Monthly Archives: July 2018

Dismantling Christian Orthodoxy in Five Questions

Calvinism/Philosophy, Christian fallacy, , ,

Once you see the rational errors which form the root and body of Christian orthodoxy, it becomes impossible to unsee them.  That is, once you accept the basic and inexorable truth that contradiction is not actually a valid method for drawing doctrinal conclusions, or any other conclusion for that matter, the failure of Christian orthodoxy to satisfy even the most remedial of logical consistency—the 2 + 2 = 4 kind of logic—becomes a punch in the face every time you are exposed to almost any form of Christian theology.  It’s why I had to stop going to church.  Literally everything coming from the pulpit is laced with rational failure.  And it’s more than annoying…it’s offensive.  It’s like that episode of Seinfeld where no matter how hard he tries Jerry can’t get the smell of body odor out of his car after he loans it to a friend.  Once you see it, you can’t unsee it…and once you smell it, it lingers like insuperable body odor around everything and everyone in the church today.

And do not think I do not know from what I speak.  I was a committed evangelical Christian in the spiritual meatgrinder of Sovereign Grace Ministries for ten years, and before that, grew up in the Lutheran Church.  I know the doctrine…I know what Christians believe and how they think and how they preach and how they equivocate their impossible theological claims.  I have lived it, preached it, financed it, lost friends and family over it, and seen the utter ruin it wreaks upon the innocent…children and spouses brought into the cultlike “family” of those who define reality according to “mystery”, and believe that applying heady-sounding labels like “systematic theology” to their proof-texting passes for enlightened and learned scriptural interpretation.  Everything I say in this article is based upon an objective knowledge of exactly what Christians believe, and dismantles those beliefs by pinpointing exactly the fatal weaknesses of their logic. I am still a Christian, by the way, but certainly NOT orthodox.  I categorically reject orthodoxy  and the whole of its interpretive methodology.

To back up my claim that Christianity is a conspicuous offense to the basic rational sensibilities of those of us who have decoded Augustinian/Lutheran/Calvinist (the unholy doctrinal trinity) doublespeak, I developed a simple exercise of logic, based upon the most prevalent assertion of Christian evangelism.

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“In order to be saved, you must believe in Jesus.”

“Believe what about him?”

[Note:  The rendering of the first assertion is sometimes “Believe in Jesus as Lord and Savior”, to which my response is “What does that mean?”, which leads to essentially the same answer as “Believe what about him?”, albeit likely in a more explicative form.  That answer is:]

“That he died for your sins.”

“What sins?”

“The ones you have committed…he died for all of them.”

“How do you know I’ve sinned?”

“Because we all sin.  We can’t help it.”

“Why can’t we help it?”

“Because we are born sinners…with a sin nature that makes it impossible not to sin.”

“So…we are born sinners, and thus we must sin.  It’s in our nature…a manifestation of our very existence.  Then…sin is not a choice.  That which my nature demands I must do cannot also be something I choose to do.  And if I do not have a choice whether to sin or not then my sin is not actually sinful.  My sin, having nothing to do with my will, cannot be called an immoral act, and therefore, by definition, it cannot actually be sin.  In the same way I cannot help but to breath, and my heart cannot help but to beat, and I cannot help but to be human, I cannot help but to sin, and therefore only a fool would call my natural sin sinful.  Which means that only a fool would call this sin “sin” at all.  I cannot be born with a sinful nature because I cannot both commit immoral acts by my nature and have a nature which makes immoral action impossible because I have no capacity to choose to commit immoral action in the first place.  You cannot morally judge, Christian, what I cannot help.  If sin is a part of me, of my nature, and is unchosen, and I cannot help it, then you cannot call what I do sin.  In order for sin to be sinful, it must be a choice, and you, because you do not know me, cannot possibly know whether I have chosen to sin.  You do not know the sum and substance of my choices, and if my need for Jesus is predicated on you knowing that I have committed sin, then you cannot reasonably assert that I should believe in him.  So I will ask again, and hope for your sake that you stop mocking the God you claim you serve and provide a less embarrassing answer.  What should I believe about him?”

