Can benevolence be reasoned out or reasoned at. I'm not so sure it can be.
I think it can, it produces a society that we're all better off in - the more benevolent societies are typically those that are self-reportedly the happiest, so it's a long-term investment in our own benefit.
''Without bad things we'd have no appreciation of how good the good things are...'' Is that really the central tenet of theodicy? It sounds like advice you'd give to an offspring just jilted in a romance to me.
Is there a 'central tenet' to anything in religion? It does seem as though it shifts with time and circumstance to suit the culture in which it's manifesting (much, to be fair, as other ideologies and philosophies do).
I think it is a testing time for all beliefs and we all probably have an investment in all for some of these. I refer of course to.
Progress and enlightenment. How far is that working out Is all of society showing the evidence of the fruits of these at the moment. On the other hand we have the hope that things will not be as bad or worse than in similar past times, that we understand better.
That's manifestly working out for society as a whole - the absolute poorest are in a significantly better position in life than they were even a century ago, across vast swathes of the world. We aren't finished yet, by any stretch, but life is better for the majority of people than it has been in earlier generations.
Humanism. We have the hope that people and governments will do the right thing and that obligations to each other will be met.
Haven't we always hoped that? The difference, I feel, is that as time goes on we're getting better and better at including the diversity and range of all that are 'human' rather than judging based on a narrow subset.
Christianity. Has never said anything that suggested there was not good or bad in the world it has never held a rosy picture on suffering.
That rather depends on the individual Christian - certainly if you look, for instance, at the work of Mother Theresa there was a great deal of preaching on the nobility of suffering.
As a new Christian in my early twenties much of the literature on hand in my first church for new christians was aimed at teenagers but from it I remember the words ''God hasn't made bullet proof Christians.'' Christians will carry on praying for all and being the same boat as everybody else.
Except in those places where they're trying to create a special status for themselves (i.e. USA) or those places where other religious or ideological groups are trying to suppress or subjugate them.
Espousing the view that a GodLess universe explains the balance of Good and Bad must have surely been tested as that ''balance'' has shifted somewhat.
Not really - with no external guiding principal any 'balance' is accidental until and unless we choose to impose some measure of balance on it. If it's shifted one way or the other it's because we've either made deliberate efforts to make it happen or we've taken our eye off the ball and not watched it closely enough as nature took its course.
O.
