u/Quit_Creative

So, I like Episcopalians, I like this subreddit, and I genuinely enjoy seeing people’s perspectives here.

That being said, how do y’all grapple with the problem of evil? Contemplating billions of years of suffering just seemed incompatible with a loving God to me, and it’s one of the main arguments that drove me to agnosticism. As I find myself reconsidering faith, I find that I still have a tremendous amount of difficulty reconciling this. Most theodicies sound quite tone deaf to me. How do you grapple with this problem and still believe at the end of it all?

I’m broadly agnostic, but I’ve been contemplating returning to faith again, and TEC is very appealing to me. I’ve been to a couple of services already and the experience has overwhelmingly been positive.

One of the single biggest hang ups for me is the contrast between the outright genocidal mandates of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible and the loving character of God in Christ. I was raised in a somewhat fundamentalist denomination, so I was raised to believe that there was basically no contradiction here, and that those filthy Canaanites had it coming, more or less.

Obviously, that’s completely untenable to me now. From a historical perspective, I have a pretty good idea of why this contrast exists, with Yahweh being an imported storm/war deity into the Canaanite pantheon who eventually merged with El. And it’s also my understanding that archeological evidence suggests that many of these conquests probably didn’t occur historically. But that’s a separate question from reconciling these passages as a believer, especially when Christ declares that he came to fulfill the law and prophets, rather than abolish them.

So, how do yall reconcile this? It would be amazing if I could just wave these problematic passages away, but in a world where leaders like Bibi Netanyahu use the slaughter of the Amalekites to justify the Israeli genocide of Palestinians, this is simply something I cannot turn a blind eye to.

Thoughts?

(Edit)- let me be very clear in that I’m referring to the conquest of Canaan specifically. I don’t mean to paint the entire Old Testament with a broad brush and I should have been more specific from the outset.