You're comparing apples and oranges. A tournament is a voluntary competition of people who accept that they have the potential to lose. Life is not a voluntary competition, it is something forced upon us, since we do not choose to be born. Therefore the comparison is not only problematic but fallacious on the grounds of it being an inadequate analogy.
Well, you don't have to compete, but you are on a team, even if it is your own.
Such is life.
You can't suggest that I am trying to make an absolute claim here. I never claimed to be God and I never claimed to have the capacity to judge absolutely. But in terms of practicality, there is such a thing as making a tentative thesis that suffering loss of things and people is necessary since it is a necessary quality of life and goodness to suffer death and evil to understand life and goodness more fully. But the suffering of theft or murder is not the same as suffering necessary loss of things and people by temporal limitations upon their lifespans. When one is violated by another, the learning curve, so to speak, is affected differently.
So, the question is, how much must humans suffer before we change our ways and focus on preventing our suffering?
Think of all pain as a lesson. We learn such things are wrong when they hurt. So how much must we hurt, before we as a race, as a people, change and stop doing what hurts us?
We posses in our own abilities the power to end, or at the very least, alleviate a vast amount of our suffering. As such, the suffering
we could prevent, would fall into the category of Unnecessary, whereupon the suffering that would require Gods divine intervention might be absolutely necessary for our survival.
I could be mistaken in suggesting there is unnecessary suffering, especially considering that a common translation of dukkha in Buddhism is suffering. But that translation is a bit mistaken, since life is not suffering perse, but unsatisfactoriness and unease. We never feel completely satisfied because of our initial clinging to phenomena as persistent and permanent in some fashion. At best I can claim there is suffering that is excessive and motivated by vices as opposed to virtues. A person committing genocide can affect a person to see how terrible genocide and murder are, but the person that committed genocide will suffer the fruits of their action, the "karma" in some sense, if you will.
The problem of evil exists because of a difficulty in the monotheistic worldview to determine anything as evil in and of itself. Evil commonly is regarded by Christians as a privation of good, so technically any evil thing is also by nature good, since it cannot but exist if it wasn't partially good. In which case, theodicy is little more than a way to reduce everything to a form of doublethink with the physical world. The physical world is evil only insofar as it derails from the "Creator's" will. But the Creator's will by nature is inscrutable in its fullness, so any attempt to conform to the Creator's will is an exercise in futility and only leaves one feeling more anxious, suffering dukkha, if you will. This seems to me a better formulation of the problem of evil in some sense.
By the creators allowance.
The fact that you think you need to enlighten me by words already seems to present a problem, since words are only partially capable of changing people's perspectives and their understandings. Experience is more primary to how we change our paradigms. You deny the problem of evil because you already insist that there is no real evil that is an absolute in any sense, since you insist everything evil is also by nature good since it is created by God.
You are engaging in the discussion, ergo, we are enlightening each other, are we not. And it seems from my view that there are things you are not grasping, so I am correcting you.
With Buddhism as I understand it, there is at least the admittance that evil is more significant and at least has value as a complement to good and not as a scapegoat to further ennoble goodness in and of itself as a property of God's essence.
The dualism in Christianity is ironically more what appears to be an exercise in subtraction, using evil to advance some greater good, whereas a nondualistic perspective suggests that evil and good multiply together to generate something that transcends our initial judgments of certain things as absolutely good or evil, but instead judge them as existing in a dynamic web, just as we exist alongside them.
Pain, is a way humans learn not to do something. It is a means of survival that we can suffer so we learn what is healthy and what is detrimental to us.
Our suffering as a whole, should be a warning sign that we as humans need to change, not a means by which to blame God for our ill fate.
God has made it clear that until every knee bows, every tongue confesses, and we as a whole learn our lesson and humble ourselves and accept him as our god and we as his people, we will suffer for our own ego, pride, and sins, right here, on earth.
The argument is only emotional if you argue that our emotions, intuitions, sympathy and empathy for the sufferings of others against excessive evil are pointless because we cannot think for ourselves. That is where our impasse exists.
The argument is an Emotional one. As you can see, I just invalidated it on a logical means above.
But, that won't change people's minds. Emotion determines weather you look at what I said and pause, think about it and open yourself up to it, or reject it at sight.
God Bless