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At this point it is inevitable that the Christian will punt his ENTIRE theology into the cosmic abyss of “God’s Mystery”. You have little choice but to walk away.  The Christian has retreated back into the ouroboros of his spiritual echo chamber as quickly as he emerged. And there he will stay…in his own mind, or, perhaps, up his own arse, you might say, until his guilt entices him to venture out and try again. He will eventually learn to avoid the thinkers, grotesquely condemning them as blind and worldy, and will seek out the meek and the helpless and the needy.  But not for the reasons Christ implored. But because the Christian understands that there is no practical difference between gullibility and indigence when it comes to meeting his quota. He has learned that the desperate can be convinced of almost anything.

My next article will deal with the difference between mystery, paradox, and contradiction, to help you to stop falling for the claims that God’s mystery is actually an argument to be considered.

 

 

What House Hunters Can Teach Us About the Rational Failure of “Diversity-as-Equality”

individualism vs collectivism, morality, , , ,

One of my favorite ways to waste time is by watching House Hunters on HGTV, and all of its various spin-offs—Caribbean Life, Lakeside Bargain Hunt, Beachside Bargain Hunt, Mexico Life, Island Life, and House Hunters International.  For those of you unfamiliar with these shows, the premise is simple:  A person or persons goes shoppping for a new house/condo/apartment in some location; they visit usually three properties and at the end they consider all factors and make their pick.  During the last few seconds of the show it cuts to a couple months later and we see them in their new home where they gush that they’ve never known a life so perfect and sublime.  Which is of course complete hyperbole, but hey, it’s TV and hyperbole is how TV rolls.  For me the show is a relaxing way to run through a couple of cups of coffee in the morning as I gird my loins for the boring yet relentlessly demanding and occasionally soul-crushing meat grinder of the American middle class.  Yes, the whole experience of House Hunters is pleasantly anodyne.

Well…except for the arrant postmodern leftist social engineering with which it loves punching you in the face over and over again.  That part I could do without; but unfortunately, it’s par for the course in America today, because the version of morality in the uber-rich (and uber white) juggernaut of leftism which controls all of entertainment, virtually without rival, involves little more than the virtue signaling of “diversity”, where gay and brown people must be displayed in televised fabrications of reality in numbers utterly inconsistent with their actual population percentages.

But this is not what I really want to talk about.  Sure I could go on about how the last time I saw a mixed-race couple that wasn’t on television, even in the massively diverse DC metropolitan area where I grew up and still spend a lot of time, was in 2010, and they were friends from church who were politically conservative.  I could talk about how statistically whites make up over 60% of the population in this country, but if House Hunters is our guide, we can expect to see white people in public at a rate of maybe one or two every other Thursday.  I could explain that the numbers of home buyers in the US are overwhelmingly white and straight, but not on House Hunters, where your next door neighbors are just as likely to be craft beer-drinkers Chaz and Cody as they are to be soccer parents Steve and Becky.

But I don’t care about that…at face value.  That is, I don’t have a problem with the “what”.  Gay or brown, white or straight, go on with your self.  I despise nothing more than individuals submitting to an abstract social standard defined solely by group identity. To me, that is the Devil.  Be what you want and do what you want.  I don’t split individuals into collections of races or orientations.  The only people I hate are liars, theives, abusers, and murderers.  Because they are the ones depriving others of their choices and the ownership of their existence…they are the expression of Satan.  Not gays, not brown people, and not straight white men.

What I have a problem with is the “why”, and that is what I’m going to talk about in this article.

