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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/23770280
It's a fake quote. Epicurus lived in a polytheistic society. He didn't say these things about one god, he said it about all the gods. This quote here is a localisation by Hume which erases Epicurus' paganism for a Christian audience.
Your atheist meme is still pushing Christian biases.
Which is funny because as far as I know none of the pagan gods are presented as omnipotent or omnibenevolent. Works good applied on the Christian god though
Yeah, Epicurus wasn't making any kind of huge atheistic point. He was just exploring the Greeks' relationship to their religion. Hume is the one who co-opted and misquoted him to serve an anti-christianity agenda that didn't even exist when Epicurus lived.
Your atheist meme is still pushing Christian biases.
Oh no better stop using this meme then!
There are older texts that explore the same questions, even before Greek polytheism. The "dialogue between a man and his god" and the "poem of the righteous sufferer" are Mesopotamian texts from the second millennium BCE that basically say the same thing (why does my god permits my suffering when I pray so hard?), and yes, it was already a polytheistic world view, but the question still remained why a god could allow their devout followers to suffer. Even when only accounting for a God's specific domain, like sickness or nightmares, rather than total omnipotence.
There's no problem with Humes reframing the question for absolute omnipotence when that's the zealotry the people in his time or in our time are confronted with. You can't shift the blame of the Christian bias when this question is a response to those who claim that their god is superior and infallible.
Hume could have quoted Epicurus as saying "the gods" instead of "God". It would have been more honest. Hume misquoted Epicurus as though he was a Christian.
Monotheistic religions did exist and were well known to them though
God as in the omniscient prime mover was a philosopical god in contrast to the Olympians and chthonic deities (Not to be confused with the Cthonian deities) who were sustained by the temples for commoners.
I can't speak to Epicurus, but Socrates' charges of impeity and corrupting the youth with perverse ideas were at least partly to do with showing the philosophical theist positions that were antithetical to devotion to the common ministries.
It's much the way only scientists and deep academics in the 20th century were openly atheist. The rest of us skeptics were members of liberal ministries, and may not have gone to church much.
The more I think about it, the more I think that if there is a god that they must have created the world and then left us alone because no benevolent God, like the Christian God, would ever let the world suffer as much as it has, letting their creations destroy everything in site without massive repercussions long before now.
Or maybe the creator just wouldn’t take us all that seriously, like a 14 year old putting a sim in a room with no exit, a fireplace, and a pile of furniture in front of said fireplace. It is only a game.
We could be just one little work of art in a room full of old works.
I mean, we tend to think of the universe as an endless canvas. It could just be some finished piece that the gods don’t even look at.
Maybe they watch our suffering so they can write their plays from it. They have no stakes, so they watch us to learn.
I mean, we’re the ones suffering. We’re the ones looking for some good luck and praying we don’t die before we get our children raised. Of course that is important to us because we’re the ones crying when it doesn’t all work out.
Maybe god/the gods don’t care because it is of no consequence to them.
Of course I’m just playing with thought. I am not a religious man. I happen to think that all of this was just a big, happy, sad, ugly, beautiful, wonderful accident.
If there was a God and it was an actual conscious entity, how could any human ever comprehend the motivations or intentions of such an entity. It can start again from scratch in 6 days - it's not an ecologically constrained being.
It might be like a fighting dog trainer - the trainer might like it, feed it , take it for walks, abuse and traumatise it and so on, or it might not - just like God might. But after it loses it's last fight, they can just get a new one.
God might care, but has no reason to. He could just as well be fucking around for a laugh. Or doing some scientific experiment, or fish tank, or it's just an art project to show off to break the ice at parties. No human could ever know.
So it's just not worth wasting time thinking about - unless you're charismatic enough to disempower the charlatans and demagogues who do claim to know the will of god. If that is the case, good luck to you.
Benevolent? Dude killed his own son. That isn’t benevolent by any definition of the word.
If you see death as a good thing, it could be benevolent
Damn! I wonder if this Epicurus guy has a mastodon account!
checks date
WELP!
Well, this quote is not attested in any of the known works of Epicurus. This particular version was first printed in The Heretic's Handbook of Quotations: Cutting Comments on Burning Issues compiled by Charles Bufe in 1992. So Mastodon might be back on the table.
I assume a material, godless world, but most theistic possibilities fall into the malevolence category.
It's a big category. It includes:
In fact, the problem of evil is only a problem to a specific set of theistic models. We just happen to like those models because we get to be special.
The horror of nihilism is that we humans aren't special. That nothing is special is incidental. We're just that self-centered.
Jonah was in the fish. But you're right about Job being a plaything.
Fixed!
In regards to, "whence cometh evil?":
This question has nagged at human consciousness for as long as we have known evil and suffering. David Hume, the Scottish Enlightenment thinker attributes this phrasing of the question to the Greek philosopher Epicurus. If God is both able and willing to prevent evil, then why does evil exist?
Something something free will, something something...
Something about natural disasters, Lisbon 1755, etc