God is malevolent evil

Question from Quora: Why can't God make our world a better place?

My answer:

Because this world is literally Hell, and God is malevolent evil, meaning God could probably make a better place, but has no interest in doing so. This is my position based on supporting evidence. The existence of tsetse flies, of suffering, of evil, it and a myriad other things are only explicable if God is malevolent evil and this is Hell. Especially consciousness. What other reason could there be to give a creature made of decaying meat a consciousness and knowledge of its eventual mortality, than to cause it to suffer through fear of death?

“But Hell is eternal!” One word for you: reincarnation. Reincarnation is how this world, how Hell, is eternal. There is no Heaven. Heaven’s existence goes contrary to all evidence. Thus, suicide is pointless.

“But how do you know that we don’t just cease to exist at death?” I don’t. I mean, I do know that reincarnation is real, because I have memories of past lives (memories that support this theory of a malevolent God), but those could be false memories, I admit. I admit this, even though there’s also many examples I’ve read or heard about of people with memories of past lives so accurate in ways that defy any other explanation, that I don’t “have faith” that reincarnation is true, I know for a fact that it’s true.

And also, since it would be a comfort to me to think that the suffering ends at death, the fact remains that everything in my life has convinced me that God is malevolent and hates anyone to be happy for long, so I would have to be extremely naive to have any hope for such a simple solution.

“But, but what about happiness? Doesn’t the existence of happiness disprove your theory?” You can’t truly suffer without happiness, without little moments here and there of contentedness. Studies into torture show that extended torture as people usually think of it just causes people to give up and lose themselves to apathy. To truly suffer, you must have happiness or at least occasional reprieves from the torture to renew hope and keep you from slipping into despair and apathy, to make it hurt all the more when that brief happiness is snatched away. (And all the rise in apathetic depression in humans lately proves is that humans excel at making each other’s lives miserable especially via capitalism.)

“How do you know God is evil? Maybe you’re just one of the unlucky few to end up in Hell, and everyone else is in the same boat or is an illusion or an actor?” Because the mere fact that God would even create Hell to begin with proves He is malevolent. There is no crime worthy of eternal suffering, none. People like to think there are, but that’s only because they don’t really understand what eternal torment would be like. Mainly because you couldn’t have eternal suffering without breaking it up somehow, like for instance by making the soul reincarnate time and again, limiting a single lifetime to about 50 to 100 years.

“What about people who die suddenly and painlessly as young people?” Probably God decided their lives were too happy and reset them to put them into a life more full of misery. Or God was just using their brief existence to cause misery for their loved ones by taking them away so soon. Or both.

“Yeah well maybe you’re just depressed.” The fact that depression is even something that can happen kind of proves my point. It takes an incredible amount of cognitive dissonance to think God is benevolent when evil, suffering, and depression exist. There is no talking around that; all you end up with if you try is excuses. If you assume a benevolent God, then those things constitute a massive plot hole that can’t be explained away no matter how hard you try unless you just stop thinking critically. The only theory that fits the evidence is a malevolent God.

“Maybe there IS no god, and life is just random, an accident.” Then where does the universe come from? Why does anything exist? It’s inexplicable. If Einstein is right and matter/energy can be neither created nor destroyed (and he is; the universe would make even less sense if he was wrong about that), then what came before the universe? Did it always just exist? Why isn’t everything just lost to entropy? You could be right, I grant you, but personally I don’t buy it. I don’t buy that consciousness just happens. Honestly, it’s kind of inexplicable even if we assume God exists, but at least under that assumption, things make some sense.

“So if we’re already in Hell, we can do whatever we want!” Sure, if you want to be on His side by helping make the lives of others suck more. Yes, happiness is also part of the torture equation here, but not only can I not help being a compassionate person, I’d rather try to make God’s job harder by doing all I can to improve the lives of others, than cooperate with evil by making their lives worse. And if we all worked hard at defying God in that way, who knows? Maybe we could actually work out a way to kill Him and make this world Heaven instead of Hell. And even if that’s extremely unlikely to happen, better to live a life defying evil than embracing it.