When it comes to “diversity” as a means of social progressivism, what is the assertion?  Well, let’s take television as an example, since I brought up House Hunters.  Why do “minorities” (and I use quotes because “minority” in the political sense has nothing to do with math, but with socialist collective identity)…why do “minorities” need to be portrayed on television in disproportionate numbers? Because postmodern eithical mores assert that they have a basic right to identify themselves in popular expressions of the greater culture.  In other words, people are said to feel better when they can regularly observe others who share a collective characteristic.  Minorities, we are told, feel more included, not when they are welcomed as individuals into society based on personal merit and value, but when they can identify with their own kind according to race, gender, and/or sexual orientation.  And one of the most effective and effcient ways to do this—to ensure social “justice” and “compassion”—is to show large numbers of minorities in media like television.  That is, to promote a version of reality on TV where straight white people observe members of their group less often, and minorities more often.

So…what’s wrong with this?  After all, white people have dominated the airwaves for 90% of television history.  Is it really a problem for shows to assert the idea that there is more to the human race than just white people?

The problem here is that these are trick questions.  The questions assume something that isn’t true:

A.  That we can ensure social equality by appealing to greater diversity.

B.  That it is rational to encourage a minority individual’s identification with the group as a means to dismantle the dominant group…at least in a way that will promote peace and general social cohesion.

The first, A., always makes me laugh because it is clearly a contradiction in terms.  The idea that diversity as a social ethic will spawn equality is impossible by definition.  The more you amplify distinctions between groups, the less equal you necessarily make these groups.  This is elementary logic.  And this is why equality between groups always comes at the expense of, not the benefit of, the majority group.  That is, the dominant group must be considered inherently immoral before you can proclaim the need for equal representation of the minority group or groups.

The majority group is the reason there needs to be greater minority group representation on television in the first place.  The majority group is the whole problem, you see.  The majority group, by being the majority group, is ipso facto commiting a sin by its very existence.  Its inherent moral failure is the fact that it IS at all.  The majority group, by being what it is, existentially and by definition, detracts from the minority group.  The fact that it exists at all presents a problem for the minority group in that the minority group is thus necessarily under represented, likewise existentially and by definition.  So the majority group, which causes the minority to be the minority, is bad, and thus is not of equal moral value as the minority group. Its existence is why there needs to be justice in the form of greater representation of the minority group on television. There thus can be no fundamental equality in diversity.  The very reason we need diversity in the first place is because the majority group doesn’t have it.  So when the left talks about diversity being an ethical obligation, they are NOT including the majority in their social utopia.  They are not including white people.

To allow the majority to exist is to deprive the minority group of its social virtue.  To represent the minority group as the minority, for example, on television, by showing its members in numbers only commensurate with their national population average, is to consign it to social marginalization, and this based upon the a priori ethical assumption that it is socially unjust for the majority to express itself (e.g. on television) as the majority.  Which, once the majority is no longer allowed to express itself…well, the majority is no longer allowed to exist.  Because being, and the expression of being, are corollary.  No matter what we are told, the claim that white people should not exist as the majority is to claim that white people should not exist at all.  Because, you see, according to collectivist (e.g. leftist) metaphysics, white individuals are not existentially distinct from whiteness—that is, their collective group identity.  So if whiteness is the majority, and the majority is evil because it by definition makes the minority the minority and thus diminishes the minority’s social value, then white people are de facto evil.  To assert the elimination of the white majority is to assert the elimination of white individuals.

Sorry if that’s a bucket of cold water, but it’s the truth.  Once you are defined according to your group identity, and that group is defined as evil, then YOU are evil.  And thus, you must be destroyed.

