...It Builds Character

Hellooo.

Crash course on freewill and evil and all that jazz coming up...

Okay, so the freewill defence is the Christian excuse for pretty much everything. While an atheist might question why God lets evil things happen to us, Christians just dismiss the whole thing by saying that God has to let these things happen because he granted us freewill.

The basic idea is that, if God stopped a man stabbing another man, it would remove the mans freewill to commit moral evil. If evil didn't exist, people wouldn't have the choice between good and evil and hence no freewill.

And this magnificent argument covers Christians backs for natural evil too - if there was no threat of natural evil and everything was predictable, people wouldn't be able to learn from the consequences of natural evil. Freedom not only means choice, but also the consequences of choice. Things being to predictable would remove the value from life. The unexpected gives us the chance of total disaster and total triumph.

Now then, Karma. It's usually a philosophy found in Eastern religions like Buddhism, Sikhism and Hinduism. Karma's basically the law of consequences - if you do something bad, then you have to deal with the consequences, and if you do something good, then you get to reap the benefits. These consequences might come tomorrow, next week or in your next reincarnation. If you're especially good, you might get a reward or get to develop certain qualities of your soul.

The idea of Karma and evil is different for the 3 main Eastern religions, so here they are below;

• Hinduism - the challenge is for everyone to achieve moksha and escape the cycle of reincarnation. This is done by not building up any karma, and your soul isn't reborn anymore, so suffering and evil don't matter to you.
• Sikhism - this is super simple... doing good deeds leads to good rewards and doing bad things leads to bad consequences.
• Buddhism - the whole point of being a faithful Buddhist is trying to live a life free of desire, hate and delusion and reach true enlightenment so karma can be left behind.

Now, as I mentioned in my previous post, sometimes we need evil in our lives to help us learn and become better people. We can also become better people through evil by helping others. There's loads of examples of this, like Mother Theresa, the Buddhist monks trying to get rid of oppressive rules in Tibet, Gandhi getting rid of social inequalities in India, fighting discrimination like Mandela did in SA and loads more, like the Salvation Army, Muslim Aid and caring for the needy in the locality of the gurdwara like Sikhs.

Basically, evil brings out the best in people because it gives us all opportunities to over come it and help others in need.

I'm really bored of typing right now, so I'm just going to bullet point all the arguments for the need of evil and suffering -

• People would be selfish if there wasn't people suffering and in need
• Suffering brings home to well-off people how lucky they are and inspires them to help
• Buddhists see suffering as part of life that has to be dealt with
• Jesus experienced all the pain and suffering that humans experience, so God understands suffering
• Muslims have zakat (when they give a percentage of their annual salary).

Wow, thank goodness for that.

Fingers crossed for a good result in RS like last year!