Ernst Junger Quotes

I believe for God not to allow pain to happen in the world is for Him to extract free will from the world.

I agree we have enough books that attempt to explain why God allows suffering, presumably in a way that lets God off the hook. And while much smarter men than I have constructed elaborate systems in this pursuit, they are by definition exercises in speculation.

The question, 'How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?' is therefore very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't - indeed it would be wrong if it weren't.

We often represent God to ourselves as being able to draw from non-being a world without sorrows, faults, dangers - a world in which there is no damage, no breakage. This is a conceptual fantasy and makes it impossible to solve the problem of evil.

It was easier for me to think of a world without a creator than of a creator loaded with all the contradictions of the world.

If God seems to be in no hurry to make the problem of evil go away, maybe we shouldn't be, either. Maybe our compulsion to wash God's hands for him is a service he doesn't appreciate. Maybe - all theodicies and nearly all theologians to the contrary - evil is where we meet God. Maybe he isn't bothered by showing up dirty for his dates with creation. Maybe - just maybe - if we ever solved the problem, we'd have talked ourselves out of a lover.

Unfortunately, some Christians are guilty of throwing out an equivalent sentiment when they play the "God is sovereign" card as a way to trump every evil that comes your way.

The question is absurd: when you ask, 'If God is both all good and all powerful, why then does He allow suffering?', what you are really asking is, 'If God is both all good and all powerful, why then can He not make me (the questioner) - who is just as much a part of a universe in which there is suffering as is any other part - be at the same time the exact same questioner, but one who is now part and parcel of a universe in which there is no suffering?' Which, reduced down, is the same thing as asking, 'Why can there not be, at the same time, X and the preclusion of X?'

I can't go around believing in a God that believes suffering is good for me.

Sometimes God allows what he hates to accomplish what he loves.

How could a just God permit great misery? The Haitian peasants answered with a proverb: "Bondye konn bay, men li pa konn separe," in literal translation, "God gives but doesn't share." This meant... God gives us humans everything we need to flourish, but he's not the one who's supposed to divvy up the loot. That charge was laid upon us.

I cannot see ... evidence of design and beneficence ... There seems to me too much misery in the world.

I don't hold to the idea that God causes suffering and crisis. I just know that those things come along and God uses them. We think life should be a nice, clean ascending line. But inevitably something wanders onto the scene and creates havoc with the nice way we've arranged life to fall in place.

I do know that there are some things that exist in this world that you just can't prove. That could be the case with God or whoever might be up there, but I don't follow any one religion.

Whenever there is a catastrophe, some religious people inevitably ask, 'Why didn't God do something? Where was God when all those people died?'

This actual question of 'Why does God allow war?' is not considered or raised as such in the Bible at all.

The only theism worthy of our respect believes in God not because of the way the world is made but in spite of that. The only theism that is no less profound than the Buddha's atheism is that represented in the Bible by Job and Jeremiah.

The God we serve does not seek out the perfect, but instead uses our imperfections and our shortcomings for his greater good. I am humbled by my own limitations. But where I am weak, He is strong.

We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we'll dig ourselves out.

Concerning God, freewill and destiny: Of all that earth has been or yet may be, all that vain men imagine or believe, or hope can paint or suffering may achieve, we descanted.

If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be.

Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing can be, or be conceived.

I was never much bothered about moral questions like, 'How could there be a good God when there's so much evil in the world?'

I'm always trying to figure out what God is and why matter exists and whether it contains spirit or not.

I see that a lot in my own life and in the lives of others.Does the presence of pain mean the absence of God?