You may argue that all we need to do is make the majority no longer the majority. Once white people are no longer the majority in this country, then they will be moral.  They will be acceptable to the social Marxists who advocate equality by appealing to spurious collectivist ethics…which always result in mass murder, by the way.  But the entire moral degeneracy of the majority is inexorably tied to whiteness.  You cannot have a majority unless those in the majority group all share the same collective characteristic…in this case, being white.  The reality which historically has driven the state-sponsored mass murder of the immoral group—in our case, the white majority—is that if it weren’t for white individuals you wouldn’t have a white majority.  If it weren’t for white individuals, there wouldn’t be a massive social moral offense by the majority against the minority.  The idea then that you can separate the evil of the majority from the whiteness of the individual in that majority is a lie.  This is a bromide for the masses to obscure the truth.  Because white people will only accept the notion of diversity-as-equality if they think they are included in that diversity rainbow.

They aren’t.

It’s a big old diversity club, whitey…

…and you ain’t in it.

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To claim that all groups are equal, makes the promotion of more minorities on television a waste of time with respect to the goal of making them more valued.  If ALL groups are of equal value, then what difference does it make who is on television?  If there is no moral difference between black people and white people, collectivity defined, then who cares if the black person only ever sees white people on TV?  He, as a black person, has the same existential worth as a white person, and vice versa. Thus, there is no reason he shouldn’t identify with the white people he sees on television, and no reason he should think that he will never fully find social value unless he sees other black people.  So, the only way you can consistently argue that minorities need greater representation on television is if there is something inherently wrong the with the majority.  Only by valuing the majority less can we claim that it is valuable to allow the minority to observe his group more on television.  In short, if all groups are morally equal, then all of the distinctions between these groups ultimately become meaningless.  If all groups are of equal social value, then we don’t actually have groups.  We only have individuals.  But that runs utterly contrary to the collectivist metaphysics which drive postmodern—which is really just old fashioned collectivist—philosophy, and therefore that notion is something that will not and cannot be accepted or conceded.  Ever.  Because it demands a rejection of the entire collectivst definition of reality…and that only happens after a nation has collapsed entirely, often washed away in rivers of blood.  Mark my words, there is no salvation for a nation, not even this one, because all governments are inherently collectivist and all of them go the way ours is, socially, just with different group labels.  It WILL collapse under the weight of its own contractions, period.  It is a rational certainty.  This is because without the philosophical premises which inevitably bring about its downfall, it isn’t that nation in the first place.

I don’t like this.  I don’t advocate it.  I’m devastated by it.  But I’m merely the messenger of arrant cause and effect.  They are inexorably bound.  The life of a nation—its collectivist philosophical premises—is its death.

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Here’s another problem.  Putting more minorities on television in an effort to make minority people feel more valued implies that individuals identifying primarily with the group is a good thing.  But if this is the case, why would white people want less white people on television in deference to greater minority representation? If identifying oneself primarily with the group is the means by which people are truly valued socially, then why would we expect white people to specifically reject this notion by advocating for that which diminishes white people identifying with their group?  If group identification is good, then why should white people want less of it?

The answer by now should be obvious.  Because white people are not good.  It’s only good to identify with one’s group IF one is not in the majority.  IF one is not white, THEN group identification is good…so goes the syllogism.  Whiteness is majority, and vice versa.  The majority is an illegitimate group because it, by definition, oppresses the minority.

And here’s the kicker.  The majority never gets to be the minority.  Because this is the root of collectivist metaphysics.  Collectivist metaphysics denies the reality of the individual entirely.  And thus, the “majority group” which oppresses the “minority group” has absolutely nothing to do with math.  That is, it has nothing to do with how many individuals happen to be in the majority relative to the minority group.  “Majority” and its primary characteristic, “whiteness”, is NOT a number.  It is a metaphysical identity. Whiteness is absolute, and it is majority, and it is evil because it oppresses the minority.  And therefore, even just one white person alone embodies the entirety of the collective metaphysical identity of “majority” and “whiteness” (the two being corollary).  The only way to reduce the majority and thus bring about social justice is to end whiteness.  And to end whiteness is in practicality to end white individuals.

Yes, it’s madness.  But it is the philosophy of the postmodern left.  Which is nothing more than the garden variety, mass-murdering collectivism we’ve had ever since man catastrophically decided that the “I” is a function of the “we”.

