Pope John Paul II: The Suffering And The Mystery Of Evil

At the same time, suffering remains always a mystery to understand. But suffering could be understood when it is connected with redemption. For Aquinas, evil is the privation of good, as is seen above, there immediately arises the question whether is it absolute privation? If it is absolute privation how could it bring something good out of evil? Pope John Paul II says that evil is privation, but it becomes not as the total privation or total absence of good.

God gave us free will and we can therefore choose whether or not we enter into a loving relationship with our creator. However, with free will comes the ability to reject God and make wrong choices. I believe this theodicy rightly emphasises that much of the evil and suffering we see in the world is the responsibility of man and not God. Each of us makes choices every day which can ultimately result in our own or others suffering, whether we see that suffering or not. Free will theodicies conclude that it is man who needs to be justified and not God.

Guilt builds up within Macbeth due to the actions his unchecked ambition convinces him to follow through with, which is why Macbeth experiences a heroic downfall. The transgressions made by Macbeth sparked the beginning of his mind becoming clouded with guilt and unease, because Macbeth knew what he was doing was wrong. When members of a society are guilty, we often choose not to confess, but to further our faulty actions. This continuation of our actions is driven by our need to protect ourselves. Humans are not able admit they are at fault; therefore, are overcome by guilt and stray further away from

Humans are naturally evil and deserving of hell because of their failure to reach God’s standard of holiness, the sin they choose to commit, and their sinful nature, making them fully responsible. One must understand how holy God is and how wicked humans are in comparison to understand why we are evil. God is mentioned as “holy, holy, holy” in the Bible (Isaiah 6). In Hebrew culture, repetition marks significance, for ancient Hebrew writing did not have punctuation like exclamation marks. Also, threefold repetition marks completion with a beginning, middle, and end (Patterson, The Use of Three in the Bible).

It seems ridiculous in a world that seek punish upon punish. More in more in the United States of America law enforcement officers are sought to be punished for the way they apprehend violators of the law. Grace as the divine attribute of God bestows worth upon the worthless and deliver unmerited favor to the hopeless. Paul instructed Titus in "saving grace.

Perceiving one’s timidity and limitations, a person tries to handle his own limit by doing such things that adds up his own guilt as well as worsens his fretfulness. This only means that by alienating ourselves to our essential self is a form of sin, with the standpoint of Kierkegaard, in which it magnifies our difficulty by increasing our own doubts, nervousness and anxiety. Through these ideas he analyzes the Christian comprehension of man, as he

Hawthorne chose him to demonstrate a moral throughout the story that sin is not the final verdict and Dimmesdale lives his life trying to fulfill this thought. Dimmesdale is taken along a treacherous path of emotional events and physical punishments which suck the life from his body and soul. Consequently, Dimmesdale cannot choose to live a life free from his sin and folds to become the prisoner of the sin which eventually leads to his death. Conclusively, throughout The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale is seen to be a man of evil, but after extensive research Hawthorne is shown to use Dimmesdale to teach a moral lesson through the effects of sin in order to show the crime is not just a physical experience, but also a mental journey, in which provides a chain of events that are moldable for future

There is not a righteous man on earth who does not possess the proclivity to sin. Given the freedom to do God’s will or his own, man will instinctively choose to pursue his own. “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Prodigal Son” are two such men who soon realize that “The greatest temptations are not those that solicit their consent to obvious sin, but those that offer them great evils masking as the greatest goods” (Merton, Thomas, 1955). Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Apostle Luke reveal the sinful nature and spiritual transformation of their protagonists using conflict, symbolism, and irony. Comparatively, temptation is the root cause of the internal and external conflicts the confronting protagonists in “Young Goodman Brown “and “The Prodigal Son”.

There is not a righteous man on earth who does not possess the proclivity to sin. Given the freedom to do God’s will or his own, man will instinctively choose to pursue his own. “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Prodigal Son” are two such men who soon realize that “The greatest temptations are not those that solicit their consent to obvious sin, but those that offer them great evils masking as the greatest goods” (Merton, Thomas, 1955). Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Apostle Luke reveal the sinful nature and spiritual transformation of their protagonists using conflict, symbolism, and irony. Comparatively, temptation is the root cause of the internal and external conflicts the confronting protagonists in “Young Goodman Brown “and “The Prodigal Son”.

The reader is compelled to identify tyranny, or God’s reign, as bad and Satan’s fight for free will as an enslaved angel, as good. Again, the “evil” entity’s reason for fighting is moral and good. In Paradise Lost, Satan’s reason for rebelling against God is justified because he is not rebelling for the sake of rebelling or spreading chaos and violence, but for the sake of freedom and therefore can be seen as a freedom fighter, rather than a

In the “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” Jonathan Edwards talks about how God is the one who is holding Israelites up from falling down. He believes that if a person was to fell, it would be because God wanted him or her to may be because of their wickedness. Moreover, Bradstreet would agree with him that “time brings down what is both strong and tall” (78). According to Edwards, God is ‘sovereign” and no one is above Him (171). Every wicked man “contrives well for himself, and that his schemes won’t fail,” but God knows it well and does not let them escape from the Hell (173).

All the things which enable a bad man to be effectively bad are in themselves good things (e.g.: resolution or cleverness). Secondly, after reading the New Testament, Lewis explains that Christianity has a Dark Power (an evil spirit who is held to be the Power behind

Everything around us is built of our faith in our senses, and our faith in other people. Without faith we are surrounded by the fear of the known, every neighbour could be planning our death, our senses could be simulated by some machine; and without faith in God, for many people can be the difference between bearing the evil of the world and slipping into the world of oblivion and chaos. Yet is this faith in God rational or not? Mackie thinks not, in his essay “Evil and Omnipotence” he uses the problem of evil in the world to expose the irrationality of God. He shows how, the contradicts of an Omni God makes the belief in such a being irrational.

Evil has been intertwined into our vocabulary from a very young age to describe villains in books and movies. To declare a person evil is to judge only by the acts of evil and nothing else. Thus, no one can be evil for an individual has performed at least one act of kindness in their lifetime Evil is not a spectrum but a lens; it depends on how you look at it. The phrase "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter" is an example of seeing evil through the different lens.

There are people who define evil as a bad vibe, and others define it as a disaster of nature. On the article, “What do we Mean by Evil” Rollo Roming says,” in centuries past, “Evil” was used to describe all manner of ills, from natural disasters to the impulse to do something wrong” He speaks about different ways that people define evil in their own point of view. A tornado destroying half of a town can be called evil done by Mother Nature, and one person robbing a bank can be called evil since crimes are what people define as evil. Dr. Jekyll shows how the evil was always inside of his mind but he never expressed it, instead, he created a monster of himself not letting people find out who was behind that monster.