A recent poster turned me on to the phiosophy of Epicurus...?

Many of your premises are faulty. All-benevolent beings are not necesserily opposed to all evil. Evil sometimes can enable a "greater good" than could otherwise be achieved without it. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

God gave humans free will (which he deemed necessary to enable true worship of Him). Per Christian faith, free will enables evil to exist, and God is fine with that. How free will is the sole source of evil, I can't understand, but that is what they say. Death, disease, natural disasters, etc. all result from the Fall in the Garden of Eden.

However, the bigger question is, how can free-will and an all-powerful, all-knowing, benevolent God logically co-exist. They cannot. And "he lets us make choices, but knows what choices we we will make" doesn't cut it.

This argument is moronic. It is a theoretic attack on God that has nothing to do with reality. Why? Because it doesn't examine anywhere what the real problems are, what the real reasons are for God permitting evil. All it does is postulating something out of thin air. It is actually stupid in its ignorance of reality.

Take the fact that a legal court case arose in the universe. This was brought before the court of God to be impartially and justly decided upon by God and by his children the angels. Satan and his crowd on one side of the argument and God, etc on the other.

Satan claims that humans can rule themselves; humans also then claim independence from God.

For the sake of the legal argument, God permits this to be proved over time. He accords humans total self-rule as demanded.

Now what does self rule mean? It means taking care of one's own problems.

Only this century has the question been answered by us showing that the earth is on the brink of being destroyed as a vessel for human life. Even our economy etc and our ability to care for the population explosion is demonstrating our failure at self rule.

This explanation could go on but the end of the story is quite simple. Epicurus was an idiot and so was his argument. He didn't try to find out why. All he did together with his followers was to create a mind game unconnected to reality -- totally empty of value and moronic to boot.

Free will implies the necessity of Evil. God has allowed evil to exist for a period of time, in order to allow us to freely choose good over evil. God did not create evil. He created beings capable of committing evil. As free-willed beings, we bear the responsibility for acting in ways that are either good or evil.

Love is patient.