That is, ever since the beginning of time.

END

 

 

You Want to Know the Real Problem of Evil? You Got It.

Ethics, forced compliance, Identity, morality, Voluntarism, , ,

Now that we have—by illustrating the rank contradictions which make up its substrata of rationale—dispensed with the theological and logical fallacy of the “Problem of Evil” as presumed by Christian orthodoxy, we can talk about the real problem of evil.

But what do we mean by “evil”?  Well, first, we need a reference.  That is, in order to call something moral or immoral we must reference it to that which can rationally arbitrate ethical value.  Without such a reference, it’s impossible to ascribe a moral label.  So, what’s the reference? The only reference which is rationally consistent is the Individual. Now, please note that in this article I am not going to explicate ethics in detail at the philosophical primary level. You can find that elsewhere on this blog.

I thus define evil this way:

The willful action of one individual which violates another.

Think Old Testament.  Think Ten Commandments.  Stealing, hurting, killing, lying to yourself or others.

Now, there is a subsection of ethics which deals with “acts of nature”, so to speak.  Those incidents where the innocent are subjected to torment, neglect, and death that have nothing to do with the willful acts of other human beings.  Like natural disasters, accidents of poor judgment (e.g. getting lost in the wilderness at night and falling down a steep ravine), or even something like a bridge collapsing.  We can argue that these things are technically violations of human life, and thus may be described as evil.  But I don’t think they fall under the category of a “problem of evil”, unless you consider God the fundamental controller of everything and thus must implicate Him in some way.  But as I explained in my previous article on the subject, this is not really a problem, because it is not actually paradoxical. It’s a contradiction and thus a lie.  So, when we are talking evil, we’ll keep it simple…basic rational ethics a la the Ten Commandments.  Kiling, lying, stealing, and all their various forms (bullying, psychological abuse, manipulation or fraud, etc.). That’s basic rational ethics, and it need not be complicated.  What is complicated is dismantling the fraudulent ethics of irrational philosophies and other various hijacking of reason.  But true ethics is simple, and I would argue, innately understood by all of us as a function of our nature.  This innate understanding of goodness is corrupted by bad philosophies, and specifically bad metaphysics, not unlike those which underwrite governments.  All of them.  Which leads us to the main thesis of this article.

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Why do people do evil?

Who are the greatest and most prolific and persistent culprits?

The answers to these questions most likely will surprise you, and I can tell you right now that the rest of this article won’t win me any friends, and will likely lose me some. Because the answer to the second question is: you.  And me, in the past.  And the why is this: because we think evil is good.

I must step carefully around this prickly subject. I am not trying to shame anyone.  I am not condemning you to fire and brimstone.  I am not ultimately imprecating the character of friends and family, or even of humanity in general.  I am not saying you ARE evil, because I know that that simply isn’t true.  This is an admonishment to a new thinking, not a condemnation of your soul.  I am aiming to help people to re-evaluate their root assumptions about he nature of man and reality, and to realize that those assumptions are the difference between our lives contributing, on the whole, to sublime morality or the utter abasement of God and the world.  Because no matter how good and reasonable and true and honorable we think we are, our root assumptions—and we all have them—define, ultimately and foundationally, our moral contribution to reality.  And that contribution is either evil or it is good, period.  The question begged, then, is this:  Can a person with evil assumptions who truly believes that these assumptions are good ultimately do good with their life?

