Essay Sample on Religion: A Source of Comfort in a Chaotic World

Introduction

Since the Enlightenment, religion has suffered constant attacks. It has been considered a source of superstition, oppression, self-deception, alienation, neurosis, hindering the truth. Many of these allegations are not without foundation, but few critics of religion would dare deny that it offers comfort in the face of human pain. Many times people's lives may seem chaotic, but religion is an effort to make sense of situations in which, perhaps, they would despair. There should be no confusion between 'endowing with meaning' with 'endowing hope' since not all religion is hopeful. Christianity or religion is popularly used to give meaning to a world that, at most times, is difficult to understand. God is not dead; As long as man continues to face situations in which it is difficult for him to find meaning, the divine image will remain present in the thought of men.

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The problem of evil stems from the religious reflection on God's intervention in the world and how he enforces his justice (Gocke et al., 2018). "Justice" is defined by Aristotle and confirmed by Justinian as giving each person what corresponds to them (Morgan, 2019). That God allows evil in the world has not been so worrying, since some religious philosophers have concluded that, according to justice, it is up to the evil to receive evil. However, the apparent lack of consistency in the distribution of things in the world is worrying, because many bad people receive good, and many good people receive evil (Harris, 2016). In such a way that finding meaning for the west and the east is not properly the object of theodicy, but only those situations in which God seems to act to the detriment of the sense of justice that he defends (Collins, 2019).

This paper investigates how the problem of evil represents a challenge for the orthodox understanding of God, identifying possible solutions to the problem that remains a challenge in contemporary society. The analysis will focus on how the Orthodox Christians operate their classification systems of representations of evil, accusation, and inquisition throughout the history of the church. The approach of these systems of representations of evil and the diabolical cannot ignore the close link existing between the dynamic and structural aspects of society on the one hand, and on the other, in the ways chosen by social agents to build identities, establish borders and promote cohesion, always trying to remove those forces considered to be destructive of the current social order.

The Problem of Evil in the Orthodox Understanding of God

All human beings, regardless of their time, their socio-economic and cultural status, are affected by evil as it manifests itself in the world in different ways Carroll, 2018). After taking a look at various perspectives, it can be said that evil is a problem that only concerns human beings within the whole of creation. Anything that we dislike and that affects us negatively is considered bad. In this sense, death, disease, war, natural catastrophes, epidemics, hatred, conflict, injustice, contempt for others, terrorism, pain, suffering, etc., are all evils. Taking into account people's judgments, their way of thinking and desires, it could be said that the human being in his desire to enjoy a fullness of life in his existence has not yet found the reason for all these phenomena that they suffer in the universe (Aubry, 2017). Because of evil, all men complain, all seek a solution, but to this day no definitive solution to this concern has been found.

One of the biggest challenges facing Christians is how to tackle the problem of evil in a suffering world. Orthodox Christians have tried to explain the situation from a theodicic perspective whose fundamental nucleus is the triad: God, the world and evil (Gocke, 2019). While for Western Christianity the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, for orthodox Christianity the Spirit proceeds exclusively from the Father. Generally speaking, Orthodoxy is characterized by a less intellectualist and more pious attitude. Concerning science and culture, this aspect of Christianity adopts an attitude of neutrality, assuming that faith makes up an autonomous sphere of life (Hankey, 2017).

Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), one of the popular modern thinkers and influence in the Orthodox Church tries to defend the goodness and justice of God before the human accusations that make the creative divinity responsible for the evil in the universe because he could avoid it and he did not (Dei, 2018). The dominant concern in this discourse is the explanation of where evil comes from in an attempt to provide the society with an answer to the fundamental question of human existence.

According to the American theologian and member of the Orthodox Church, David Bentley Hart, the idea that Hell is a kind of life imprisonment for the souls of unrepentant sinners, in which they will be tormented for eternity is one of the greatest interpretive and moral errors in the history of Christianity (Holdier, 2018). Hart argues that within the logic of the Christian faith, the only thing that makes sense is to expect that all rational beings, without exception, will end up joining God at the end of time. In explaining what he considers to be the philosophical and theological implications of the idea of a perpetual Hell, the orthodox thinker does not spare some key figures from the most creative insults, especially Saint Augustine (354-430), the Dominican Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and the Protestant reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) (Egan, 2014).

Hart reserves much of his indignation for statements like those of St. Thomas Aquinas, according to which the beatitude of souls in Paradise would be increased by the awareness of the torments of those condemned in Hell, or by Calvin's idea that the infernal regions would have a dense population of babies "less than a cubit [about 50 cm] long". According to Hart, such beliefs are both an ethical and logical problem (Holdier, 2018).

