The Rebel, a couple of comments

"When the personal god begins his reign, rebellion assumes its most resolutely ferocious aspect and pronounces a definite no...From this point of view, the New Testament can be considered an attempte to answer, in advance, every Cain in the world, by painting a figure of God in softer colors and by creating an intercessor between God and Man.  Christ came to solve two major problems, evil and death, which are precisely the problems that preoccupy the rebel.  His solution consisted, first, in experiencing them.  The man-god suffers, too -- with patience.  Evil and death can no longer be entrirely imputed to Him since He suffers and dies."(pg.32)

Christ justifies ways to Man by suffering them Himself.  But then God has to justify His was to Man and to Himself in the form of Christ.  Does this mean that God has so little control over suffering that He must suffer Himself?  But then there is an apocolyptic hope for the end of suffering, but what about the meantime?

I want to look back at the previous post about theodicy broadly considered.  Evil can be considered a process of education and/or progress both for individuals and societies.  For Hegel, God goes through a 'logic' of history where evil is part of the unfolding of ultimate rationality, and all these evils are themselves part of this rationality. For Marx evils have a specific cause which will largely be eliminated by the end of history.  All of these attempt to explain, if not justify the history, of evil.  Of the accounts in this post, only Marx does not suffer an outright contradiction.  Hegel has to explain the rationality of evil in History, and I am not satisfied logically by Camus' presentation of the solution of the problem of evil in Christianity.

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