I'm a skeptic. I believe in God, I just don't know if religion is real due to ethical and rational complications. Here's my story y'all.
Growing up, I was a pious Muslim. I like simple things and simple explanations. Religion was and still is in my mind a beautiful thing. It brings people together, it creates a unified ethical system that benefits a society and that secular societies today got heavily influenced by.
However by my 1st year in university, I've encountered my first real ethical challenge from faith, through the Epicurus riddle. Here's how it goes roughly:
God is defined as All-Knowing, All-Loving and All-Powerful. However where does evil come from then?
If he knows and can act, does he not care?
If he cares and can act, does he not know?
If he knows and cares, should we call him God?
If he knows, cares and acts, where then does evil come from?
At first, I dismissed this as nonsense. I was smart my whole life and came to different solutions to this problem. My first one was that God gave us free-will and that this world is a test. As such, evil is a necessity to weed out who is good and who is evil. This if evil doesn't exist, then the test would be void in its inception. Close and shut case right?
Well then through more reflection, I've gone through another issue. Natural evils.
Babies are born with deformities sometimes.
There are diseases.
There are natural disasters.
There are poisonous plants and animals.
There are droughts.
There was even a moment where most of all life died due to rocks falling from the sky.
How can I argue with these evils with free-will. My solution to these were that they are tests to see how much conviction one has. But then again, this isn't done equally, this is done in an unequal fashion. Why do some live good lives and other don't? If God is the most just, then why is the world unfair? How can anyone put their trust that the afterlife will bring about justice when there was no justice in this world in the first place? How does that make sense?
My second real ethical challenge was the problem with Hell.
We are born and then we die. Our lives are finite. And yet, some of us will be punished forever in Hell.
If a God is to be defined as the most Just, how can one justify this?
Also, if one's evils can be imagined, and Hell's severity is unimaginable, then clearly the punishment doesn't fit the crime.
So for a finite life, one is punished forever. And for sins that can be comprehended, one is punished with acts that are unimaginable.
Personally, I still don't have a solution for both of these ethical dilemmas.
I'd like to hear your solutions to these 2 ethical problems. And if anyone wants my explanation on why I accept that God exists, I can explain that as well. I also hope no one takes offense by these ethical challenges, but instead act to fight them head on. I'm being unusually serious here.