Book review: 'Holiday in Hellmouth'

"God may be dead, but the question of why he permits suffering lives on." Read it all here.

“The reality is that most suffering is not positive, does not have a silver lining, is not good for the body or soul, and leads to wretched and miserable, not positive, outcomes.” . . .

“Come quickly, Lord” is the great refrain of both the Old Testament and the New. But the problem for Jews is that the Messiah never came, and everything stayed the same (or got worse), while the problem for Christians is that the Messiah did come, and everything stayed the same (or got worse). Jews and Christians are dependent, in different ways, on an always deferred Second Coming. Heaven—because it comes next and is not now—is, as so often in religious thought, a solution that merely creates another problem. If God supposedly wipes away all tears from our faces in Heaven, why does he not do it now? Why does God not now establish paradise on earth, as the Jehovah’s Witnesses believe he will do? And what is the purpose of these eighty or so years we spend on earth not having the tears wiped from our faces?