Hello frens,
I’ve been living in Plato’s cave on purpose lately, just to shield myself from the scorching sun and this awful heatwave. Summer has only just begun, and this is how it’s kicking off? I don’t know if I’ll stay sane enough to keep creating my posts. sigh
I don’t mean to throw a pity party, I’m just keeping it real. The truth is, while I was looking at pretty shades and wondering why people ever want to leave the cave when everything is literally on fire outside, I kept myself busy reading and drawing.
And this is what I wrote and illustrated: The Problem of Evil.
It was a challenge again, because something that felt so abstract and so vast had to be compressed into something a little easier to understand, at least to some extent.
Hopefully you’ll enjoy reading it and looking at my art as much as I enjoyed creating it. As with the last one, I’m not posting anything for sale, since these are my furry kids and they might not be everyone’s cup of tea. That’s okay.
They’re still my furry muses, and here they are trying to brighten up a pretty heavy subject.
Tell me what you think, and have a beautiful day. Take care, and godspeed.
I enjoyed this one! I can't say that I really know what I think about the bigger questions you pose in your article, but I can offer this:
having children gave me a different perspective on the rough question of "If God is all the things we generally say God is, why do bad things happen?" a la the case of the bambi.
The one thing I know about my children is that I want them to grow up. I don't want them to be childish their whole lives. and I don't want them to be me. The most marvelous thing about being a parent is that your children come from you and yet are not you.
I don't want bad things to happen to them. It kills me when they get hurt. I've heard having children described as having an exposed nerve walking around in the world completely out of your control.
But, if you asked me would I choose to put them in a safety zone bubble where they never get hurt if I could -- my answer is no. They have to go bump around with all the other atoms out there or else they aren't actually people. They'd be more like little computer programs or something.
I suspect the same is true for God. If we believe that God is the creator of all this or at least us, then it seems to me that God could feel the same sensations I do here: what's the point of a creation that is just a copy? The truly exciting thing is a creation that becomes something new, something genuinely different.
And in the pursuit of that, God throws us to the dogs. At the least, we must have our free will. So we can choose things and actually be different. But even more, the environment in which we live must be uncontrolled. So, I guess I feel that evil exists because we are creations.
I really liked your “exposed nerve” analogy, even though I don’t have children myself. I think it makes a lot of sense that having children can feel like an extension of oneself, and maybe that’s one way to imagine how God sees us too.
And I think your point about free will is important: good and evil can coexist without canceling God out, even if that doesn’t automatically prove God’s existence either.
It also made me think of Hick’s soul-making idea, that this world isn’t meant to be comfortable, but to shape us into something more than we were before. Though, honestly, sometimes it feels less like “soul-making” and more like God is forging us a bit sadistically haha.
Also, thanks for reading my blog đź©·