[Buddha-l] Natural Evil

[Shiangtai Tuan]

I have not been reading this list faithfully, 
have missed a lot (and a lot of fun, at that).  I 
saw one message in this "subject" quite 
interesting so started to read earlier 
postings.  I would like to give my 2 cents on evil but first this:

At 03:25 PM 4/9/2007, Richard Hayes <rhayes at unm.edu> wrote:
>...
>
>Unless I'm very much mistaken, God IS in jail for life. There is no place to
>live but the universe, and every region of the universe is filled with pain
>and affliction. Just think what a prison this universe is. Everywhere you go
>there are exploding stars, toxic gases, high levels of radiation, black
>holes, It's worse than Guantánamo. And God has to be everywhere at once, so
>he can't escape these dangers even temporarily. To make matters worse, he has
>to listen to all these whining human beings ...

         Brilliant.  Thought I would just add a little:

         "Look at those happy fish, swimming swiftly in water."
         "You are not fish, how do you know these fish are happy?"
         "You are not I, how do you know I do not 
know that fish are happy."  (retold material)

         You are not God, how do you know God has 
to live in this Universe, has to bear the danger, 
and has to suffer?  Christians said let there be 
(created) an omnipotent God and therefore God is 
omnipotent.  The Christian bible said the God 
created the universe but it did not say it did 
not create any other universe.  Since Christians 
live in this universe just like the rest of the 
people, they cannot tell if there are or are not 
other universes.  (Before people learned about 
other planets, they did not know there were 
places equivalent to earth geographically.)  If I 
were omnipotent, I would at least make three 
universes.  This one, as you pointed out, is 
nothing but suffering.  I would create another 
one where there is nothing but enjoyment -- 
endless happiness and blissfulness.  Then I will 
create another one.  In this one there is 
absolutely no happiness and absolutely no 
suffering.  There are, in fact, nothing but rocks 
and Buddhists.  (I got that Trini-Universe idea 
simply by reading your postings.  Your postings are truly inspiring.)

         Well, come to think of it, the Christian 
God did create the parallel universe that is full 
of happiness and hired some White House staff to 
leak the information.  For no better name, the 
Christians who heard about it through the 
grapevines call it the heaven.  Some other 
religion which name I will not name (for the name 
that can be named is not the true name) went a 
step further.  The leaders drugged some disciples 
and put them under the care of Deborah Jeane 
Palfrey (in DC) for a while.  When they woke up, 
they were told they were in heaven.  The leaders 
promise those people if they go do "good" deeds 
and kill for the said leaders they could go to 
heaven, even if they die  in the process of 
killing.  Of course, their enemies condemn such 
behavior as "evil".   (See, I finally got back to 
the subject line, Good vs Evil, though this is not a very Natural evil.  :-)


Best Regards, Shiangtai