this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
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This always boils down to the Epicurean Paradox.
So, most religious mythology (including Christianity) defines its god as 3 absolutes:
All good (not a shred of evil)
All powerfull (its will is our reality, period)
All knowing (it's fully conscious of literally everything that happens in its universe)
So how is it that evil can exist? Cuz we can see that clear as day, everywhere. God either...
is aware of it, has the ability to stop it, and chooses not to, in which case it is not all good.
is aware of it, wants to stop it, but doesn't have the ability to, in which case it isn't all powerful.
Has the power and desire to stop it, but isn't aware it's happening, in which case it isn't all knowing.
Every single attempt to answer the Epicurean paradox does so by rugpulling one of the three pillars and presenting god as instead only being two of those absolutes. (and if anyone reading this takes that as a challenge, feel free to give it a go).
Either Christianity and most other religions are being deliberately dishonest about the nature of their gods, or, as you said, god doesn't exist.
What are “good” and “evil”?
Why are you asking me? Those already have established meanings, there's no need for me to reinvent them, nor do I have any kind of authority on our language even if I wanted to.
Ehhhhhhh. You're conflating this existence with all of eternity. Those are very different things.
Consider God as a parent. I used the example in an earlier response but my friend took her child to be vaccinated. For a baby, that's a very unpleasant day. In a week, she won't remember it.
Similarly, an all powerful, good God can be okay with someone suffering for a momentary blip because the end result is an eternity of paradise. (What is a lifetime of suffering against infinite years of happiness?)
"But wait!" you cry, "surely an all powerful God can skip the ANY suffering bit, right? He's just choosing not to because he's a prick!" Which misses the possibility of self imposed constraints on power. If I build a system and choose to work within that system, that's still me being all powerful. And if, as an all knowing being, I know that a half moment of unpleasantness means an eternity of bliss (so I can reward free will, instead of just creating a bunch of automatons), that's a tradeoff a good and all powerful God may make.
Those are very different things, but I don't see how or where they were conflated. Nor how conflating them would even be problematic in this context: they'd both be within god's full scope of control, right?
So, not 'all good'.
And if that system you just built includes evil, again we're in not 'all good' territory.
According to self imposed rules that include evil
A tradeoff? Why would god need to trade? If he wants something, he just makes it so -- unless he isn't all powerful. Or unless we're still in the self-imposed-rules that allow for evil, which again is claiming that god is evil.
Yeah free will usually comes up in these conversations, but right out the gate that's an attack on god's power: does he not have the ability to grant free will without also allowing evil? And even if he can't, and ignoring that that claim is that he isn't all powerful: why is the ability to commit evil always a criteria for free will? We can't fly, shoot lasers out of our eyes, or fart out unicorns either, so with or without the ability to commit evil our freedom is still not absolute - does that make us a bunch of automatons?
Or rather, if the ability to commit evil was taken away from us, would we lose our free will? Let's look at your freedom of choice within the context of dinner. Half a second's thought, and I've got dozens of restaurant options, or grocery stores that allow me to cook up something that might fall outside of what the restaurants here offer: the number of options, while technically finite, are so mind-bogglingly huge that it might as well be infinite: so I'm gonna say my freedom of choice here is almost literally absolute.
One of those dinner options is to kidnap my neighbor's 4-year old, throw him in the oven, and cannibalize him. Why? Cuz god lets me, right? Sure it's illegal, but we don't care about legal authority, we care about god's. So if god snapped his fingers and changed our reality so that I'm no longer even capable of considering that, let alone committing it, evil is officially off the menu... but the billions of other possible combinations are still open, so I'd argue that my freedom of choice didn't actually change all that much. Does that make me an automaton?
...and what about the things that I already don't have the freedom to eat? Most of our reality isn't edible. And even if it was, I can only fit a few handfuls of it into my belly at a time - I can't have the moon for dinner, it won't fit. ...does that make me an automaton?
Point is our free will already exists within a system that has limits. Evil is one of many, many, many parts of that system, so even ignoring Epicurean Paradox, why is evil always a focal point of free will?