The first, most obvious reason is that this God believes in letting everyone have their freedom of will, and furthermore, will allow a person to exercise it constantly, even for making bad decisions... presumably in the hopes that they'll realize their mistakes and get it right next time.
But there are other potential reasons, too. For example, what if there's an eternal Heaven, and being there is just so good that it literally makes up for even a theoretically infinite amount of crappiness in a person's life? In that case, the shit in the world doesn't even matter - it's only temporary, and any harm it's done is just going to be washed away completely by the trip to the afterworld.
Or... and here's a weird one: what if God is not as omnipotent as He's been made out to be? What if "all-powerfulness" has a limit, and God is using all that power to the very limit just keeping things from getting worse? Or what if there's a Satan-like figure who is just as powerful as God, and those two are continually counteracting each other, leaving mere mortals entirely up to their own devices?
Or... what if there's going to be (literally) Paradise on Earth or some other amazingly good turn of events that can only come about from all this shitty history?
There are a few more, but they hinge a lot on definitions of what constitutes a "being such that no other being can be greater than it" - one of the common definitions of God.
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Date: 2003-09-08 10:45 am (UTC)The first, most obvious reason is that this God believes in letting everyone have their freedom of will, and furthermore, will allow a person to exercise it constantly, even for making bad decisions... presumably in the hopes that they'll realize their mistakes and get it right next time.
But there are other potential reasons, too. For example, what if there's an eternal Heaven, and being there is just so good that it literally makes up for even a theoretically infinite amount of crappiness in a person's life? In that case, the shit in the world doesn't even matter - it's only temporary, and any harm it's done is just going to be washed away completely by the trip to the afterworld.
Or... and here's a weird one: what if God is not as omnipotent as He's been made out to be? What if "all-powerfulness" has a limit, and God is using all that power to the very limit just keeping things from getting worse? Or what if there's a Satan-like figure who is just as powerful as God, and those two are continually counteracting each other, leaving mere mortals entirely up to their own devices?
Or... what if there's going to be (literally) Paradise on Earth or some other amazingly good turn of events that can only come about from all this shitty history?
There are a few more, but they hinge a lot on definitions of what constitutes a "being such that no other being can be greater than it" - one of the common definitions of God.