Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
-Epicurus (mostly)

Suffering is an important topic in the Great Atheism Discussion. Among Atheists, it is frequently seen as the clincher – the one argument that negates the need for all other arguments. For many, it was what began their road to deconversion, while for others – such as myself – it made any future return to faith almost impossible (if not entirely).

Yet a recent conversation with @findo on Twitter brought to mind how the issue of suffering is often seen as a non-issue among believers. Some dismiss it easily: It’s just God’s will, it’s all part of a larger plan, or simply God works in mysterious ways. Others provide sophisticated and complex reasonings, while others still never resolve the problem at all – tortured by it but unable to part with the bathwater for fear of losing the baby.

The issue of Suffering is born from monotheistic belief, and it follows like so: If God is good, why did he create a world in which so many suffer? If God is not good, he is not worth of worship.

There are several common explanations I’ve heard that I would like to address specifically.

1. God doesn’t cause suffering, people do – through sin. It’s very flattering to imagine that little ol’ me could cause an earthquake that kills thousands, but like most flattering things it is not particularly realistic. Much suffering is caused by war, poor resource management, sheer stupidity, greed, etc., but not all. Money doesn’t move the world, tectonic plates do.

2. God made the world perfect, but original sin broke it. At the risk of putting words in @findo’s e-mouth, this was the argument he used in response to #1. The problem is that belief in a monotheistic creator god more often than not requires that he (and it is always a he) also be omnipotent and omniscient. We lowly mortals know that glass sometimes smashes and, when it does, it sometimes hurts people. In response, we invented glass that breaks neatly or merely cracks. God, who should have known that humans would fall to temptation and cause the world to break – and that it would break in such a way that it would cause suffering – could have made the world different, just as we do with glass. In anticipation of the argument that even omnipotent beings cannot do the illogical, what is so logical about the eating of fruit causing volcanoes?

3. It’s God’s will. How can this be reconciled with the belief that God is good?

4. Who said that God is good? (courtesy of the Phelps family) Then why worship him? If God’s only claim to our worship is that he is powerful, why not worship Putin? Why not worship strong people or people with guns? Power can be reasonably feared, but not worshipped.

5. It’s part of God’s plan. What is God’s plan and why do I not get a say in it? The belief that God has a plan and that certain events and circumstances in our lives are related to it seems to be in conflict with the other belief that God granted humans free will. If I have free will, why can I choose to torture and murder a child, but not to choose my own destiny? And if suffering is caused by the sins of humans who are free to sin because of free will, how can they simultaneously be a part of God’s plan?

6. Suffering is good for us in the long run, you just can’t see it yet. The example @findo gave was the inoculation of babies – it hurts and babies have absolutely no idea that it will drastically improve their chances of surviving childhood.* There are a couple issues with this. Firstly, we would make vaccines painless if we could (indeed, they have improved a great deal just in my lifetime). God could make our ‘vaccines’ pain free but has not. The second issue is the same as #5: if we have free will, it should be our choice whether to be ‘vaccinated’ or not. So are we free, or are we pawns in God’s master plan? And finally, we are not babies. We are capable of reason and could certainly understand at least the rudiments of God’s plan if he cared to explain it to us. Most parents will at least attempt to tell their young children (if not babies) how vaccines work and how they will decrease suffering in the long run – why does God not extend the same courtesy to us?

7. Suffering is actually good, it builds character / allows us to prove our worth (like Job). What about me? I have never had to go to bed hungry because I could not afford food. I was born with all my parts present and functioning. I have never been in want of a roof to take shelter under. I have many parents and step-parents (not to mention aunts, uncles, and older siblings) who all love me and who have never betrayed my trust. I have never been molested, raped, or attacked in a way that made me fear for my life. I do not have eyeball worms. If suffering is good, why has God been so cruel to me?

8. Suffering is only given in amounts that the individual can handle. Are people in developing countries innately hardier than those of us in the West? What about those who break and kill themselves?

The problem of Suffering has never been resolved to my satisfaction. It may not prove that God doesn’t exist, but it certainly seems to disprove the existence of a good god. It is an issue that has plagued theologians for several millenia and has caused more than a few believers to turn toward Atheist or, at the very least, to Deism. Every explanation raises more questions than it settles and every question takes honest faith closer to its limits.

As always, I invite believers and argumentative Atheists to tackle this topic and, as always, I await to be proven wrong.

*If suffering is part of God’s plan and for our ultimate good, is it ethical to diminish suffering in any way? Am I, in fact, harming my child when I try to protect her from disease? Should I stop donating to charity immediately?

For those few who have managed to miss the news, Switzerland recently voted to ban the building of new minarets in the country (this would not affect any minarets currently gracing the Swiss skyline). I have been mentioning the ban a great deal via Twitter, but that’s not a very good medium to really get into my position. I want to explain myself further here, both for those who are hanging on my every opinion, and so that those who disagree with me at least have my opinion clearly laid out for them.

