Waste In The Universe -- Evil In The Abstract

[Llwellyn]

If Yahweh is going to kill me, I hope at least he'll enjoy it.  What about you, do you believe that there is any wasted suffering and death in this universe?  If you are going to be touched by "God's righteous decree of deserved death," Romans 1:32, would you prefer that at lease someone got their kicks from it?

 

The Christian says that "justice" rather than Yahweh requires me to suffer.  Christianity, then, proposes a kind of impersonal, inexorable, and universal doom that is ultimate and stands above all persons, even divine persons.  All feeling and desire in this universe, even Yahweh's, would be eclipsed by this mechanical a priori order of waste.  For them, the universe is a place of dissipation, evil in the abstract.  People die and there isn't even someone who can stand over them and gloat.

 

As long as my joy will come to an end, I would like to think that some part of Yahweh's ideals could be met in that transaction.  In the hour of my defeat, there will be some satisfaction to the ideals in which the other person's interests lay.  My suffering should be part of some compromise, even though it doesn't suit me, rather than being part of a total loss, where my suffering would be simply vain and wasted.  It would sadden me to know that I would suffer for all eternity and that suffering was not satisfying the desire of anybody, not even Yahweh!  

 

If I am going to taste the wages of sin, I would at least like to know that Yahweh is pleased by my suffering!  And if Christians experience pleasure from beholding and smelling my burning carcass, even better yet...  The following image of the universe is an improvement on the one contemporary evangelical Christians propose:  "The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked.  So that a man shall say, Verily there is a reward for the righteous: verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth."  Psalm 58:10-11.