This is a good example of an answer to one of the most common reasons sinners give for ignoring God and His goodness.
A man went to a barber shop to have his hair and his beard cut as always.
He started to have a good conversation with the barber who attended him.
They talked about so many things and various subjects. Suddenly, they touched the subject of God. The barber said: “Look man, I don’t believe that God exists as you say.”
“Why do you say that?” asked the client.
“Well, it’s so easy, you just have to go out in the street to realize that God does not exist. Oh, tell me, if God existed, would there be so many sick people? Would there be abandoned children? If God existed, there would be no suffering nor pain. I can’t think of loving a God who permits all of these things.”
The client stopped for a moment, thinking, but he didn’t want to respond so as to cause an argument. The barber finished his job and the client went out of the shop. Just after he left the barber shop he saw a man in the street with a long hair and beard (it seems that it had been a long time since he had his cut, and he looked so untidy).
Then the client again entered the barber shop and he said to the barber:
“You know what? Barbers do not exist.”
“How can you say they don’t exist?” asked the barber.
“I am a barber and here I am.”
“No!” the client exclaimed. “They don’t exist because if they did there would be no people with long hair and beard like that man who walks in the street.”
“Ah, barbers do exist, what happens is that people do not come to me.”
“Exactly!”- affirmed the client. “That’s the point. God does exist, what happens is people don’t go to Him and do not look for Him. That’s why there’s so much pain and suffering in the world.”
Very funny. So the cause of all pain and suffering is people who do not “go to God.” Pull the other one!
You are saying that people who are suffering are guilty. What a terrible thing to say. And it is exactly what the judeo-christian religions teach. You are a sinner. You are born with sin. You must have done something wrong. Yeah, right!
Stop using religion as your cover for supporting the furthering of suffering in the world. At least be man (or woman) enough to admit that you benefit from the inequality and would like nothing more than to see it perpetuated.
Aral
A proud atheist and humanist.
Oh, by the way, let me just state for the record: God does *not* exist. 🙂
Aral,
We all pay the consequences of our acts. Heck I even understand that all the wrong going in my life is because I have made the wrong decisions. I am not hiding behind religion to support the truth that we still in pain because we do not want to go to God. Personally things go worse in my life when I decide to go my own way rather than following God’s way.
The point of the story is that yes there is suffering, but the suffering of others is not made from one day to the next. Things go downhill from years before and poor choices. Let’s take the story for example; a person with long hair wasn’t born with long hair. It took time for the hair to grow. The same is with sin and its consequences. We take the wrong turns and many times not from one day to the next we get the results, sometimes it take a day, some times years, some other times results won’t come until the final judgment. When one day we all will have to face God and give account from our acts. That is why we are invited to come to him right now.
But hey! I am not really good at expressing what I think. I have like that can help me to explain my thoughts and it is in FLASH! :o)
check out this link
Here’s something I posted a little while ago on my blog. I’d recommend that you read this book and try to address the points raised. At least think about them. The issue is one of reason and ethics over belief.
“A very timely book that I recommend to anyone who seeks to understand current issues and how they fit into the larger scheme of things: “What Is Good? The Search For The Best Way To Live” by A. C. Grayling. Here’s an excerpt from the preface:
“I have a point to argue, which is that mankind’s quest for the good has been a struggle between humanism, on the one hand, and religious conceptions of the world, on the other hand. The latter have proved resistant in the face of efforts by the former to free not just the imagination but the very life of man from the authority of religious world views, whether in the classical epoch, the Renaissance, or the eighteenth century and since. The durability of religious views might be variously explained, but one main historical reason is that most people are naturally superstitious and insufficiently reflective, and that religious hierarchies have been successful in getting political power or at least influence, as demonstrated by Christianity through most of its history — and as Islam likewise, and contemporary fundamentalists of various kinds in India, Israel and the United States.
As these remarks more than hint, the point I make is a partisan one. My claim is that most human progress has occurred in the face of religious reaction, and that most human suffering other than that caused by disease or other natural evils has been the result of religion-inspired conflict and religion-based oppression. This is an unhappy fact, but one that is overwhelmingly attested by the evidence of history. My hope is that this sketch of the search for the good will help some, perhaps even many, to see afresh what is at stake in the broad opposition of perspectives between humanistic enlightenment and traditional religion in their debates about the best life for humankind.
. . . For six or seven centuries from the height of classical Athens to the last flourishing of the Antonine dynasty in Imperial Rome, thinking about the good life was premised on principles which, as the following pages show, were fundamentally those of enlightenment and humanism, so nameable not just because they are the source of intellectual attitudes which bear those labels in later times (the Renaissance and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment), but because that is exactly what they were in themselves.
Then, for a period more than twice as long, the Western world — for most of that time restricted to Europe — lay under the ideological hegemony of Christianity, which, although it adopted and adapted much from the ethical thought of classical antiquity, also flatly rejected most of its bases in favour of a quite different view, namely that the source of value lies outside the world, embodied in the commands and requirements of a personal deity.
Since about AD 1400 — which is to say, in the six centuries up to the present — the project of enlightened humanism has been fighting back against this theistic transcendentalism, which, imposed on European civilisation from the Orient (it is important to note that the ‘Religions of the Book’ — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — are Oriental faiths), has had a very mixed influence on its development and welfare.
The chapters to come observe the line of this history of six centuries of ancient thought, twelve of Christian hegemony, and then a following six centuries of struggle between the rivival of the former against the latter.”
The book is out now, at least in bookstores in the UK.”