If Christian dogmas about God's supreme goodness, justice and wisdom are true, it makes no sense to imagine that he will punish finite rational beings for all eternity just because they were not baptized as Christians (Clark, 2017). Even the worst of psychopaths and genocides, he argues, have finitely committed evil, argues the theologian. Therefore, any eternal punishment would be disproportionate and unjust with the wrong done by any sinner. Going further, the writer ends up having a curious indirect dialogue with the doubts raised by areas such as genetics and neuroscience about the traditional concept of free will.

If it is increasingly clear that the freedom of human choices is strongly influenced by numerous biological and cultural factors that do not depend on what an isolated individual "really wants", it is very difficult to justify any definitive punishment. According to the theologian, without these intrinsic limitations, any rational being would naturally choose the Good and could join God. Hart proposes, therefore, that the traditional concepts of Hell should be rethought as something much closer to the Catholic Purgatory: a temporary and purifying situation that would lead even the most hardened evil to seek, finally, the divine bosom (Holdier, 2018).

Man has not yet realized his vocation. The Orthodox Church sees this as the reason for the "fall," the lack of the first man - Adam - in which all humanity is mythically represented (Hankey, 2017). The myth of the lack of the first man expresses the solidarity that binds all men, both good and evil. Thus, the Christian East faces the dogma of "original sin," the question of our guilt "in Adam," differently from the West. Admittedly, under solidarity "in Adam," we suffer all counterattacks of "their" sin, that is, the choices and actions contrary to human of others and of all who came before us from the origins of human age. The Eastern Fathers - and the orthodox theologians in their wake - insist on the fact that if people are responsible, it is not "Adam's sin," but theirs exclusively (Dei, 2018).

The Christian East interprets the famous passage of the apostle Paul - "Through one man (Adam) sin entered the world and through sin, death has affected all men because all men have sinned" (Rom. 5:12) that: each person suffers death, a consequence of sin, but each is personally responsible.

In the classical-philosophical traditions of the West, evil is discussed as an unresolved age-old problem that cannot be answered. The question that arises is "If God is all good, all-loving and all-powerful, so where does evil come from? ". The response by orthodox Christians is that God has his reasons since there is a reason for everything (Hankey, 2017). However, people cannot understand intellectually the "why" behind evil. Humanity can only understand God's use of evil only in the sense that suffering is necessary for spiritual growth. Atheists consider this an unsatisfactory answer at best, and at worst a disappointment for any seeker of truth.

As an interesting note, atheists develop one of their strongest arguments on the unanswered question by the classic-philosophical view of evil: How God, who is considered all of the above, can allow evil. And/or, if God created all things, then He must be the author of evil. Also, the atheist argument continues that, God is either impotent (not all-powerful,) and cannot control Evil or His character is corrupt in that He is the creator of evil. Either way, to an atheist, God is not the God Christians think He is and is not worthy of worship. In fact, for an atheist, God does not exist and from this point of view, it does not hurt. Because if there is no God, there can be no evil.

The orthodox argument is that Evil, or the problem of evil, cannot be solved under the false premise that it is a question of the intellect, which can be rationalized and compartmentalized. None of the previous views of Evil creates a strong case for its origins, nor the relevance of fighting it in today's world. Evil can make sense from a spiritual point of view and this spiritual point of view, evil can be defined and its origins become evident. In light of the above, Evil takes a gigantic form in scope and much more than an intellectual problem to be solved philosophically.

Pierre Bayle, a Frenchman of the XVII century expounded the opinion that, by suffering in the world, God is either not good, or he is not omnipotent (Erdozain, 2017). Ironically, Bayle was a defender of Christianity, but he came to recognize that, rationally, the existence of evil could not be reconciled with a good and almighty God. In such a way that Bayle, far from promoting skepticism about God, as traditionally attributed to him, rather promoted an approach to God, but through faith and in the abandonment of reason, simply because he could not offer an understanding of the divine. However, as explained by Leibniz, there is no opposition between faith and reason. Leibniz did consider it possible to rationally reconcile the goodness and omnipotence of God with the existence of evil, and in opposition to Bayle, he considered that, on this basis, the reason may well serve as an instrument of faith. The orthodox Christian theodicy rests in the hope that divine justice is claimed in the afterlife (Hankey, 2017).

In search of a truly rational answer, which dispenses with faith, Leibniz subscribes to the argument that goes back to Saint Augustine, according to which evil does not have an existence of its own, and must be understood as the deprivation of good: there is nothing efficient about the form of evil because it consists of deprivation (Wilson, 2017). For Le...