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Really? Does an earthquake come and devastate Lisbon on a feast day for a reason? Do people get horrible, agonizing diseases for a reason? Why should the grand spiritual plan of a perfect, benevolent being involve kidneystones? There are all kinds of ways people can grow without getting cut down by forces far beyond their control, no especially apparent reasons why so many people should get destroyed in painful ways.
I guess an uncaring deity might say 'it's sink or swim, I gave you access to the tools. Now pick them up or suffer' but that isn't what most people who believe in a plan conceptualize it being.
Yes and yes. There are literally thousands of years of writing on theodicy (i.e. trying to answer the question "Why does God let bad things happen?"). You can disagree with the many proposed answers and explanations, but it's obnoxious when you ask those questions like they're some sort of irrefutable gotcha.
For me personally, amongst the many reasons for why God allows bad things to happen, the biggest one for me is that this life is just a tiny moment in our eternal existence and as awful as it seems within that moment in the long run all that happens in our mortal life will have been less than a blink of an eye in eternity. And the suffering and pain we experience in this life serves a very important purpose in our eternal existence.
I know, I'm well aware. A thousand years of cope is just that, a lot of cope. It's like how the Muslims will have thousands of years worth of discussion about djinns and various spirits, human-djinn halfbreeds, exorcisms and possessions. I'm sure lots of time was spent on this but it's still nonsense. No, you cannot have an omnipotent all loving god in this universe.
This is exactly what I'm talking about, it's undiluted cope. Communists explained all their suffering as necessary to build socialism. But you can't even explain it at all! Where is the benefit in getting your head dashed in by falling rocks at the age of 9 or being left a crippled, mentally retarded zombie drooling and raging at phantoms because of a twisted gene? There is no benefit whatsoever.
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As I said to @Hoffmeister25
You are basically just restating the problem of theodicy. The fact that you think it's a slam dunk against faith shows that you have not really looked into the history of the Christian church, or frankly almost any other religion, more than at a surface level. Theodicy or the problem of evil is the obvious issue with all religious faith. Religious people don't just brush it under the rug and pretend evil doesn't exist. Of course we have thought about this issue deeply, and come up with various answers to it.
No, the problem is that Christians do not understand the universe beyond a surface level. They don't come up with any good answers to theodicy, only cope like 'it's all part of the plan which is totally incomprehensible to us' or 'somehow free will requires this'. Sensible religions don't try to declare the existence of a omnibenevolent, all-powerful deity and then grapple with how dumb that is when it's a ridiculously silly thing to believe. Of course the universe is not run by such a being, that is immediately obvious from all the random torments and trouble dished out. Coming up with a million philosophical epicycles to justify this bizarre doctrine doesn't help at all.
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