I don't think I would say "everything happens for a reason" to someone who is suffering, but all the same for me and other people of faith it's a simple reality. But for people who disagree or struggle with the premise, it will offer no solace. They would probably feel like it dismisses and trivializes their suffering, and worse, they might attach other, unintended meanings.

History attests to the terrible condition of the world, and the Bible is very clear about that from the earliest parts of Genesis. There is so much pain, as a constant through the vastness of history and before. Saying everything happens for a reason doesn't necessarily deny that. When applied properly, it acknowledges the cruelty and struggle to find meaning, but that the reality is as it stands. Someone who does not believe may very well reject the notion of meaning, and see only the path of improving the situation as the answer. In the end, both types have among them people of goodwill, and we must be charitable to each other.

A sibling comment to yours mentions Candide, which takes "we live in the best of all possible worlds" very cynically. Voltaire disagreed with Leibniz's premises. But of course "best of all possible worlds" has lots of room for argument as to "best" means, and it certainly does not mean the best of all of _your_ possible worlds. As the joke goes, both the optimist and pessimist believe ours is the best possible.

Like you said, it can probably console people that believe in that sort of stuff and probably is meant like that but you gotta be careful with it if you ask me. I can easily be damaging.

If you think about it, the bible and other books/religions were created in really hard and tough times and the belief that somehow in some way "it was meant to be and there's a reason behind this terrible thing happening" was helping them through it. This is all in times in which less was known about how the world around us works (and even nowadays we don't really know but our models are much much better - just think of how medicine knows about bacteria causing illnesses and such vs. the whole Yellow Bile, Black Bile, Phlegm and Blood thing - Hippocrates ~460BC-~370BC).

A merchant in the 1300s coming home to find all of his family had died from the plague might find solace in thinking that all of this happened for a reason if he is a very devout believer in such things. I can't personally fathom how you'd find someone today that would see meaning in having a family member getting infected with Yersinia Pestis, nevermind die from it, but that's just me.

So as you can see, personally I absolutely don't believe in the whole reason and other religious stuff but I can see and appreciate how religion can help stabilize society and keep the population under control in tough times, how it can be a moral compass etc. I don't personally need the rest of it all to know that I shouldn't just go about killing other people. And if something bad happens in the world then - from my relatively safe western vantage point - I can just see that the world is still an ugly place and that there are bad people that just do bad things or that are living in bad enough situations that make them do those things (hey, until we're in those situations ourselves, we don't really know what we'd actually do, best intentions not to or not!) and all I can do is to try as best as I can to avoid those people amd situations altogether. There's not much more to it and I don't need to imagine a devil or some other stuff to explain this somehow.

That was really my point. In the Bible, you see God directly intervening in certain situations but you don’t see Him actively controlling everything. Moses even argues with Him at one point.

There’s a couple of verses that people have strained to apply that meaning to it, but reading the entire Bible to put things in context you don’t see “everything” happening for a reason. You see some things.

It’s one of the reasons that I try to make this point a lot. I don’t know how many people realize how much that phrase leads non-believers to demonize God by attaching every awful thing that happens to a reason, which then makes those things His doing.

It’s simply not reflected in the text.

This comes more from the early Catholic theology dogmas of an all-knowing, all-powerful benevolent god, which creates a contradiction.

If God is not actively controlling everything, then you have to either admit that He can't control everything (but that clashes with the all-knowing, all-powerful aspect that the church really wants to preserve), or that He can intervene but chooses not to, in which case He is responsible for every awful thing that He lets happen, and you either need to assert that "it's all for a good reason in the end" and letting these awful things happen is not a bad thing, or give up the presumption of benevolence.

So the tricky thing is that you have to give up something of these assumptions; you can keep any of them, but if you want to keep all of them, then there's a contradiction - and the discussion becomes very different depending on which assumption you give up; if you keep omnipotence, then you have to "demonize God"; if you keep both omnipotence and benevolence, then you have to ignore any awful thing in our reality that does not have a plausible good reason justifying the awfulness; if you want to keep benevolence and a common-sense look on our reality, then you get (perhaps, I hope I'm not misinterpreting you) something like your approach - which, IMHO, is quite reasonable, but essentially surrenders omnipotence and thus strongly goes against dogma of many churches that do assert a God that actively intervenes all the time.

