[Archalen]

Originally Posted by Malice_Mizer [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

That's interesting, because your questions are honestly pretty juvenile. If you believe that people adhere to religious systems and a belief in God simply to comfort themselves and avoid any liability for their own lives, then I don't think you've dug deep enough into the nature of human spirituality. Even the way you frame the questions betrays a shallow attempt at understanding.

For example the problem of pain is explicitly addressed and concretely satisfied in any orthodox Christian theology: God allows evil to exist to bring about a greater good, i.e. we are unable to view the entire "puzzle," and experience only a small piece, our own piece, of creation. Therefore, any judgment you make about the fairness or unfairness of existence is itself unfair, because you have no viewed existence as a completed whole. It's a teleological understanding of existence that is honestly supported now by science (now that science has abandoned the static-universe theory it slavish held onto until 50 years ago), which says that our universe has a beginning and will one day end. Until then-- until you're able to view creation as the mind that conceived it-- any analysis you make is flawed and incomplete.

Existence absolutely is a puzzle, which is why when people ask me about the existence of God, I say "I don't know."