The answer is D

BeCaUsE hE's MyStErIoUs!

- Reincarnated as the Christian God!??
This is, entirely unironically, the central tenant of the Catholic teaching on the subject.
It really does just boil down to "You can't adjudicate the morality of the Divine." And, for the most part, its a line of reasoning that hierarchical social structures condition us to accept. God is just the CEO of the Universe. If you accept that your boss at the toxic waste and murder machines factory is Beyond Good and Evil, believing it about God is downright trivial.
- One of the earliest forms of copium
- I tell this story a lot but as an escaped Xtian the thing that marks the moment I was fully off board with the church was hearing those magic words 'God works in mysterious ways'. I had heard it so many times because of course they say it all the freaking time but that was the time it really clicked for me that I won't be getting any real answers and can stop pretending.

"He gave us free will" aka he doesn't want to.

Yeah I'm not religious but this is it. Christians believe free will is "more good" than the bad things it leads to are bad.
- The problem for Christianity is that it doesn't fit with how God is presented. He intervenes in things from time to time. Destroyed civilization with a flood because he didn't like what people were doing with free will.
  You might be able to take a Deist stance and make it work. However, then you're implicitly saying there's no evidence for God, and are one step out from agnostic atheism. You could say God changed his mind and saw the flood as a bad idea, but fundamentalists are never going to go for that one.
  For that matter, the free will explanation isn't even universal among Christians.

A: He can't.

Dude forgot to add himself as admin.

this user does not have sudo access
this incident will be reported.
- https://xkcd.com/838/
He's up there raging because his own system hit him with the ol "new password can't be the same as the old password"
First thing you do is enable MFA these days... dude got a new phone and forgot the password to the old account.

According to Isiah 45:7 it’s C.

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things”

The god the Abrahamists have chosen to worship is a weather and war god. So he is a vengeful dick.

When the Israelites were still polytheistic they worshipped, besides this war god, a sun god and a god of fertility in the Pantheon. Yet they’ve chosen to solely worship the war god. Says a lot about them.

Please let me remake this:

A. He can't, so he is not worthy being worshiped.

B. He doesn't want, so he is not worthy being worshiped.

C. He causes them, so... uhm, actually maybe? Depends, is He doing terrible things to me and my friends, or my enemies?

D. He doesn't exist, so he is not worthy being worshiped.

Side comment - C is obviously excuse to let us do terrible things to them. If You like being evil, surem that do work.
- Except god is a hypocrite and will judge you for it for not following his rules.
- welcome to religion. A tool for the elites to get rubes to do terrible things to their enemies while paying you for the privilege.

I don’t know. At this point I’m leaning toward C.

Me too, but only because I very strongly lean toward "god was created by man" rather than the other way around.
Really if you believe that God created the universe, then C logically follows.
But if we were created in the image of God, then B is very likely, too. Just look at what we do to characters that we create in The Sims.
- Basically, the bibble confirms it's C.

Growing up as an agnostic atheist, I loved the Epicurean argument. Now as an adult, I feel compelled to ask the definitions of the words Good, Evil, and God before talking about things.

I think most of the arguments surrounding these topics involves complex use of metaphors and abstract concepts that people can spend lifetimes defining, but are happy to argue about in a short form without a mutually agreed definition.

Yeah, it's that. I'm a Christian, but I have atheist close friends, and I love our debates, but it's because we respect each others enough to accept and recognise that we use the words differently. It's generally not the case on the net.
The Epicurian argument is strong only if you have a very broad definition of all-powerfulness. A definition that classical Christian theology doesn't have, as it recognizes a lot of logical limitations. All-powerfulness is the capacity to do everything possible. So yes, the Christian God is limited.
One of these logical limitations is: God can't create anything free without allowing their creation to do thing that they disapprove, thus God being good, they can't create freedom without accepting the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good. God chose freedom over perfection, and it's not a human.thing, but a cosmological one.
So yeah, this is a strong argument only of you are already convinced, but it's generally the case on religious matters. I tend to tink that the only purely rational position is true agnosticism, but sometimes for important things you have to make choices without being sure. That's why I'm an agnostic theist.
- One of these logical limitations is: God can't create anything free without allowing their creation to do thing that they disapprove, thus God being good, they can't create freedom without accepting the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good. God chose freedom over perfection, and it's not a human.thing, but a cosmological one.
  What I don't get is - didn't God create the necessity of evil for freedom to exist, just like he created everything else? He could have chosen to create the concept of freedom such that it still doesn't allow for evil, but for some reason didn't choose to do so, right?
  Or is God bound by rules from an even higher power?
- the existence of evil, which is not a thing per se, but the absence of good
  ...what? The absence of good is indifference. Evil takes effort, you have to work at it. It's the difference between trying to help the homeless, ignoring the homeless, and burning down tent cities.
- This also depends on once definition of freedom.

E. Invented by humans

That follows from D.
- Yes, he didn't exist until he was invented. 😁🫠

God creates dinosaurs. God destroys dinosaurs. God creates man. Man destroys God. Man creates dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs eat man. Woman inherits the earth!

He caused it/allowed it to happen because he wants to test YOUR faith and make sure you're cool with needless pain and suffering so long as it means you get to go to heaven/avoid an eternity of torture.

we are just bald monkeys, stop pretending otherwise

go fuck a banana!

I make my room filthy and dangerous every day. My roommates are getting hurt!