I guess I should explain what I mean about “evil assumptions”.  What I mean is assumptions about the nature of man and his relationship to realty which nullifies man’s will, and demands him inadequate, by dint of no less than his very own birth, to existence, itself.  The philosophies in which this is done are varied and copious, and without any rival anywhere in the world I submit, but at root they all share the same theme:  Man is fundamentally controlled by some determinative force outside of himself, be it God, or natural law, or mathematics, or his own “sin nature”, or the Unknown, or evolution, or all of the above, and therefore his will—his sentience and agency—is, at the very foundation of his existential make-up, fraudulent.  Will is an illusion; choice is determined and thus a lie.  Man is incapable of being himself qua himself—there is no such thing.  And thus, for his own good, and to ensure his own real and true existence, his will must be censured, and he forced into “goodness”.  He must be forced to thrive because he cannot do it on his own.  Man speaks as if he is an individual, but this is a function of a root existential error, and his individuality is an illusion at best.  His reality is that he is collectively driven by a single Cause (God, Nature, some other Force), and thus his false sense of self must be oppressed so that his true self—his determined and collective self—can prosper.  He must be forced to thrive—forced into his proper collectivist role—because he simply cannot do it on his own.

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People committing rank atrocities against their fellow man are easy to spot when the definition of evil is rational.  It is hard for the liar, or thief, or murderer to hide when the ethical context is clear.  They stick out like a dead fly in a glass of milk.  And thus, I don’t consider them, and whatever pathology drives them, be it physiological or behavioral or genetic or whatever, to be the real root of the problem of evil.  The liar lies, the killer kills, and the thief steals.  This is clear.  The real problem evil—of evil which is endemic and pervasive—my friends, is not the evil person, but rather the good one.  That is, real evil is found in the majority…the masses who wish to do good, to save and promote fellow man, but do so from a false assumption. The assumption is this: The only way to get men to behave morally is ultimately to grant a small group of people (or a single person) the power to compel human behavior by violence.

I’m talking, in essence, about government. And the fact that after thousands of years of state-sponsored mass murder, oppression, exploitation, slavery, torture, economic regression, and nepotism, we all still accept that the most moral form of humanity is that in which it is governed.  We accept that by eradicating morality, which destroys choice by forced compliance to legality, which is an entirely different ethic altogether, goodness can be brought about in the world.

It can’t.  It hasn’t.  It won’t.

What is the assumption which guides our moral code, almost to a person?  It is found in the answer to the question: Why government?  The answer is always the same, though in various semantic molds:  Without government, man is doomed.  Left to himself, man’s base natural instincts to oppression, exploitation, and murder will erupt and the earth will be a cauldron of misery…a hell, itself.  That man’s very inherent and natural ability to choose his own actions cannot be trusted.  And choice, dear readers, is the root of what makes a human being a human being.  Absent choice, there is no individual.  And thus, this concession to the necessity of government implies that man IS EVIL, ITSELF.  And that’s why government. That’s why human will must be replaced by obedience to law.

Of course, how the political elite get a pass on their own mendacity and natural depravity is a question that is alway punted into the cosmic abyss of grand Mystery.  The fact is, we are told, that our sense of One Self—of “I”—is by nature false, and our choice thus is the vehicle for our own destruction.  And therefore we must be ruled.  It is the only way to save us.  We must have ourselves forcefully denied so that humanity can survive.

And that is REAL evil.  That idea…right there.

So you shall never get to experience life out from under the unblinking eye of Authority, no matter how benevolent or special or God-ordained that authority is claimed to be.  The Bill of Rights, Magna Carta, Pax Romana…it’s force, force, force.  It’s the State, and it means law, and law is the eradication of choice by its nature, and this means the nullification of morality, which means that there is no longer any  consequence for actual evil…because evil becomes not that which violates the individual—YOU or ME—but which violates Law.  Because YOU and ME are a lie, we are told and believe.  So, you will never know what it means to be you, ultimately.  You will never know the freedom of You qua You.  You must always have an overlord, and a cage in which to put you, even though its borders be the size of a continent.  You may have a shadow of freedom, but you will never have it in the flesh.  You will never get to be the real You.  The Self is dead at birth.

