? Its supernatural side is its essential core. We would need to have supernatural power ourselves to sense it. You can imagine how absurd it is all getting.
Given that religion says that if you risk telling yourself an evil is there when it is not you are in fact giving into evil it would follow that if divine grace or some supernatural power helps you notice evil then there is evil in you in the first place.
Religion's faith plays on how even the most melancholy of us look on the best side or try to. For a sad person, the best is only a bit better than the worst. But it is still reaching for the "bright" side.
There is nothing religious about that. Religion just hijacks it. It is like religion taking a secular thing like money and making it religion by putting it in a shrine. If you want the bright side just reach and don't make it harder for yourself by trying to put it in a religious framework. You shouldn't look for salt on your chips when you have enough on. Don't waste time and energy and just enjoy.
Back to the looking at the bright side where you think God tolerates evil only to overcome it. Looking on the bright side is not looking on the bright side. Evil is a master of camouflage and deceit. It hides in the middle of good and wears good like a fur coat. So it is hard to see how much of a situation is infected and where. Every evil is really a collection of evils. Evil is like a web rather than a line. As this is a fog and makes new evils you cannot really be sure that the good side is really that good. It is complicated and you only see so much. You cannot see everything.
In complex matters, and everything is plugged into great complexity, it is too easy to think that good following bad is somehow linked to that bad. A following b even all the time does not mean b is causing a. The doctrine that evil is followed by and overcome by good is based on the lie that it does. This is another example of how "solutions" to evil happening under the care of a loving and almighty God are themselves evil.
You never can be sure if that if good arose from an evil that you are right in discerning when it has happened or if it has happened. You mess up the diagnostic tools so while you may postpone evil you cannot stop it. Moreover, you trigger a placebo. A placebo is talking when you speak of faith. You are looking at a possible bright side. Don't get carried away. Possibilities do not count. Probabilities do. You do not know if there is a bright side. Or if you are looking at the right one. Or the best one. Or how many bright sides there are.
Anyway that does not mean there is no bright side. But that is so vague and foggy. It might justify a weak level of faith but that is all. Any more faith and it becomes delusion and harmful. It gives rise to a Pollyanna mentality.
Let us assume there is a bright side. Clearly if so then there may be more than one. We will go for two. Or try to.
You as a believer in God are nudged and often forced towards the following "bright" side. In religious circles, it is claimed that evil would be ridiculous in the presence of God. That only tells us it is stupid and misguided. That is not much. Anyway because evil is foolish and that is not enough for us we have to ask if there is a next step. The next step is that God is rendering it powerless in the big picture. The main step we want is this one. But it is not the most important. The first is. The one that does not talk of action is. Why? Because if evil is not foolish or is unimportant then action does not matter. Hypothetically if it had to be one or the other we would have to make do with the first. We need evil to be stupid more than we need it to be acted against for if we don't know that it is stupid there is no point in acting against it.
The silver lining on the cloud for many is that evil will not thrive. Obviously to them the main thing is that it burns itself out. Some point this out and say it is an incentive to acting against it. So you only do something about it to help it destroy itself and if you do nothing it will in time dissipate. Some incentive! To say all that matters about evil is that or that its self-erasure is the main thing is evil. What about those who suffer unlike you? You are concerned about evil going away and not about what evil actually is. That is not a bright side. The real bright side asks for action against evil. The bright side is a hard side. It is bright and asks for courage so it is not a light side. Those who want a bright side mean they want a light one. They are out of luck.
Evil being without potency before God would tell us nothing at all about what evil is or is not. All it says is that evil cannot last.
The powerlessness of evil in the face of the complete and perfect love of God is not telling us if evil contradicts God or not. A bad or partly bad God can do away with it. Religion says that evil behaves insanely so there is no contradiction in an evil God doing away with the evil in us.
Incidentally, if Satan wants us to be bad surely he would make do if we were bad inside even if we could not act on it?
Atheists are saying that suffering and evil are so terrible that they refute God. Religion says you cannot call anything immoral unless there is a God of love and justice to say it is immoral. In fact it is religion that is refusing to admit that evil may be so real that it debunks God. Who is really watering down evil?
If evil does refute God that tells us how terrible it is and we need to know. We need to be informed. Why?
First you just do. In the past if you could do nothing about the cancer you still needed to know.
Second you deserve the chance to do something even if you cannot. That allows solutions to be worked for.
Let us test this with the hypothetical, the if. The if shows what is inside us and removes illusions we may have about what we value or value most. What if you had to have one and not the other? Then which one?
The first. You need to know even if it cannot do you any good to know. The second is less important for unless cancer is known about the question about what to do if anything does not arise.
If the love of God is an evil doctrine it warns against those who create or talk as if they know this God on a relationship basis. History shows that people of faith in power enable evil and do it directly to an alarming degree. If we atheists can be bad too then what? We can admit that. How do you test that when atheist organisations do not become global like a religious organisation such as Catholicism has? Anyway, we hold that God belief is not about God in reality. It is about finding a new outlet for evil in the form of hypocritical piety. If we are no better than believers at least we know this. If faith is another way for people to be bad at least we know it is. That is worth striving for even if getting rid of theism will make nobody any better. Remember what we said about cancer above?
We have learned that talk about the love of God rather than giving us courage to fight evil harvests many new evils. So the logical argument that God and evil are an irreconcilable contradiction wins.
