Secular Theodicy

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Bottom line: A lot of "evil" may originate from religion itself, rather than being suppressed by it.

No, I don't. If two people are starving, and one finds food, then eats it all himself while letting the other person continue to starve, that's evil -- acting on one's own selfish interests without regard to the needs of others.

People in America and Europe (Theist and Atheist alike) throw away tons of food per person each year, while people in third-world countries starve to death every day. Wouldn't you agree that this is evil?

Your example certainly outlines an important problem that needs solving, to be sure-- but I frankly think it's a bit myopic to frame it as being wholly the result of the progress of Western society. The issue is far more complex than that. If you're going to do that, you also have to factor in all of the genuine altruism exhibited among Westerners as well, in the form of aid organizations that have made it their goal to improve conditions and fix what is broken in the third world. At the same time as the wealth of the West can be deemed a source of evil, it can also be seen as having greater potential for good.

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

By this line of reasoning, any country under Sharia law should be a utopian paradise

No, you misconstrued the logic. What I was saying is that most religions have beliefs of punishment that transcends mortality (I.E Hell). Sharia would not even come close to fulfilling this category, as it is a code of law developed to punish the living.

Sharia is indistinguishable from the religious statements of the afterlife mentioned in the Quran and the hadith. It is the same thing, just different verses.

eternal damnation is not a powerful deterrence of evil when seen in the context of what atrocities religion itself is responsible for.

For sure. That line how religion is something that can make otherwise good people do bad things.

What are you talking about, Muslims believe in eternal damnation they call it jahannam.



That is true; people have committed many atrocities in the name of their religion. However, most of these acts were perversions of original doctrine. I never said that religion alone is enough to stifle crime or end violence. Ideally, you need law, environment, and religion working in (separate) harmony to reduce violence.

Except in Islam, where it *is* original doctrine...

Well, that is a debated issue amongst historians. Some claim that peace was preached towards non-believers and criminals, but from what I have read on early Islam I would be inclined to agree with you. Of course, that does not make all Muslims intolerant or violent.

If you want to talk about the fact that humans have not controlled their numbers, to the point that the future existence of life on earth is now threatened, you can look for explanations in our cleverness outstripping our reflectiveness; if you want to explain human cruelty against other life forms, you can try the neotenous nature of our evolutionary path; if you want to figure out why a specific human has turned mass murderer, you can look into genetics & that person's childhood (frequently horrendous); if you ask why our sociopolitical institutions are not more humane, you can investigate the question whether greed alone is a sufficient rule for human society: But there is absolutely no necessity to invite theologians to the table.