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The Problem of Authority
“People abuse or neglect their power when they have it and rebel or become apathetic against it when they don’t.”

In the thrid installment of Jesus Uncensored, we looked at Evil and Suffering. We began by asking the simple question: Why is there evil and suffering in this world?

Every religion or spirituality must come to grips with the question of evil and suffering.
There are 3 main families of answers to this question: Eastern, Scuralist, and Biblical. Rather than finding a common core between these three, the deeper that you go, the more differences that you will find.

Eastern
-Evil and suffering are at the heart of life.
-The world is driven by desire which leads to craving and to attachment.
-Death is not the problem, but rather dying and coming back again.
-There is not hope of a world beyond evil and suffering. There will never be a place or time with peace and justice.
-Rather there is renunciation. Withrawing and detachment. Nirvana is the great removal of personality, freedom from individuality (not freedom to be an individual). The great deathless lake of extinction.
-The desire that drives the cycle is the illusion that we are individual and separate from the rest of reality.
-While doing goods deeds to those who suffering will gain for us good karma, it will also not allow a suffering person to fully pay for their own karma, thus the motivation to seek justice and to bring healing to the broken is very weak in the eastern view.

Securalist
-Takes evil as seriously as the east.
-They fight it and try to make things right.
-The ultimate reality is chance. Time plus chance plus natural.
-As we fight suffering, we fight what is natural in the world and thus we cannot overcome it.
-It is like the parable of the Greek man pushing a stone to the top of a hill only to roll it down and bacdk up again.
-Life is never ending defeat. There is bravery and heroism but a bleekness.
-The average atheists just lives their life enjoying what they have and don’t think deeply about the meaninlessness of life. The great atheists like Camu and Nietzsche thought deeply about these things and came to the place of losing all hope for meaning in life.

Biblical
-Ultimate reality is not impersonal or a chance but a God who is persona, relational and infinite.
-The world of evil and suffering should have been otherwise. it is not how it was designed to be.
-The world will be better again and will be restored to peace and justice, without evil or suffering.
-Suffering and evil is a result of mankind’s revolt against our loving Creator.
-The four aspects of the curse that God brought on creation are related to our relationship with ourselves, others, creation, and God.
-Suffering and evil come to an end as the loving Creator enters his creation and brings restoration and shalom and undoes the broken relationships that have come as a result of the revolt against God.