1. Wow, that is really horrible. I’m so sorry for your family and the girl.

  2. Galadriel says:

    We went over the whole felix culpa in Christian Thought–in the end, is it ultimately a good thing that Adam sinned? It makes my head spin just thinking about it, but fictional examples–for example, Bilbo not killing Gollum–cut it down to a more manageable size.

  3. Bainespal says:

    A few weeks ago, I finished playing the videogame Aragorn’s Quest, and the narration at the end had Samwise Gamgee saying something like, “…and that’s where evil belongs, safe in the pages of old books.”  I felt the weakness of that message very strongly, because that same morning a man had shot several people in my town and the neighboring one, including at a business I had been walking to before the shooting hit the news, and I came to find the block roped off in police tape.

    It’s hard for me to accept the reasoning that God allows evil because it suits His own glory. They may be true, but that statement is just the tip of the iceberg. God can’t be selfish, can’t want His creations to suffer, because suffering and evil is by definition the contradiction of what He has decreed to be right and good. We don’t have the answer, but the only alternative is that evil absolutely wins without any contest, and that is utterly unthinkable.

    Thank you.

  4. Lex Keating says:

    Chris, this is a brave and powerful post. Thank you for sharing. 
     
    I will add, because I think this is part of the natural conclusion of where your argument is going, that evil is, at its essence, the absence of God. That doesn’t make evil simpler or smaller or less of a terrible thing when we have to face it. But it does underscore that we sometimes don’t give God enough credit for the scope of His goodness. So many people get angry at God for “letting” bad things happen. What if He let go of us entirely? It’s very true, that in the battle of good and evil we are not the protagonists or antagonists. We are bystanders, whom good would save and evil would destroy. But only because evil hates that which good loves, not because evil has any intent to “do one better.”
     
    And while we remain in this world, evil’s influence isn’t small. It doesn’t create a little sinkhole that only pulls us in when we stumble directly upon it. It ripples across the fabric of God’s creation, poisoning anything it can touch. I don’t for a moment believe that God is playing “catch up,” trying in vain to plug holes after the dyke’s been broken around His children. But Lord, it is hard to look up when the ground has fallen from under our feet!

What do you think?