An interesting analysis on the evolution of concept of “Evil” in monotheist religions from  wrath of God to an act of free will by human being. Mr. Kenan touches on why righteous suffer in the world, original sin and difference between natural evil and moral evil.  

“At the heart of the book( of Job  )is an attempt to wrestle with the profound new questions raised by the emergence of monotheistic religions. Why does evil exist? Why do the righteous suffer? And why should one obey God?

In traditional pantheistic religions, such questions had little purchase. Good and evil were woven into the fabric of the universe. The righteous suffered because gods could be nasty, vindictive, brutal and immoral.  One obeyed – or, rather, appeased – gods because one did not wish to make enemies of such powerful, yet often capricious, beings.  It was the irrational, unpredictable nature of the gods that led Socrates, Plato and Aristotle to look to secular reasons for piety and righteousness.

The question of evil had an entirely different character within faiths in which God was seen both as omnipotent and as willing good upon the world. The existence of evil suggests either that God is not omnipotent or that He is responsible for such evil. Since neither view was acceptable to believers, a new kind of explanation was required.

Evil came increasingly to be seen not so much as a rod of God’s anger as the washing through of human moral frailties. It was an explanation interwoven with the developing concept of free will. God, so the argument ran, had created humans as beings capable of making moral choices. Evil was an expression of the kinds of moral choices that humans sometimes made. The world contained evil not because God chose to make people suffer but because humans did, despite God’s best attempts to instill in them moral rectitude. As the twentieth century Christian thinker CS Lewis put it in his book The Problem of Pain, God could only eliminate evil by thwarting every malevolent action, by ensuring, for instance, that ‘a wooden beam became soft as grass when it was used as a weapon’ or that  ‘the air refused to obey me if I attempted to set up in it the sound waves that carry lies or insults’. But for God to do this would mean that ‘freedom of the will would be void’. Evil is therefore the price that has to be paid for allowing morally frail creatures the good of free will.” Click link for full article;

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2013/10/13/god-and-evil/

Posted by F. Sheikh