My position is that there is nothing wrong with the ban. Don’t get me wrong, I happen to disagree with it and I certainly would not have voted for it had I the right to vote in Switzerland (honorary citizenship, please?), but the ban itself is perfectly legitimate.

My first reason is that unlike Canada or the US which build themselves up as being multicultural countries, Switzerland is not and has never tried to be. Unlike the US and the UK, Switzerland doesn’t have a history of taking people from their native countries and transplanting them. It therefore has no responsibility to accommodate the cultures of others. For the same reason, I would have no problem if Saudi Arabia banned the construction of bell towers on their churches, or some similarly phallic portion of a noticeably Atheistic building (if such a thing existed).

My second reason is that this decision was made democratically. This isn’t a government oppressing religious expression, this is the direct will of the people – open to change as that will and that people change. To my mind, this fact makes all the difference.

There are a couple things being said in the media that I wanted to address as well. For example, I’ve heard a few times that this violates Switzerland’s position of neutrality – it doesn’t. Neutrality in a Swiss context means only that they will not take a military stance in foreign affairs. This ban is a purely internal matter. The concept of Swiss neutrality has a long (and somewhat bloody!) history and has absolutely nothing to do with tying its hands in matters of its own culture and laws. Any attempt to claim otherwise is either an example of truly poor research or good ol’ dishonesty.

The other point I have frequently seen brought up is that this is a violation of human rights. One article even compared this ban to what is going on in Saudi Arabia! As if not being allowed one part of a building that you are otherwise allowed to build were comparable to not being allowed to build the building at all. We need to be very clear – without hyperbole – what is actually going on. This is no different than my not being allowed to display a Swiss flag on my balcony, though my neighbours can have a Canadian one (“ethnic” flags would promote “discord” among residents, explains my lease agreement). This ban should not shock anyone who has ever lived in a condo. Muslims are still allowed to be Muslims, they can still build mosques, they can even wear burqas and niqabs if they please. They just don’t get to build big towers that interfere with Swiss aesthetic sensibilities (which, as anyone who has ever lived in Switzerland should know, are offended by far more than just minarets – with good reason in a country where much revenue comes from selling a particular Swiss “look”).

The only element in all of this that could legitimately be whined about is the contra ad campaign surrounding the vote. My understanding is that it was clearly racist and – while I find Swiss xenophobia endearing in its own way – racism has no place in political decisions. But the focus of the ire I have seen has not been on the ads. It’s been on the outcome of a democratic vote that in no way interferes with human rights.

I was mostly a “cultural Christian” for much of my childhood. I’d always had an interest in religion, but it was a detached, literary interest – I liked the stories. In college, my interest became more intense.

I never put much stock in the holy books – my studies of history and New Testament criticism had taught me too well for that. But I believed in a deeply personal god, a god that all religions attempted to understand (I called it pantheism). It’s difficult for me to describe the relationship I had with this god, but I see a lot of myself when I read about mystics.

I recently came across two blog articles that reminded me of my own experience of deconversion. Diary of an ex-Muslimah writes that her parents’ “indoctination worked so well that I was my own moral police [...] I was a purist and an idealist.” Beliefnet (found through John Loftus’s blog), I read about an individual named Anthony.

Anthony had little room for mystery in his theology. Everything had to be nailed down tightly and he built his life around being-in-the-know about everything related to God. When he found that his tight theology didn’t mesh with the facts, he thought he had no choice but to give it all up.

This was precisely my experience. I submerged myself in God and sought a gnostic experience of the divine. I searched the universe for a pattern, a plan, a history. I saw it as a gigantic puzzle and I sought to find as many of the pieces as I possibly could.

The harder I looked for God, the more difficulty I had making the pieces fit. It was easy, at first, to force them together, to cut them so that they joined. I could even fool myself into believing that I wasn’t doing it. But the evidence mounted and it became harder and harder to ignore.

The discrepency between when I could see with my own eyes to be true and what I knew in my heart to be true pained me. The world stubbornly kept looking exactly the way one would expect if there were no god. The more I drowned myself in God, the more I saw a god who didn’t fit, the more pain I experienced.

Then something in my snapped.

Almost overnight, I dumpt it all. I continued to grasp at the idea of God by placing myself somewhere between Agnosticism and Deism, but even that eventually faded away.

I think that there is that moment in every person who really takes religion seriously’s life when reality and religion collide and we can no longer pretend that everything is fine, that everything makes sense. I imagine that many people who reach this point break away from the faith, and many convince themselves that their perceptions of reality are tricks: We must either change what we know or change what we believe. I wonder how many people who reach this point don’t deal with it at all and instead become self-destructive.

Is there a correlation between fundamentalism/extreme religion and eventual deconversion?