And now, right now, you’re telling yourself that I’m a fool…a nut, a radical, a denier of reality, lost, or angry, or irrational, or all of it.  Perhaps you should no longer associate with me, you’re thinking. Perhaps you will unfriend me on Facebook…or perhaps you already have.  I’m a bad influence, a reprobate, a rejector of clear truth.  An arguer, a rebel, a non-compromiser, a denier of God’s sovereignty, a rejector of the empirical, unenlightened, unsaved, a know-it-all, arrogant, and without faith.

Of course we need government, you’re thinking.  Of course we can’t just let people do whatever they want!  That’s complete madness! The death of us all! Idiotic!

Nothing I can say will change your mind. Nothing I can do will cause you to question. I can show you the graves of the millions that government has slaughtered; the starving children ravaged by polical despots who are called the “savior of the people”, the “dear leader”, the “Fuhrer”.  I can show you internment camps and gas chambers and killing fields and nuclear craters and whole cities on fire and severed heads on poles on castle walls and bodies littering the colosseums and the crucifixion of Christ, and all of it a government program, and yet you shall reject the idea that government, and in particular its philosophical roots, might just be the source of the horror. No, in your eyes, I am forever the fool.

And that, my friends…is the problem of evil.

 

 

Solving the “Problem of Evil” from Reason

morality, reason, , , ,

You’ve heard of the “problem of evil” (henceforth to be written PE)? If not, that’s okay. I will explain it here. Basically the PE is this: in light of God’s sovereign Character, how can we explain the existence of evil in the world? How can an all-powerful and all-loving God create, cause, and allow for evil to exist in the world, and even worse, in such copious amounts and in such terrible forms?

The problem with the PE assertion is that it makes some fundamental assumptions with respect to God and man’s nature and character, and the nature of reality in general, which simply do not stand up to rational scrutiny.  Now, many, if not all of these underlying rational errors, I have dealt with in articles on this blog, probably more than once. But I thought it might be beneficial to write a summary in article form on the false assumptions which lead people to accept the PE as a paradox that has some logical merit and relevance to theological discourse.

It doesnt.

This is by no means a comprehensive synopsis…and, given that it is relatively deep and detailed, this should tell you something.  I submit that the false and arrantly irrational assumptions which underly the PE, in and of themselves, alone, suffice to illuminate with perfect clarity this baseless notion. Unfortunately, with religion it seems that all too commonly rational error and superstition are a boon, not a demerit.

What most immediately and predominately springs to mind as aiding and abetting the idea of the PE is the Biblically absent yet widely accepted notion of humanity’s Total Depravity.

The idea is this: man, because of “The Fall” (a term also Biblically absent) in the Garden of Eden was cursed with a pervasive “sin nature”.  This means that existentially man cannot help but sin.  In fact, man, by his very birth IS SIN, for all intents and purposes.  Everything he does in his natural state is from evil  He cannot understand, and thus cannot choose nor do anything that isn’t evil at root.  And though the Church can often be seen equivocating most hypocritically the idea that a totally depraved reprobate who is infinitely wicked by nature is still somehow morally responsible for his actions, the fact remains that ALL of Christian orthodoxy asserts either plainly or implicitly that man—and even those who are saved by Christ are often featured in this assessment—MUST sin, and WILL sin.  It is a forgone conclusion from birth, period, full stop. And though I have heard many times Christain apologists and theologians attempt, in cringe-inducing fashion, to explain how a TOTALLY depraved human being is not actually totally depraved, the fact is that, according to their own arguments, it is impossible for them to describe just where in the singularity of one’s individuality evil ceases and good begins.  Thus, I submit that this whole convoluted and disastrous notion of Total Depravity contributes to the PE in a couple of ways:

If man disobeyed God in the Garden, and this initiated the race’s downfall, and if this was a function of God’s creating man with the ability to disobey, then how is God not ultimately responsible?  How can we absolve God of blame when he specifically and in full control of his divine faculties created man with the distinct ability to wreck himself and all of creation along with him by doing evil, and this in perfect keeping with his normal operation?  That is, the ability of man to choose evil was not a design error.  It was a part of his proper construction and function.  So…can we really blame the machine for simply doing what the maker designed it to do in the first place?

