[zeek]

The problem with your dismissal of the free will argument is that it was a result of the exercise of man's free will that God chose to take restraints off of the "natural" and even off of the already existing evil in the form of Satan and his followers.

You seem to be onto something there, but there’s a problem. If evil already existed, then it existed before man exercised his free will. Therefore, such evil is not the result of free will. So the free will argument does not explain it.

Our problem in deciphering the issues surrounding God and evil is that we constantly presume that a particular characteristic of God is overriding in all ways, especially in the ways that we would want them to be overriding.

So God is righteous, but we demand that love override it in its entirety.

It isn’t that we presume, it’s that these characteristics are “omni” ;that is, absolute, total, ultimate characteristics. So the problem doesn’t begin with our presumption. The problem begins with the very definition of God. How can you have absolute power and absolute goodness without one “over-riding the other? That’s the problem that is embedded in Epicurus’ questions.

Yet we want God to exercise his righteousness on those we see as willfully evil.

In other words, we want God to decide everything in the way we would.

Not necessarily. The problem is still there if we want God to decide it in anyway conceivable that preserves his absolute attributes.

It's a little like the people who holler about having to submit to searches before getting on airplanes, but will blame the government if something happens on an airplane because a terrorist made it through security. We want God to exercise the judgment he has reserved for the end times. And we want it to be the way we would have it be.

An omniscient and omnipotent security guard wouldn’t have to search people, she would know what they are carrying and could dispose of the terrorist immediately. Your analogy seems to fall apart.

I would suggest that if we are to love our neighbor as ourselves, we don't have a very healthy love for ourselves.

I don’t see how that is relevant or true.

You may not have spoken on any particular one of these issues. But th idea is the same. We want God in our image. We don't want a God that is beyond our comprehension. We want to both comprehend him, and somehow prove that he thinks just like we do and therefore whatever we think is right is . . . well . . . right.

I think we want a God who is better than us. I agree God is beyond our comprehension because how can we comprehend that an omnipotent and perfectly good God permits evil? That brings us back to Epicurus’ questions.

We don't want a God who decides to exercise restraint with respect to how nature behaves. How genetics, environment, and evil work to produce poverty, sickness, and more evil. Or how the greedy manage to keep getting more while we righteous ones keep getting less. Solomon said it best. Life is what it is. There is good and evil. There is grief and happiness. Serve your God in it all.

Right, well, the existence of evil seems to be incompatible with the claims made for God that he is both omnipotent and omni-benevolent. I don't see there is a rational solution to the problem. If there is none, then an irrational a leap of faith is necessary if we are to accept God as advertized.