Why doesn't my mom clean it up for me? She certainly could. Does she want me to live in squalor? Perhaps she MAKES the mess!

IDK, maybe mom doesn't exist.

Does your mom...
Put eye parasites that blind children in your room?
Force you to eat and breathe through the same tube?
Give you horrible cancers?
Put drugs in your room and then get mad when you use them?
Tell you to love her unconditionally after doing all of these things?
So anything bad that ever happens to you is your own fault?
Do you just walk around through life assuming cancer patients did something awful to deserve their disease? Cause that's the only way this analogy makes any sense...
- Everyone dies saban. Are you saying that if everyone doesn't die peacefully in their sleep, and unless no one ever gets bruised or cut or hurt or harmed in any way, it means there is no god?
No one claims your mom is omnipotent and omnipresent you eggplant. And if they did, you’d think nothing of such a ridiculous claim. Which is what a rational person would do.
- I understand you think I'm a member of the nightshade family. Cool.
Your mother, the allpowerful being.
- It's an analogy.

there is a fucked up fifth answer that works for theists, E. terrible things don't exist

F. He's testing us
- F is just B with rose tinted glasses.

It's all a test. If you can't put up with horrible shit while being alive, how you gonna become an angelic slave and sing happy songs for eternity?

In Buddhism, the concept of God as a powerful creator is not central. The question of "why terrible things happen" is addressed through the teachings of karma and interdependence. Terrible things occur due to the collective actions aka karma of beings, influenced by ignorance, attachment, and aversion, rather than a deliberate act of a deity. Thus, from a Buddhist perspective, the most aligned answer would be that terrible things happen because of the causes and conditions created by sentient beings themselves, rather than any of the options listed.

Think about the following:

In the medieval ages, people were popping out 5-15 children on average. Child mortality was extremely high, with roughly 80% of children dying before they were 5 y/o.

Now, what should god do (if they existed)? Let the children life and cause overpopulation, which leads to famine and disaster, or kill a lot of children? There's literally no solution.

That was until contraceptives were found. And interestingly, contraceptives exist at roughly the same time that antibiotics exist, thus preventing both high child-mortality and overpopulation.

Funny ideas but completely wrong. Contraceptives existed throughout the human history. And antibiotics were discovered a bit later than Haber dealt with overpopulation problem.
- Yeah bro, you make a sheep intestine condom and get back to us on the efficacy

It's just that the model of divinity as an lawful authority is complete bullshit, and has nothing to do with spirituality

Their logic would be

C

If something bad happens to someone it’s because they deserved it

“But they were a good person”

They were going to do something terrible

“I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the LORD do all these things“
Isiah 45:7 King James Version

It's not that deep:
1- In the case of natural evils: C. God causes them, but they are morally neutral from the spiritual perspective. If what matters is salvation and glory to God it doesn't change anything if you died by tornado or by anything else, and inevitable death might even be a net positive individually and to others (Ind: the person might repent about something, social: seeing the frailness of life leads to less self love, while increasing compassion)
2- In the case of human caused evils: B with an asterisk. Given that He has imposed upon Himself the restriction of respecting free will, He won't stop people from doing evil deeds, even though He wants them to do good and He can make them do it. Why God chooses to do it like this is a mistery and doesn't really matter, but it seems to be because He wants people to freely choose to worship Him.

God causes them, but they are morally neutral from the spiritual perspective.
source?
- Imagine asking for a source on a philosophical argument lmao
  "Yeah, no, Descartes, I'll read it when it's peer reviewed. Yes in LaTeX please"

E. You deserved it

hear me out.

what if it's actually B and C?

Then it is not worthy of worship.
C sort of implies B or A. If he causes them then he doesn’t prevent them because either he can’t or he doesn’t want to. It would be kind of weird if he caused a terrible thing and then prevented it before it happened.

Fucking Abrahamic religions

Pretty sure every pope is a multimillionaire (or at least lives exactly like one) without having to answer this question 🫤

...because your tithing is too small. Impenetrable defense ain't free!

So for the sake of a thought experiment:

in this thought experiment B or C or both is the case:

what is the best course of action?

comply with regulations and hope to get on the good side or suffer the consequences of the alternative

worship doesn't require benevolence. fear keeps people in line just as well.

pretty sure thats the case for many religious people. telling you the god isn't "good" would upset the rules, so why would they

I’m not necessarily a theist, but this overused argument is flawed. It could be that terrible things happen because, for whatever reasons that could be incomprehensible to our teeny human brains, these terrible things happening are necessary to serve a greater good or purpose for the long run.

What that purpose could be, I have no friggen clue. But humanity has near zero understanding of the universe beyond us (I’m talking about the answers to fundamental questions; why are we here? Do we have a purpose for existence? Etc) and to claim that there is 100% nothing existing beyond ourselves is just as ignorant as claiming there is some personalized God directing everything. We have no fucking clue what’s out there, and anything else is the ego talking.

In such a case as you describe, this god either:
A) Would not desire faith, as it has concerns far grander than whatever some malformed ape thinks about it.
Or
B) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has the capacity to reveal these machinations in exchange for this obeisance, and chooses to watch us suffer and still expects us to thank it for our suffering.
Or
C) It would not be worthy of faith, because it has decided to test us, like some cosmic Jigsaw. Fuck that.
I hold with Stephen Fry: if I were to discover that god exists after death, my only response would be "how dare you". If it did exist, it would not be an entity worthy of our faith, let alone love or admiration.