I've been skimming through John Loftus' new book and I read Bart Ehrman's book on theodicy this summer, so the problem of evil has been on my mind for a while.  It's occurred to me that Christians waste an inordinate amount of time on this issue.  While I've no desire to give you guys any ammunition, I also think it's a dead issue, especially where Christian beliefs are concerned.  I invite everybody to critique my logic here, because the odds are I got something wrong.  Still, I think this is pretty strong, so here goes.

I'll start by saying that Christians pay the riddle of Epicurus and its variants way too much attention.  When it comes down to it, there would be no concept of theodicy without it, but you fret over it needlessly.  For one thing, it's irrelevant to your conception of God, and for another, I'm an atheist and I've got no business defining how God should or should not behave.  There.  Bye-bye, Epicurus (don't worry.  I don't need him).

The thing is, the best reason for me or anyone else to believe in the Christian concept of salvation is that I am born doomed to an eternity of torment that I cannot begin to imagine in my Earthly life.  And I completely deserve every last microsecond of it.  I have no defense for my depraved behavior (I'll point out here that if you claim to be a Christian and you don't believe in Hell, you're a coward and a flake).  There is absolutely no way that I can keep the Ten Commandments perfectly like Jesus did.  Just feeling lust or rage in my heart is enough to qualify me for the Lake of Fire and I feel the former nearly constantly.

Given that sobering fact, any suffering I or any other creature might experience on this mortal coil is a joke.  It's a drop in the ocean.  It's less significant than a single lepton in the entirety of the universe, because Hell is forever.  And since I've earned the torments of Hell merely by being born, then I've definitely earned all of my stubbed toes and sore throats and early morning wettings of the bedclothes.  This is of course, nothing new.  A theodicy that suggests that "evil" is merely punishment is probably the most basic form, though woefully incomplete, because there is also the possibility of the suffering of the innocent.

Now, you don't actually have to believe in mortal innocence, but chances are you do, in some form or another.  If you believe that there's such a thing as an age of reason (the age at which a child becomes responsible for his own morality) as many Christians do, or that animals, not being partakers in the Sin of Adam, can be purely innocent, then it is surely a contravention of the goodness of God for a young child to be raped and murdered or for a squirrel to twitch for interminable minutes on the road with a broken spine until blood loss claims him.  What good God would allow such apparent injustice to occur?

Clearly, the very same God who understands the concept of Hell better than any living being.  He really does know how bad it is.  Aside from willing the place into being, He actually went there, following His own torture and crucifixion.  And that's the whole point, in fact.  When God showcases the suffering of the innocent to us, He's actually reminding us of the death of His son and the salvation that it brought; He's running a marketing campaign.  Right?  That's a perfectly good explanation.  He's even giving the pagan in his far away village a clue of what awaits in eternity if one does not accept His mercy.

You can say that no scripture specifically points this out, but why would you?  Every theodicy has to be teased and prodded out of scripture to some extent, so given enough time, a clever person or persons could easily create one based on this concept.  Furthermore, as the atheist in the debate, I'm the one who's supposed to demand the supremacy of reason over faith, and the above is a damn good reason for the suffering of the innocent, at least within the confines of your own mythology.  Even if it's cruel, it's infinitely less cruel than just sending me to Hell without every last possible scrap of warning, right?

While I'd like to snidely point out that two thousand years worth of Christians, supposedly guided by the Holy Spirit, have yet to find an answer this satisfying (if anyone of the old masters proposed exactly this, I yield embarrassed--I haven't encountered this explanation before and it's new to me), I think this is quite likely premature.  The real reason why I wrote this is start cutting theodicy out of our discussions (which I think we do pretty well, but those who would bring it up remain in our midst).  We atheists really don't need it.  We have perfectly good reasons for why suffering exists and the other guys have to fumble with it and I'd hate to waste their time with something silly. To put it simply, I don't care about the ultimate source of evil in the world.  I care about the fact that a conception of the universe can be arrived at based on a hearsay of a hearsay of a hearsay and upon personal experiences that I didn't have.  Seriously people, what kind of illiterate bumpkins do you consider us to be?  

Good night.