What is Reddit's opinion of God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer?

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I would suggest Bart Ehrman's book God's Problem: The Bible Fails to Answer our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer. I don't like the title of the book. It is really pretty misleading. The book talks at length about the answers the Bible gives. But then Ehrman dissects the reasons and finds them lacking.

I would read it apart from your friend, and don't use it to try to deconvert them. But I think the book is a pretty good book to give an atheist insights into how Christians use the Bible. Also, if your friend does have a loss you might be able to draw on some of the insights from the book.

Here is a link to Amazon. It isn't an affiliate link. The book is only $12.99 right now in paperback.

> Ehrman's The New Testament (amazon link) is one of the more widely used. Ehrman is very much on the "critical" end of critical scholarship, to the extent that his studies led to the weakening and eventual loss of his faith.

Ehrman says it was the problem of suffering rather than his scholarship which led him to become an agnostic with strong leanings towards atheism. See God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer

Ehrman has spoken quite a bit about how struggling with the problem of evil was the impetus behind losing his faith.

Bart Erhman wrote a wonderful book about the Bible's failures to address the problem of suffering. However, like other Biblical scholars (including atheists like Robert Price), he has a lot of respect for the sophistication of Job's attempt to answer this question as it is the most honest and most sobering.

Like most critical scholars on both sides of the faith fence, he sees this as a work similar to Grimm's Fairy Tales. When approached in this way, we see that the historicity and narrative events take a back burner to the conversations between Job and his friends as well as the significance of the narrative.

Unfortunately, I lack the scholarship to walk you through it, but one of my favorite parts is it's rejection of Just World Theory, something found elsewhere in the Bible and a huge motivating force of Christianity's ails (it is just to go to war, if you are experiencing difficulty then you are being curse by God, if you are sick then you have sinned, etc.).

In 11:13-20, Job's friend Zophar presents his take on just world theory, which, in 42:7-9, God beautifully renounces:

"After the Lord had said these things to Job, he said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me, as my servant Job has."

The reason that Job can be so confusing is because it has been subject to redactions and edits over the centuries, with various scribes trying to edge in their particular take on things. It's a marvelous study well worth your time if you have an interest in ancient literature, philosophy, and generally shutting down less competent Christians with valid and grounded argumentation.

I think there is a lot of issue to take with Christianity, but faulting the religion for the book of Job is not one of them. Next to Ecclesiastes, it is a beautifully sophisticated and highly relevant work of past thinkers trying to work out why we suffer in this world.

An alternate explanation:

https://www.amazon.com/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924

Here's a good book by a well-respected Biblical Scholar, God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer https://www.amazon.com/dp/0061173924/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_biwQBbZWC7VWM

God's Problem by Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is one of the world's top biblical scholars. Virtually every scholar agrees that he is in the top tier.

And he gave up Christianity because of this question: "Is [God] willing to prevent evil, but not able? then is he impotent. Is he able, but not willing? then is he malevolent. Is he both able and willing? whence then is evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"

And then he wrote a book about it:

http://www.amazon.ca/Gods-Problem-Answer-Important-Question-Why/dp/0061173924

So, um, fuck off.

> If you're going to be in the discussion at least be original. If you understood the Christian bible you'd know that's not an argument

Asshole.