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Sinners in the hands of an angry god literary devices
Literary analysis sinners in the hands of an angry god the people
Sinners in the hands of an angry god literary devices
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The film “God on Trial” depicts Jewish men in Auschwitz concentration camp having a discussion against God. They are discussing whether He was faithful to the Jews, or has broken His covenant promises with them. inmates of the concentration camp include Jewish citizens from various walks of life. All are educated in religious studies and history and are familiar of the God of the Bible. They discuss the moral significance of the situation they are currently experiencing. They argued whether God or humans are at fault for the suffering they face. Evil and suffering exist in the world because of human free-will. The film uses one historical event, the Holocaust, (caused by a dictator’s misguided use of power to cleanse the world of one ethnic …show more content…
God allows humans to exercise free-will to choose their actions. When humans take advantage of their God-given free-will and make choices that are self-serving, they inflict pain and suffering on others. Human suffering is a result of man’s need to make himself a god and be king over other people. Humans have the choice to do evil or good. When they choose to do evil, they cause their fellow man to suffer. God gives man a choice of actions. When man chooses to act selfishly, he causes suffering. Although God has ordained every event that happens from the beginning of time, and gives humans the freedom to choose their actions, He is not the author of evil. God does not like evil, nor is he the creator of it. God only allows evil if it serves His greater purpose and plan for His people. God only allows evil if it serves the purpose of his plan or strengthens the faith of His believers. God can also use suffering in a person’s life to help them realize their current favorable situation is not a result of good luck or fortune, but because God allows them to be prosperous. Men do not realize all the earthly blessings they possess are given by the hand of
In his essay, "The Magnitude, Duration, and Distribution of Evil: a Theodicy," Peter van Inwagen alleges a set of reasons that God may have for allowing evil to exist on earth. Inwagen proposes the following story – throughout which there is an implicit assumption that God is all-good (perfectly benevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient) and deserving of all our love. God created humans in his own likeness and fit for His love. In order to enable humans to return this love, He had to give them the ability to freely choose. That is, Inwagen holds that the ability to love implies free will. By giving humans free will, God was taking a risk. As Inwagen argues, not even an omnipotent being can ensure that "a creature who has a free choice between x and y choose x rather than y" (197)1. (X in Inwagen’s story is ‘to turn its love to God’ and y is ‘to turn its love away from God,’ towards itself or other things.) So it happened that humans did in fact rebel and turn away from God. The first instance of this turning away is referred to as "the Fall." The ruin of the Fall was inherited by all humans to follow and is the source of evil in the world. But God did not leave humans without hope. He has a plan "whose working will one day eventuate in the Atonement (at-one-ment) of His human creatures with Himself," or at least some of His human creatures (198). This plan somehow involves humans realizing the wretchedness of a world without God and turning to God for help.
The Holocaust was one of the most devastating events to happen to us a world. On an ordinary day 1,000 people would be plucked from their everyday lives in ghettos. Over 30,000 Jewish people were arrested on Kristallnacht and taken to concentration camps. According to one source, “Over eleven million people were killed and about six million of them happened to be Jews” (“11 Facts”). Producing movies based around the Holocaust is a very controversial topic. There is the ever prominent argument on wheatear or not Holocaust based films can help us understand the different aspects of its reality.
In 1741, Jonathan Edwards, a Puritan preacher of that time, had one thing on his mind: to convert sinners, on the road to hell, to salvation. It just so happened to be, that his way of doing that was to preach the reality to them and scare them to the point of conversion. Sermons of this time were preached to persuade people to be converted and to me it seemed that Edwards just had a special way of doing it. Just as people are being influenced by rhetoric appeals today Edwards used the same method on his congregation. In “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” Jonathan Edwards positively affected his readers using pathos, logos, and ethos, while trying to convince the unconverted members of his sermon to be born again.
The question of why bad things happen to good people has perplexed and angered humans throughout history. The most common remedy to ease the confusion is to discover the inflicter of the undeserved suffering and direct the anger at them: the horror felt about the Holocaust can be re-directed in the short term by transforming Adolf Hitler into Lucifer and vilifying him, and, in the long term, can be used as a healing device when it is turned into education to assure that such an atrocity is never repeated. What, however, can be done with the distasteful emotions felt about the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Surely the citizens of those two cities did not themselves directly provoke the government of the United States to deserve the horror of a nuclear attack. Can it be doubted that their sufferings were undeserved and should cause deep sorrow, regret, and anger? Yet for the citizens of the United States to confront these emotions they must also confront the failings of their own government. A similar problem is found in two works of literature, Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound and the book of Job found in the Tanakh. In each of these works a good man is seen to be suffering at the hand of his god; Prometheus is chained to a rock by Zeus who then sends an eagle to daily eat Prometheus' liver while Job is made destitute and brought to endure physical pain through an agreement between God~ and Satan. To examine the travails of these two men is to discover two vastly different concepts of the relationship between god and man.
After reviewing the work of David Hume, the idea of a God existing in a world filled with so much pain and suffering is not so hard to understand. Humes’ work highlights some interesting points which allowed me to reach the conclusion that suffering is perhaps a part of God’s divine plan for humans. Our morals and values allow us to operate and live our daily lives in conjunction with a set of standards that help us to better understand our world around us and essentially allows us to better prepare for the potential life after life. For each and every day we get closer to our impending deaths and possibly closer to meeting the grand orchestrator of our universe.
