Recently, I saw a Reddit thread that somewhat caught my eye and decided to have a go at a response.
In the initial post which concerned the problem of evil and how it is not resolved by justice in the afterlife, I saw the following quotation:
This falls into Epicurus' malevolent description. God is able to stop evil but doesn't because justice will be served. If you could prevent a crime from happening, the moral decision would be to try and stop it not WAIT for it to be committed then exert justice. If you see a baby strapped to a chainsaw by a maniac, do you un-do the baby from the chain-saw or wait for the baby to be chopped up, then strap the maniac to the chain-saw? Evil on earth either matters or it doesn't. If it matters, then God is malevolent for allowing it but if it doesn't matter I could just go about on a murder spree since God will "make all things new" or "send my victims to heaven and torture me forever".
My response came largely inspired by the Church fathers:
The actual purpose of life is not to be enjoyed by being constantly shielded from injustice, but rather, the purpose is to morally grow and to actually deal with and digest all of our experiences.
To believe that we should always simply enjoy life and not grow from it reminds me of this quotation from Ilias the Presbyter:
"In addition to voluntary suffering, you must also accept that which comes against your will - I mean slander, material losses and sickness. For if you do not accept these but rebel against them, you are like someone who wants to eat his bread only with honey, never with salt. Such a man does not always have pleasure as his companion, but always has nausea as his neighbor." (in the Philokalia)
As St. Peter of Damascus says:
"Every trial and temptation is permitted by God as a cure for some sick person's soul. Indeed, such trials not only confer on us forgiveness of our past and present sins, but also act as a check on sins not yet committed." (in the Philokalia)
Life is to be viewed as a journey, ultimately, and thus even the evil things which befall not just us, but which befall others that we hear about, are to be considered as tools for us in our own spiritual journeys.
The man who loses a leg in a drunken motorcycle accident experiences excruciating pain, and then all sorts of subsequent emotional and mental pain from the loss of his leg. Yet, he has the power to make this a tool for change in his life to save himself from alcoholism and mortal sin.
Of course, that is not to say that we should view people who fail to transform themselves immediately after a great trial as somehow a moral failure... that is not our place to judge, or even to think about. Nor is this some callous way of justifying any evil thing that we ourselves do or indulge in...
But it is appropriate to understand the purpose of life not as some mere exercise in counting merits and demerits, but as one in which we are supposed to advance ourselves and our neighbors, taking advantage of both the good and bad times to learn our lessons and move forward.
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