This is the bad timeline, evil is rewarded

Other than god not existing? God is malignant

Forking shirtballs, we're in the bad place!

The theological explanation from Catholic dogma would be along the lines of God doesn't really interfere with the day-to-day goings on of the world.

Obligatory:

So, so many ways.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/evil/ offers some good discussion.

You're talking about the same god that let Satan torture Job to win a bet. Even in Christian doctrine, god doesn't give a fuck about people. He just wants obeisance.

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).

How can this be explained, other than God doesn’t exist?

Either Christianity and most other religions are being deliberately dishonest about the nature of their gods, or, as you said, god doesn't exist.

Anyone whos actually read the bible knows the christian god is a violent genocidal sociopath. It only makes sense he would reward that behavior.

God doesn't care, or God doesn't know.

If he knows, but does not care, then he is not good.

If he cares, but does not know, then he is not god.

If this is part of the plan, then God is evil.

God is obviously malevolent. All of his conservative representatives being evil should be a clue.

There's no indication that God would be good. In the Bible, David did something bad so God had 10 of his wives raped as punishment. He ordered genocide, specifically including that suckling children were to be killed. He does a lot of bad shit. Maybe he's real and he's a Trump supporter.

Or god likes the pope too and wants to hang with him but to do that he has to kill him.

Fuck the the Catholic Church and anyone that supports it.

If God existed, I doubt he goes around with a magic cancer wand. That being said, Pope Leo isn't a good person, he just has a good media team.

God isn’t catholic

Have you considered the possibility that God is an incompetent moron?

His plan is ineffable, it can't be effed

• good omens (I think)

I'm an antitheist, but just to play along:

God is real, and he's a fucking asshole.

"god works in mysterious ways"

"but that's all bullshit"

"god works in mysterious ways"

if you look at how cancer develops

that doesn't need God.. that just happens here on earth as a random lottery / your life choices

Or God do exists and is the ultimate villain, the fucking last boss of Life™

God could still exist. It just means that either he isn't benevolent, isn't all-powerful, isn't all-knowing, or some combination thereof.

If he smoked or other risk factors and genetics have a lot to do with health. Some are more at risk from genes, but bad lifestyle can make various illnesses sooner, worse and advance faster than those who live healthier. There is no supernatural reward for suffering now. We're all temporary conscious stardust in this time to exist, and all the elements in us will be recycled again. That's the truth that frees us from the damaging dogmas and conditional belonging. Enjoy being the universe observing itself for this short time, peace!

God's interests are confined to the ocular, he doesn't do lungs.

Another reason on the list that I do not believe in God such as God is portrayed in the Bible, Torah, Koran, etc. If there is a God, I don't think it cares about life on Earth. It may have created the beginning of everything somehow but I don't think it micromanages what happens on Earth or even cares one way or the other.

As an atheist: you get the concept wrong. All religions treat this life as a test and the nice part is yet to come. Children dying early or the Pope is them getting to heaven faster

Do you mean the designer, omnipotent, omniscient, benevolent, creator, Jehovah, or the lord god that gave that gave us viruses, deadly bacteria, genetic diseases, parasites, , volcanos, earthquakes, blindness, cancers, floods, droughts, starvation, meteorites, death from lightning strikes, pestilence, holy wars, tidal waves, asbestos, infant mortality, trachoma, life threatening radioactive elements, solar flares, malaria, smallpox, despots, dictators, slavery, mass extinctions, ice ages, trachoma, hare lips, cleft palates, animal sacrifices, infant genital mutilation, mental illness depression, bilharzia and anxiety, autism, Parkinson's disease, Hansons disease, hernias, the appendix, compacted wisdom teeth, acne, dementia and complete morons?

Mysterious ways, brah. Mysterious ways.

You're asking an existential question: why do bad things happen to good people? I would wager that this has been a subject of philosophical debate for as long as humans have existed.

Ultimately, I think it's the wrong question.

What you're experiencing is a form of confirmation bias. You expect bad people to live and good people to die, and that expectation is shaped by societal conditioning and the beliefs you've been exposed to throughout your life.

In reality, cancer, for example, affects a relatively small percentage of the world's population at any given time, although that percentage still represents a tremendous number of people.

You're seeing it affect people in roughly the proportions you'd expect. The problem is that the people you pay attention to tend to be the ones you believe shouldn't be affected by it, while those you believe should be affected often aren't.

We tend to perceive these events as unjust because we expect the world to operate according to some inherent sense of fairness. Unfortunately, nature doesn't make that distinction between good and bad people.

Holy fuck that question is as deep as a puddle

The best explanation I've heard, as an agnostic, is this is our misperception of this life vs an eternal (infinite) afterlife.

Sure, bad people might live really fun lives for maybe 100 years while good people might suffer for the same. But then, for millions and millions and gazillions of millennia after that, both are punished or rewarded for how they chose to live those 100 years.

My friend's baby had a bunch of vaccinations the other day. Horrible day for the kid, unfun and stabby. But in a dozen years, will she remember it? Nope. But that day, that's all she could comprehend. Similarly, for this brief go around, yeah, what we can see and experience is all we can really comprehend. But the promise of at least Christianity, but I think many other religions, is that the next life is infinite and all that matters.

Existence of evil isn't proof that [the Christian] God doesn't exist, for a variety of reasons, some less obvious than others. Although it's still very unlikely that he does exist.

Which is generally irrelevant, because faith is entirely separate from objective facts. You don't need to consider the hypothetical existence of God to be a true fact in order to be a good Christian. To 'believe' in him means something else completely, but depending on your language it might not make linguistic sense (assuming it makes sense at all, but that's a separate discussion).

The same is, however, not true for Catholicism, Orthodox Christianity (stupid ass name), Mormonism, or some others. Mostly because they have nothing to do with Christianity, and are just... well, scams.

Catholicism, and most other Christian denominations, use Christianity in a similar fashion to the Nazis using swastikas.

The main idea of Christianity is that earthly life is essentially an entrance exam for the next, true life. You live your life as best you can, then you're judged afterwards, and if you pass - you go to heaven, which is supposedly a paradise free of evil.

So evil (or what we generally consider to be 'evil') being omnipresent does not prove anything in the context of Christianity. The crucial part is whether or not evil exists in the 'next life'. Conveniently, we'll never know until we reach it, so it'll probably never be possible to prove anything on this topic.

I'm not sure if it's still possible to track where it all started, but to me it seems quite likely that precisely this idea of 'true life' or 'soul' being disconnected from physical, observable, empirical reality is where all our troubles with capitalism started.

If this life is largely meaningless, and the real one starts after we die, then sooner or later some people will just do whatever they want. And if humans are the only 'intelligent' beings, or the only beings with souls (Christianity + later Enlightenment philosophy), then mass destruction of nature is morally sound.

Then add focusing on accumulation of capital, as well as industrial machinery, and you arrive where we are today, pretty much.