Fair enough.

I'm intrigued by the "non-believers to demonize God" though. As a thought experiment, replace God by any deity of any religion, such that you would also be a non-believer (I assume you are a believer in the Christian god), which should help with the objective distance.

How about human sacrifices, say Vikings or Aztecs. What are your thoughts on human sacrifice? Would you go as far as to demonize the Aztec god(s) that required a human sacrifice?

(I'm not the person you're replying to) A bit of a tangent: I don't know that much about the Aztec gods but AFAICT, the Vikings didn't really deny that their gods can be pretty terrible. There are a lot of Norse myths that basically describe a really dysfunctional and bitter family, but with superpowers. Betrayal, infidelity, pettiness, arrogance, and stupid mistakes are all reflected in stories about their gods. They might as well be demons but they weren't as bad as other things so you'd worship them all the same.

Christianity in particular is significantly different in that their god is canonically benevolent while also being omnipotent. It's a pretty fundamental aspect of Christianity, I don't think I've heard any Christian that believes their god is actually kind of a dick. I would imagine that even though "why do bad things happen?" is a classic foundational challenge to Christianity, it's probably irrelevant to Vikings. Christianity isn't really comparable to old school faiths like Vikings/Aztecs.

Also fair enough :) and to add to your tangent AFAICT though Viking human sacrifices are described it seems like they weren't the common place standard type of sacrifice.

I don't necessarily think that it matters much for the question though. I'm not sure I can find a different benevolent omnipotent (or close enough) deity to make a straight comparison to that doesn't have a current (large) following that would drag the discussion into geopolitical/georeligious territory. If you do know one I'm all up for a substitution.

I don't know with the parent I was replying to, he seems reasonable, but usually religious discussions "never end well" because of the belief involved. Bringing the discussion to a different non-current religion levels the playing field to both sides discussing something they don't believe in. The "fun part" is where the believer in a current deity knows that "obviously Odin doesn't actually exist, there are no Norse gods". Well that's how I feel about their deity, sorry. But I don't mind that they believe in it as long as they leave me be and don't try to convert me or negatively affect me because of their beliefs.

The Bible often talks about not honoring other gods, avoiding idols, etc. Even Solomon built many shrines to other gods for his wives.

Some people interpret it to affirm the existence of other gods. In reading, there’s never a point where another god directly intervenes in the lives of men. There are plenty of occurrences of men creating idols to worship of other gods or falling to temptations offered by the gods of other cultures. Asherah poles are the most often called out.

All that is to say, we don’t have any historical context of other gods directly intervening in people’s lives.

What we do know is that if we were to claim to know when God will intervene we would be wrong. We can’t possibly. I have seen in my own life and heard testimony from others which gives me a little bit of a pattern to draw from and gain better understanding to help make some sense of it…but I’m still just guessing.

What we do see in the Bible is that even the biblical heroes are all very flawed and fall in and out of favor with God. Noah, Moses, David, Solomon, etc. The only one who doesn’t is Jesus, but even Jesus became frustrated at times. There’s a story where Jesus curses a fig tree because he’s hungry and there’s no fruit on it. I always thought it was funny because it shows more of his human side…he got hangry.

Interesting. In two ways, you brought the discussion back to the Christian god instead of coming onto the "we both don't believe in those gods" playing field.

I appreciate the civil discussion nevertheless and there's the second interesting point.

You never actually say it directly but between the lines I read that you think to have at least an inkling of a pattern that confirms the direct interference of the Christian god in this world. I don't know why that would be relevant to be honest.

In any case, I would bet that the same could be said of people in ancient times for their gods (or even right now people that have different religions might for their god(s)). They probably thought to see patterns as well and attributed them to the gods. Without thinking about any specific religion: if they made a specific sacrifice every year at a specific time to gain favourable weather for example, they probably had a pretty good chance of success by pure luck and pattern observation and any unlucky weather anomalies could easily be attributed to mistakes with making the sacrifice (maybe it was the wrong goat or whatever) for example.