Examples Of Theodicy In The 21st Century

Trisha Aranyos

ENGL102

Dr. Sideris

February 18, 2018

Absentee God:

Theodicy in the Twenty-First Century

Mass shootings, rape culture, racial strife and natural disasters have become mainstream in the United States. We see it every day in the media; from the most recent shooting in Lakeland, Florida that left seventeen students and faculty members dead, to the #Metoo movement. So, why do these things happen to seemingly good people? The question of theodicy can be narrowed to two differing views: emotional (religious) and logical (scientific). Religion has been around for thousands of years uniting people of different cultures under a common set of beliefs. There are several types of religion, but they can be broken down into three basic

God, according to Christianity, is loving and patient; however, God is also vengeful. This can be seen in Genesis, with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as well as the Great Flood. Sodom and Gomorrah were consumed by fire and brimstone as it was God’s will to punish the inhabitants for their wickedness. In the Great Flood, (Genesis. 6:4-22: Good Leader Edition)

God called unto Noah to build an ark because the world was corrupted and filled with violence and, therefore, must be cleansed by a great flood. Of course, these are stories from the Old Testament. In the New Testament, we see Jesus as the Ying to God’s Yang. God is seen as omnipotent and wrathful, whereas Jesus is the savior, preaching of forgiveness and God’s love. We can concur from Christianity that when bad things happen, we have brought the punishment unto ourselves by not following God’s will but as long as we repent, our sins will be

Freud regarded God as an illusion, based on the need for a powerful father figure, and religion as more or less a teaching tool to inhibit violent impulses in early civilization before science and logic. In Freud’s psychodynamic theory, our behavior is deeply influenced by our unconscious thoughts, impulses and desires. The drive of our unconscious, Freud argued, was sexual and destructive in nature. Therefore, evil is part of the unconscious of all humankind and people could not be cured until their unconscious thoughts were brought to consciousness to gain a better understanding of themselves and their desires. Emile Durkheim was a French sociologist who proposed religion had three functions in society. Religion, he argued, provides social cohesion to social solidarity through shared rituals and beliefs; social control to enforce religious-based morals and norms to help maintain conformity and control in society. Similar to Freud, Durkheim viewed religion as a means of teaching morals and “acceptable” behavior in