There are likely thousands like Anthony, people who no longer think they can have a relationship with their Creator because they find pieces that don’t fit into their once-neat theology.

Every so often, I hear from the religious right about demographic warfare. Reading Quiverfull really made me take notice of this idea.

The Ancient Romans used a similar tactic. Knowing that conquering through brute force alone would mean keeping up an active military oppression indefinitely, they instead sought to simply change the demographics of the conquered lands. Posted soldiers brought their families, slaves, and all the merchants and service providers who catered to their needs and lifestyle demands (and who, in turn, brought their own families and slaves). Soldiers were rewarded with farmland in conquered areas and would frequently retire there. After a couple generations, the Roman population would overtake and assimilate the native population and the area would be made loyal to Rome.

It’s an especially tricky strategy because it’s so slow and subtle. Anyone who points it out is decried as an alarmist – or worse, an agitator.

According to Kathryn Joyce, the author of Quiverfull, there is a frighteningly large segment of the fundamentalist Christian population who are deliberately using this same tactic. They realize that they are in the minority, so they have six, nine, twelve, eighteen kids each. Within a generation or two, they hope, they will have overtaken the population demographically and become a clear majority.

It’s scary!

My first reaction was to say “I must balance the population! I must have babies!” D was not in a mood to acquiesce. A child of three, he has very strong ideas about how much love and attention parents have to give and how that finite resource might become scarce when spread across a larger family. Besides, he reminds me, overpopulation is a serious issue.

Barring some kind of serial virginal conception situation, D’s pronouncement put a pretty big kink in my plan. But for the sake of my potential daughter or granddaughter (not to mention all the other daughters of the free world), I feel a responsibility to ensure that this demographic warfare is not won.

And so the (Atheist) Spirit moved me: “If I can’t have my own babies, I must have theirs!”

My mission became clear. I must make Atheism visible, I must spread a culture of respect, secularism, and tolerance. In so doing, I hope to sow the seeds of deconversion (or at least rationality) in one individual for every baby They(TM) have.

In my isolated universe, alternative ‘medicine’ is something that only an uninformed and gullible minority buy into. Since I’ve started my new job, however, I’ve come to realize just how pervasive it really is.

My office is full of bright, professional, and educated women (and a small minority of men, but we don’t talk to them). Nearly all of these women use alternative ‘medicine’ and swear by it. Common conversations around the metaphorical water cooler include which berries are best for detoxification, which acupuncture practitioner so-and-so goes to for her chronic migraines, and how not knowing how homeopathy works doesn’t matter because it just works, gosh-darnit!

The spread of woo is like something from a George Romero movie. The uninitiated is surrounded and outnumbered as the experienced users slowly eat her brains with conversation and personal testimony. “Deee-tox” they grown as their crooked fingers tear at her weak credulity.

And that’s the problem. The innocent are weak in their defences. They’ve never given it much thought before, so what are they to say when clearly outnumbered by a large group of people who all agree with each other? How are they supposed to go against their friends and co-workers and say “no, actually line B is clearly longer”?

What can I do? I want to be liked and socially accepted as much as anyone. So what can I possibly do when yet another of my co-workers is being convinced to ‘just try’ acupuncture? And when am I morally obligated to intervene? What happens if I hear one co-worker tell another to ‘just try’ homeopathy instead of her real and necessary medication?

Not so long ago (in the grand scheme of things), I manned the Humanist booth at the Ottawa Folk Fest. It was a lovely booth, by the way. We were right at the entrance of one of the two community tents, so everyone had to pass us to see the rest of the displays in the tent – hoorah for good placement! We had a big sign made out of the “There’s probably no god” bus advert in front and our table was littered with all sorts of interesting Humanist literature.

So anyways, there I was, minding my own booth by myself when this young lady came up to me. “Is this really what you believe?” she asked.

“It’s really what I don’t believe,” I replied, with a sly snicker.

As happens with a disconcerting number of my attempts at humour, I was met by a pair of blank, staring eyes.

“Yes, this is largely what I believe.” My self-esteem lowers a little… again.

“Okay, well, hum, what do you think happens to you when you die?”

“I have no idea. I assume nothing, but I’ve never met anyone who has been there and come back, so I can’t say that I know for sure.”

“Well, I do know,” she replies, that crazy twinkle in her eyes my cats get when they see a spider. “And I think you had better think long and hard about it before your time comes.”

And with that, she marched away, leaving me more than a little flabbergasted.

In, perhaps, a more interesting interaction, a man came to my booth. He was looking over the literature on the table, so I asked him if he wanted a pamphlet or a sticker. “Oh God no” he responded with slight recoil.

After a moment, he added “you know, you guys don’t really not believe in God.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, you just want to be able to live your lives the way you want, so you pretend that God doesn’t exist.”

“Well then,” I replied, “you don’t really believe in God.”