Next, does not the fact that after the Fall man becoming wholly determined to sin imply that man has made it impossible for God to abolish evil…since every man born MUST by nature do evil?  Indeed, is not every man’s birth post-Fall an act in and of itself of evil—by definition of the pervasive sin nature which utterly and existentially defines him? And if we argue that God can, in fact, abolish evil by destroying all of mankind, is this not an admission that the Maker has failed in his creation? That the perfect God has created out of Himself that which is inherently imperfect by virtue of its innate ability to sin? Even the act of sending a Savior to redeem man implies a contradiction stemming from the Total Depravity of a failed creature that somehow corrupted the Perfect God’s perfect universe by simply exercising a divinely created, divinely-willed, and divinely-intended freedom of choice. For how can he whose very birth is an act of evil because of the categorical nature of his root existential wickedness and who is unable to see the Truth and accept God’s Provision except when enlightened by God’s Spirit, and this entirely of God’s doing, possibly be converted from darkness to light? In other words, how can God make Good, Evil? What is A cannot be made B without contradicting A and thus contradicting B. That is, Evil cannot be made Good without rendering both concepts entirely subjective, barren of any inherent objective meaning and value. In other words, God cannot make evil good just like He cannot make a square a circle without destroying both concepts…and thus He contradicts His ability to create those concepts in the first place.

Other irrational assumptions which underly the PE have to do with the commonly accepted Divine Characteristics: omnipotence, omniscience, and omnipresence. Now, I have dismantled these in previous articles, detailing how they are in fact inherent contradictions which destroy God’s identity by ascribing to Him attributes which wreck any distinction between Himself and His Creation. A God who can do anything can, by definition, BE anything; and a God who can be anywhere IS everywhere; and a God who knows everything must determine everything. And thus, the only conclusion to be drawn is that there is nothing that God ultimately isn’t, nowhere that He isn’t, and no act that he doesn’t. And in this context, God becomes utterly non-relative.  That is, since there is nowhere that God ends and His Creation begins, the distinction is ruined and God’s very identity with it. In short, the false paradox of the PE is asserted via these Divine Characteristics as follows:

How can a God who basically knows everything and controls everything and is everything and determines everything NOT be responsible FOR everything, including all of the evil He claims He hates?

To conclude, the simple answer to the problem of evil is this:

It is rooted in assumptions that are rank, object, and arrant contradictions, and thus all of these assumptions must be rejected as impossible. Man, being a rational creature, and one who relies upon the conformity of his concepts to rational consistency in order to define and navigate reality, must stop pretending that claims to divine enlightenment and salvation is but an ideological and fanatical commitment to madness over reason; to ignorance and foolishness as the Most Noble Virtue; and to superstition over Truth.

In mathematics, if the numbers do not properly sum, then the equation is in error and reworked or discarded. In science if the empirical evidence is not forthcoming then proof is not accepted or asserted. And in philosophy—and the theological is inexorably philosohical—if the syllogism nullifies the concepts from which it is constructed then it is false, and no truth can be derived. We must throw it out and start again with new assumptions that are rationally consistent and thus can lead to meaningful and useful conclusions.

The fact is that there is no such thing as the Problem of Evil. It’s a contrivance from ignorance or willful deception, and must be dismantled and condemned as such. It presumes a definition of God that renders “God” a null hypothesis. That is, it makes God a contradiction in terms, and thus it demands that there can be no such thing. It pretends that an All-Powerful God can willfully create that which is contrary to both that power and his very Self. The solution then to the problem of evil is to reject it for the distraction from the truth that it is.

In my next article then, I will discuss what the world’s moral problem really is, and how evil contributes.