It also follows that God, not as benevolent as could be hoped, prefers the maximization of good (2) as opposed to the minimization of evil (1). This is disquieting for the individual who might be the victim of suffering a “greater good.”
So, if it is by man’s choice itself that there is evil, then should they be justly punished? The most supreme evil, it would seem, is to act in outright defiance against the most supreme good. Well, if that good is eternal, then the punishment for acting against that good cannot be temporary. Thus, the failing of human endeavors and suffering cannot alone be the punishment for acting against the good. The punishment must fit the crime. Eternal crime must mean eternal
Suppose he had a reason to permit evil, a reason that was compatible with his never doing wrong and his being perfect in love, what I 'll call a justifying reason. For example, suppose that if he prevented evil completely, then we would miss out on a greater good, a good whose goodness was so great that it far surpassed the badness of evil. In that case, he might not prevent evil as far as he can, for he would have a justifying reason to permit it” (5). Even if God had a reason to allow evil, he who is all loving and powerful would want the least amount of people to suffer and feel pain. Since God knows what is going to happen before it actually happens, would he not be morally obligated to stop people from doing something evil to others, or preventing suffering by those who have been hurt by evil?
Rather than spending time on trying to figure out why God allows evil to exist, the focus should be aimed at what is within our ability to control or to prevent the existence of evil and understand that without evil; good could not exist.
I don’t see this being true of all moral virtue. For example, the virtue of independence is not created through suffering: its created by the need of relying on your own judgment and action. Along with that, there are a lot of evil and suffering that we see on a daily basis that does not teach us lessons, for example, a two year old dying from cancer or a hurricane destroying homes and lives; showing compassion can be praiseworthy. It may be argue, well supported by the evidence of post-Holocaust genocides, that mankind has not taken this lesson to heart. God’s goal is to create moral individuals and he allows evil to teach us moral lessons that we are supposed to learn from. Suffering and evil are not necessary conditions for moral development. We can learn morality without being subjected to evil. Likewise, purposely exposing one to evil in order to teach them a lesson seems outrageous. Another important problem with this theodicy is that it makes an image out of suffering. If morality depends on the existence of suffering, then if there was no suffering, then suffering would be solely around to have morality or teach a moral
Last semester my documentary production professor told my classmates and I to avoid making films that were too much like Holocaust or civil rights films. This really struck me as an almost cold statement, however this semester in both this class and the film and Holocaust class that I took I began to understand what he meant. After reading much of Aaron Kerner’s book I saw even more, it wasn’t a statement on the subject matter but the filmic techniques that have been overused in the genres. The most burnt out are the tropes within each film; like the crafty jew trope, the jew as a victim, or as a hero, and the usage of naziploitation. These are all found in films revolving around the Holocaust and the film Europa Europa (Agnieska Holland, 1990)
God is the source of evil. He created natural evil, and gave humans the ability to do moral evil by giving them a free will. However, had he not given people free will, then their actions would not be good or evil; nor could God reward or punish man for his actions since they had no choice in what to do. Therefore, by giving humans choice and free will, God allowed humanity to decide whether to reward themselves with temporary physical goods, and suffer in the long run from unhappiness, or forsake bodily pleasures for eternal happiness.
These arguments made by Berish and Job boil down to the question the theodicy, “why do good people suffer? Where is God in all this? Where is justice” (Fox 173). Elie Wiesel provides an answer that parallels once again with the book of Job. Embodied in the character of Sam, who claims that suffering is, “all because of our sins” (Wiesel 134). Similarly Jobs friends give a similar answer to the theodicy question by saying, “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? As I have seen, those who plow iniquity and sow trouble reap the same” (Job 4:7). The answer to the theodicy question in t The Trial of God is that suffering occurs because of the sins committed by individuals.
Growing up I was raised in a Catholic family, and I have gone to Catholic school my entire life. I have always learned about religion and the history of Jesus. In grade school, we were always taught the positive aspects of God, but never the negative aspects. I never really thought about God being at fault for anything when I was in grade school, but the older I got the more I began to almost blame God for the things that would happen in my life. I always began to wonder how exactly God can exist if there is evil in the world. When bad things happen in someone’s life, it is very common for them to ask God what they did to deserve this or how He could do this to them. I wanted to utilize my chance of writing a paper on this topic, so that
While we try to understand why God let violence, aggression and pain exist in our world. In trying to answer this question, we still should admit that people were given a freedom of choice, a choice between good and evil. Without it life would be meaningless. God wants us to act in a righteous way, but It is for the people to decide whether to follow God’s will or not. There are philosophers who think that evil and good are two forces with equal power. I think for the most part that people are kind, because they were created in the likeliness with God. In our hearts we approve virtue and reject corruption. However the discussion of this topic will almost never be able to eliminate pain and sorrow from our world, injected with the tears of history. Everyone knows the consequences of evil. I will keep to the point that life’s calamities will strengthen human spirit and I pray that next generations will not repeat our mistakes as well as the mistakes of their ancestors. I am an optimist and I think that it is important to concentrate on those honorable deeds which we can do now, because there’s no sense in dwelling in the past on events that were so destructive at the time, they cannot be changed but can eventually be forgiven by actions taken later in