St Augustine of Hippo condoned god evil

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Christianity says that evil is not a thing or power. It is good in the wrong place. It is a failure to be properly good. It says that since God makes all things there is no such thing as an evil power for God cannot make evil. They say that when cancer ravages you, that its existence is good. Its power and strength is good. It is just good in the wrong place but good in itself for God makes it. So one cannot accuse God of making evil.

St Augustine of Hippo preached the excuse that God is not to blame for evil for evil isn't a power and some dare to trust every word he wrote after his silliness. Yet this was the eccentric who said that he would not believe in the gospels if the Church did not tell him to believe. Yes the Church says he only meant that its authority gave him good reasons to see the gospels were true. Don't believe that for he could believe in the gospels for scholars rather than the Church were saying it. What he meant was that he was going to believe only what the Church ordered him to believe and that was enough for him. What would you think of a man who said that he wouldn’t believe in God had it not been for the authority of his parents? He is just saying he prefers to let other people think for him and that is laziness.

The Handbook of Christian Apologetics defends the excuse in page 132 and thankfully it confesses that if evil is a being, real or an entity like a power or force then the idea of an all-good God is decisively refuted. So far so good, but there is this problem. A God who withholds power to let evil happen is no different from one that makes evil forces. He is still trying to cause harm. It follows then that whether evil is a power or not, God is still not all-good.

Anyway, Augustine tried to save himself from the silliness of his doctrine about the nature of evil by asserting at times that evil was not just the absence of good but a privation of good that ought to be present. Augustine wants Christians to claim the right to believe that somebody falling off a cliff shouldn't have the power to miraculously slower their fall so that they are safe. So the person being crushed to death on the rocks is more acceptable to him. Yet he teaches that good in the wrong place is a sin or an evil. He wants to restrict the amount of good a person should perceive themselves to be entitled to for then they will see no point in believing in a good God should they see how much good we could and should have but don't have. Augustine believes we should not be able to sprout wings in emergencies for God has made us without this faculty. He chooses to approve of human death and suffering caused by not having this power and for what, a belief - a belief called God!

Augustine said we must be prepared to suffer for doing right and for doing good. If its the only way, then is it the courage in the face of suffering that is good not the suffering? The suffering must be good then if courage is good for there would be no courage without it. Augustine never thought to ask is the courage good when it gets no results and you die? Augustine approves of the suffering because he forbids you to have sex even for a very grave reason with somebody you are not married to. So if you can't have sex for a good reason but can suffer for a good reason even when your reason ends up unfulfilled due to your death the suffering must be good. To say that suffering is good is to deny you know what good is and the theodicy will be no good to you.

Undeniably good and evil have a part in everything we do. Nothing is completely good. We should see that when we do right we have done the most good and the least evil and should not be pretending that it was all good for it was not. When evil is good that is misplaced it will be hard to tell if anything we wish to do is more good than evil. Augustine makes it worse by implying that unhappiness is the mere absence of happiness which is ridiculous. The theodicy does no good. It only serves to give the Christian mind-control tool, God, some ammunition. It blinds you to real goodness.

If I have cancer, I cannot say, "This cancer is the absence of health so it is bad". I cannot say it is bad and that is because when evil is the privation of a good that ought to be present, it follows that I may have been meant to get cancer. It may be good for me to have cancer. Or God may have intended me to have cancer for a good purpose. If somebody slips a pill into my drink that makes me permanently happy this seems to be good. Yet many would say it is a good that is the absence of the good that ought to be present. The good that ought to be present means I should make myself happy by virtuous acts not by a pill. The point is nobody can prove what the good that ought to be present is. When a child is punished, evil is used for the good of the child. You can't describe such evil as the absence of good. When a person cannot say what the good that ought to be present is, what business has that person excusing evil by saying that it is the absence of a good that should be present?

The theodicy proves how much belief in God aims to make us deceive ourselves and use one another. All Augustine has done is compound the callous insults to suffering people offered by his philosophy.

Augustine said there is a significant difference between absence and a lack. A person who can be good but won't be is exhibiting the absence of good which is evil. A person who can't fly like a bird is not exhibiting an absence of good in not having the power to fly like a bird but the lack of the power to fly. You expect a man to be good but not to fly. That is how you tell the difference. Absence has to do somebody not being what they are meant to be. Lack has to do with somebody not being what they are not meant to be. The absence of a good you can be is evil. The absence of a good you cannot be such as having the power to fly like a bird is only a lack not an evil (page 215, OCR Philosophy of Religion for AS and A2).

Augustine would say that a singer losing her singing voice through illness is evil. But somebody not being able to sing is not evil for they never had a singing voice nor was meant to. This implies that it is only evil to not be able to sing if you were made to be able to sing. It presupposes that there is a God who wants you to be a singer and so gave you a singing voice. If you were born with an ugly nose, it must be a sin to fix it.

If you don't believe in the existence of God, you can deny that there is any purpose in having a singing voice or not having one. Thus for you, you won't have to excuse God for not giving you a singing voice and condone this loss. You won't have to demean yourself for a belief.

Suppose as Augustine says God gives you a singing voice for a purpose. What about somebody having a singing voice and being trapped on a miserable desert island where they or nobody else can enjoy it? How could the singing voice be good then? It is only the waste of a gift that somebody who can't sing in the world should have. So if I don't have a singing voice, then my not being able to sing is a deprivation. Augustine cannot say that not being able to sing is fine. He has to admit that it is the absence of a good that should exist.

What gives Augustine the right to say any handicap one has, be it the absence of intelligence, the absence of the power to sing or the absence of the power to lift heavy weights or whatever is fine? Who is he to decide what other people should have or lack? What right has he to glibly say that it is not the absence of a good that ought to exist?

Augustine condones paralysis on the grounds that the person merely has the absence of the power to walk and that this is acceptable for the person was not intended by God or the way he or she was made to be a walker. There is something fascist in a walking man saying things like that. The solutions Christians desperately seek for to overcome proofs of divine evil make them evil themselves.

So evil then is the absence of a good that ought to be present according to Augustine's theory. Ought to Augustine meant what fits the will of God and is commanded by him but ought is more complicated than that. That means then that it is up to men to decide what is evil for they invent God which is evident from the fact that everybody has a different idea of the how and whats of God. Its like a word that everybody uses differently. The truth is, God can’t decide what is right. We have to decide that for ourselves because even if we listen to him it will be our judgment that will make us do that anyway so why not take the short-cut and leave him out? When the God concept is evil for this reason and for many others what sense in trying to save God’s reputation?

Evil is intrinsically irrational. Irrationality is a power in your mind that you create. That is why decent people and decent Atheists make so much of devotion to reason. So evil is stupidity. Christianity says that humans are really the origin of evil in the universe not God. But this makes no sense for stupidity is a power. It’s a bad energy. What is a power cannot be just the absence of something. White is not just the absence of black – it has an identity of its own.