The “If God is good, why doesn’t He do something about the suffering in the world?” argument is one of the strongest for not believing in God. Entire books have been written about it, both pro and con, and I don’t have room to deal with it in a single blog comment. So I’ll recommend The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis, as a very in-depth treatment of the subject from a Christian perspective.

For myself, I’ll just say a couple of things:

1) When I was a child and a teenager, I was indeed “following what my parents told me to believe,” as you say. But while I was attending Wheaton College (a Christian college near Chicago), I started doubting my faith, and went through about a year of questioning everything about Christianity. Was there really a God, or were church services just an exercise in working ourselves up to an emotional high? Was the Bible really reliable, or was it something that was cooked up several hundred years after the events in question, after all eyewitnesses who could contradict its story were safely dead? (And do we actually have the original text of the Bible, or do we have something that was garbled and/or deliberately changed somewhere along the line of being copied and recopied by hundreds of scribes?)

I never tried to answer the “Does God really answer prayer, or are healings and so on just coincidence?” question, because it’s not provable. No matter what experimental conditions you set up, people would be able to say “Oh, God decided not to heal that person for reasons of His own,” or “No, the prayer had nothing to do with the cancer going away, it was just spontaneous remission.” There’s no way to prove it one way or the other, because there’s no obvious cause-effect link to test. I did, however, wrestle with the exact same question you’re asking about. One year, there were two people at Wheaton College who had life-threatening conditions. One was a 20-year-old student who had been in a car accident and was in critical condition at the hospital, and the other was a school employee (a janitor, I believe) who had a serious illness — I don’t recall exactly what the illness was. Both were prayed for publically in chapel, and privately by their many friends and relatives. The student recovered, the janitor died. I wrote a letter to the school newspaper saying, “Was there any difference in the prayers offered for these two people? No. Was one of them less loved by his family and his friends? No. There are no easy answers here: sometimes God says “Yes” to our prayers, and sometimes He says “No”. But He never seems interested in explaining His decisions to us.”

It wasn’t the problem of pain, or questions about unanswered prayer, that finally resolved my doubts, though. What finally did it was examining the question of the resurrection of Jesus. That one is a falsifiable proposition. If you can prove that the Resurrection didn’t happen, then all of Christianity falls apart. (The Bible even admits this — 1 Corinthians 15:14 says, “If Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith.”) On the other hand, if the Resurrection really did happen, then there’s something unique going on here that hasn’t happened anywhere else in history (other religions have stories about a resurrected god, but Christianity is the only one that makes a falsifiable historical claim about a specific person, at a specific time, returning from the dead under his own power). If the Resurrection really happened, then the other claims of Christianity need to be examined more closely as well.

I don’t have room to write my “why the Resurrection really happened” reasoning here; I’ll turn it into a full blog post. You should see it in a couple of days.

2) I’m no stranger to pain myself, though in my case it was emotional pain rather than physical. I’m back from Africa now (I really need to update that “About me” page), but while I was there, God put me through the wringer. And yes, it was quite clear to me that God, not circumstances, was the one setting me up for all this pain. But after I got through it, I was stronger for it. So I don’t feel angry at God — I feel grateful. The pain He put me through was, basically, the pain of surgery. Again, I don’t have room to write the whole story here (I wrote it all out once, and it turned out to be about 5,000 words long) but I’ll make a separate post on the subject. (This time I’ll edit the word count down a little.)

Use your geekiness to think from a statistical perspective. Wouldn’t we have found evidence by now that those who pray receive what they ask for more often than those who don’t? Sure, every once and a while someone with a terminal disease prays and is suddenly healthy. Do you really think that was god? Or do you think that there is just a small, but statistically significant chance that the human body can, on rare occasions, overcome such diseases? If you think it was god, then please explain to me why my sunday school teacher (the most devout person I know) was diagnosed with breast cancer. We all prayed and the cancer went into remission. We all thanked god that our prayers were answered. Soon thereafter, the cancer came back and she withered away and died a slow painful death.

We happen to know that there is no chance of the human body regrowing a limb after amputation. So why does god NEVER seem to answer the prayers of amputees when they ask for their limbs to be restored? What does god have against amputees? This idea is not my own, I saw it on a webpage a while back. I used to be like you. I went around saying that everything I accomplished was due to god. Now I realize how pathetic that was. YOU accomplished it. It is alright to take credit for your accomplishments every once and a while.

I noticed that you store the converted certificate as /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.pem while you refer to it as ssl-authority-files = /etc/ssl/certs/cacert-root-ca.crt in ~/.subversion/servers.

Is this intentional or an omission?

With kind Regards,
Kasper van den Berg

Furthermore, all this “brand new money” being conjured “directly out of thin air” every time someone takes out a loan would have the same economic effect as the government printing large sums of money: runaway inflation.

How loans actually work is that the bank is loaning out the money that is being deposited with them by people with savings accounts. But there’s a limit: the bank can’t loan out more money than they actually have, minus a certain percentage that they keep in reserve (the “fractional reserve” of Fractional Reserve Banking). If the bank loans money to someone who defaults on their loan, they have actually lost money.

What you may be talking about is the “money creation” effect of repeated loans (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_creation for a chart that explains it pretty well), but that doesn’t create any actual money, it just makes that money circulate more widely. And each bank is limited in what they can loan out to the amount they actually have. So it’s in the bank’s best interest to loan money to people who will actually repay it, and that’s why Wachovia’s offer is foolish: the only people foolish enough to take a loan at 50% interest are the kinds of people who will never repay their loan.

When a bank makes a loan it conjures brand new money, directly out of thin air, in to your loan account. This is the magic of Fractional Reserve Banking.

So, a bank is not actually risking any of its capital… it is only
considering the Opportunity Costs between the different loan possibilities that the loan sharks can think up.

The Mortgage or Loan Application becomes a BRAND NEW asset on the Bank’s Balance Sheet.

It is good to be king.