Why does evil exist in a world with a loving and omnipotent God? Could it be that God does not love us or does not care (my personal belief)? Another rational answer for many who want to believe in a more caring God bring up our free will. We have the power to decide if we help or hurt one another. So if God take away our freedom to ignore his teachings than he would take away our freedom to love him. Devotion would be mindless and automatic. The Devil, I would argue, does not exist; a demon exists inside of each of us and each of us can commit evil transgressions against our brothers and sisters.
On the topic of devotion and in order to tie in my last post on our morality vs God's morality, we can't really assign concepts like Good and Evil to humans and their actions, especially when someone brings in God. If God has a higher sense of morality, and Islamic extremists claim to act on God's will, than how are we to say that 9/11 was an act of evil against us? Such claim assumes that America is morally righteous, which it clearly isn't, as evident in these wars. God could be acting on some higher moral code that he felt that these 19 Muslim men were fit to do in his name. These wars might just serve to prove our lack of virtue and our country's demise.
Overall, this debate is part of a larger discussion of free will and what God wants us to do, and thus I can not fully get into this deep conversation, as it could take up an entire semester.
The 'question of evil' is no more than a reflection of the limited moral potential of our species. We may like to think of ourselves as 'moral' or 'spiritual' but we are neither. We might appear moral within the relativity of any particular cultural construct and we have confused 'aspirational' for spiritual. On the question of free will, one can only say that what ever it is or it's limits, so long as we are self evidently an unsustainable species, the question is mostly irrelevant. http://www.energon.org.uk
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