“Yes I do!”

“No, you’re just seeing the beauty and majesty of the universe and are projecting all that onto an idea of God. But you know he’s not really real.”

“I do believe in God!” Had he been a few decades younger, he might have stomped his foot.

“If I believe in God, then you don’t believe in God.”

“Yes I do!”

“No you don’t!”

“Yes I do!”

“No you don’t!”

If I admit to how long this little exchange lasted, I shall be truly shamed. So I’ll merely state that this gentlemen was a good sport and argued with me, Bugs Bunny fashion, for a wonderful length of time. It might have lasted even longer, but he eventually broke it off to say “well I find that sign,” referring to the Atheist bus ad, “to be really offensive.”

“How is it offensive? We’re merely stating our opinion and we’re not even claiming absolute knowledge.”

“Well, it’s offensive to my faith.”

To which I replied, “Well, sir, I am sorry that you find it offensive. However, we are merely expressing our own beliefs. You have come here and actually attacked my beliefs, saying that I do believe in God and so forth. Which one of us is more offensive, do you think?” I admit to fictionalising this little speech a fair bit. At this point, my fear of confrontation had gotten the better of me and I was about a heartbeat away from passing out. But I think that this is the gist of what I said, though perhaps the actual speech was a little less coherent.

And here’s where the miracle occurred… The man actually said “oh, well, hum… huh… I’m going to have to think about this…” and walked off.

Think? He’s going to think? Because of something I’ve said? Is he going to realize that he was being offensive and that statements of Atheism are not, actually, ohmygoshdarnsooffensive? Dare I hope, will he de-convert and join us at one of our future Humanist Association meetings? No, I dream. But still, I made him think! Ah ha!

As soon as he was out of sight, I collapsed into my chair and started the very important work of calming my nerves and trying to hide from everyone I was handing pamphlets to that I was shaking like the bloody dickens.

I arrived early while the parade consisted only of two or three half-assembled floats and a couple small groups of people standing around chatting. It had been drizzling most of the morning and I feared that the dark clouds would drive both the participants and crowds away.

But time went on and more people arrived. As I walked down the street, I listened to the competing sounds of electronic dance music and show tunes that blasted through all the conversations. Then the costumes began to arrive. There were people in negligées, in sparkling evening gowns, a woman dressed as a horse and lead on a tether by a cowboy, and more than a few people in assless leather chaps.

The march was, on the whole, fairly uneventful. The skies cleared just as we began walking and the good weather held. While I am sure that many people who might have otherwise come were deterred by the threat of rain, the 24hours claims that there were at least 35′000 people in the crowds.

The Atheist Pride group was led by our energetic mascot, Darwin the dog, who had been decked with a lei of multi-coloured flowers. We had a beautiful new banner printed with the “Atheist Pride” slogan. It was wonderful to see so many of us show up to give support not only for pride in Atheism, but also for those homosexuals among us and within our community in a broader sense.

In a bizarre twist of coincidence, there was an Anglican group marching behind us. There was some animosity at first (a priest sporting a shirt that read: “I’m the pink sheep of my family” made a joke about us “feeling a heat from behind”), most of us soon put aside our philosophical differences and embraced the fact that we were all there in support of a common goal.

As could be expected, there were some naysayers in the crowd. We spotted two gentlemen sporting anti-gay/pro-Christian signs and one woman shouted at us that there is a god and that she was angry at us. But these dissenters were clearly in the minority and, as far as the sign-wielders went, had a dejected look about them suggesting that they knew it.

Overall, we had a lot of fun and received some great feedback from the crowds. I am so proud of my city, of how tolerant and accepting, or at least polite, it is.

Imagine a board room filled with tension. The group has spent months planning a conference but nothing seems to be getting done. You’ve prepared a critical path in the hopes that some direction would help, but one of your co-workers had the same idea and now the group has just spent over two hours debating which to use.

We’ve all experienced the horrors of ‘work by committee’ – when leadership is lacking, nothing seems to get done. For many, this is what an egalitarian marriage must look like, and so the pendulum swings in the other direction and marriage becomes an exhausting exercise in powerplay.

It’s important to understand that having an egalitarian marriage does not mean running a household by committee. Rather, it is about not giving a single individual ‘CEO status.’ This means that families can capitalize on the strengths of their members and use these strategically, spreading the power around, to accomplish the goals of the family as a whole.

To give a concrete example, I manage the budget in my household. Putting it into practice depends on achieving consensus, but I am responsible for ensuring that we have a workable budget that that it is executed. My husband, for his own part, is responsible for co-ordinating household chores and ensuring that they are completed in a timely manner.

In an egalitarian marriage, each individual does what s/he does best and, when all areas are taken together, responsibility and power is spread fairly equally. In addition, final decisions in an egalitarian marriage ultimately depend upon consensus – which is a great way to keep the lines of communication open!