If there is a God, and he is all powerful and all loving, then how can he allow evil to exist and people to suffer?

Because he gave us free will.

Books have been filled in regard to this question. I don’t think you’re going to find the answer on Fluther.

I agree with gooch.

An invisible man in the sky watching everything you do and willing to pass judgment on you and fully prepared to send you to hell and live the rest of eternity in pain and suffering. But he still loves us all. Seems unlikely, right?

The Bible is a book to help make sure people live their lives as good people. People have taken simple metaphors and interpreted them as factual happenings.

In the beginning there was light/love… infinite, unconditional light/love. Not a man in the sky called “God”.

Our understanding of God is so limited. The question is like a child asking how a loving parent can subject their child to a vaccination. Not that I am suggesting that suffering is some sort of vaccination, I am just saying that in the scope of eternity, this life is just a spec, and how this moment intertwines with eternity is a huge mystery. We really just can’t see it from our perspective. If we could step back and see it in the scope of history, eternity, maybe we would get it. That’s what “Faith” is all about. I hope everything is OK with you. Usually this question comes up in the midst of suffering and I sense your heart is aching over something.

I asked a similar question of a clergyman friend of mine, and his answer was a good one.

He said, “God doesn’t ‘allow’ evil and suffering to exist in the world; it is human beings who ‘allow’ it.”

We have the freedom to choose to be good people. When some of us choose not to be good people, other people suffer. The value of the choice to do good—and the fact that it is a choice—is more important than an end to suffering.

This is a wonderful question…I have pondered it so many times.

God can stop evil and suffering, he could also easily take away our free will. He is the almighty….why doesn’t he?

God created Evil. It has purpose.

Keeps you sheep in line.

@sarapnsc;
Because we were created for fellowship with God, not to be programed robots. He delights when we make good choices, like we delight when our children make good choices. A robot that can be programmed to respond a certain way is not what God wanted. That’s why he created us in his image with free will. Like we hope our children will make good choices, he has the same hope for us. When his children make bad choices his heart aches and he forgives them, just like we do our children. And when his children make deadly decisions, he loves them so much that he throws himself under the train (or onto a cross) to save the children he loves.

I can understand God’s not wanting us going around being like a robot and keeping us in line. I don’t understand an innocent child being hurt from it all.

@Judi, thank you for answering…I appreciate it, and it was a great answer.

@Sara
I was that innocent child once, and in the scope of 40 years I can honestly tell you that I don’t regret a moment. Those awful times made me who I am. I would never have the empathy and understanding that I do now, and I would never have the faith I have now. I am a much richer, deeper, and stronger person for the things I have overcome.

Imagine a super duper happy world, by now, we all would have commited suicide, things cannot be that boring….
We believe in light, because of obscurity
We believe in joy, because of sadness
We believe in God, because of the Devil…

@Judi, I generally like your answer and think it is nice. If you are talking about the Christian god, I do take issue with your last line—as there are numerous instances where God commands death in the bible and accordingly should be pleased when we obey him.

To the general question, without evil we would never recognize good. Without suffering we could never know happiness. What is good or happiness when there is no bad in the world? We would have no emotional ability to express joy because we wouldn’t know any other way. To know our blessings we must also know what could have been.

The world may never know, kinda like the old Tootsie Pop question.

What you are asking is talked about by philosophers as “the problem of evil.” It has been debated for centuries. I agree that you probably won’t find a perfect answer on Fluther.

I will say this much. Being all-powerful and all-loving doesn’t, of necessity, require one to suppress all suffering. Take a surgeon. The more he loves the patient, the more he goes on cutting, doing a more thorough, painful job on the patient. Crude example, but you get the idea at least. Loving doesn’t mutually exclude the presence of suffering, sometimes love is more pronounced by the presence of suffering.

For Christians, this is why the passion of Jesus Christ is so central to their thinking. In one act, Jesus endured all suffering in a supreme, eternal act of love. From this perspective, if God didn’t allow suffering, then he would not have suffered himself. To me it’s a beautiful representation of the difference between God and mortal beings; rather than eliminate suffering, he endures it completely, on a scale we cannot comprehend; no one’s individual sufferings are unfair or unjust because God heaped it on himself. But this is a religious answer to the question, so if you’re looking for a non-Christian, philosophical one, I’d start with looking at the terms of the question at hand, and seeing how it may be possible that an allowance of human suffering and all-powerful/all-loving nature of God can coexist. In my opinion, Aquinas is a great place to start for philosophical constructs to get at this logic.

You really think that there is a god in this rotten world ? Oh my God ! I mean, Wow ! :D

a

If God was to step in and to remove evil from the world, at what point will you want him to then step back and leave us as humans to be free again?

Who also decides who is and who isn’t innocent? Surely if God stepped in we would all be innocent therefore the world would become perfect. Robot like.

Just pointing out that, according to the Bible, Lucifer, the angel of light, made a choice for evil before evil was otherwise present.

To ask this philosophically, would simply having the ability to make a choice therefore require the existence of evil (or the ability for it to exist)?

If a god created everything didn’t this god also create evil? Was an omniscient, omnipotent god not capable of conceiving a world without evil?

@tinyfaery, that is an excellent question. It’s easy to put our human limitations onto a problem when trying to understand it. But an omniscient, omnipotent god surpasses those. I don’t know it’s possible to answer that, though.

…and what about the rule “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” Wouldn’t that mean that in order for there to be good there has to be evil?

Those are our conceptions, not necessarily a god’s.

For you to be able to answer this question while still keeping a god in the picture requires too many ‘work-arounds’. You end up spending a lot of energy finding excuses (and they are excuses) as to why god has chosen to have innocent people suffering. We are not talking about the suffering of you not finding a parking spot, or having a cold. Hell, I’m not even be talking about the suffering of loosing a loved one. I’m talking about the child that is being abused, mass disasters, children born into poverty not ever having a choice.

There is only one simple way to explain these. And that is that there is no god. It very easy for those in the throne of privileged (ie. white, mid/upper class, first world country) to preach some greater plan that god has for us that we are too naive to understand, but it’s all just one big excuse. And and an excuse for atrocities most of the privileged people on fluther will never have to experience in their lives.

Food for thought: Why would a god give us a free will so powerful that it would be able to remove the free will he gave others?

Well for starters their isn’t a god, but in the event there is than because he likes the conflict

thegodfather is right, this is debated as “The problem of Evil and Suffering” and has been going on forever. A lot of the answers here are based in the famous theodicies on this topic.

St. Augustine argued that the world started perfectly as created by God, and the evil and suffering is because of human error and sins. To accept this theodicy, one must take the Bible story of Adam and Eve literally.

St. Thomas Aquinas argued that there is no natural evil, and that if something “fulfilled its nature” then it is good, and if it did not fulfill its nature then it is evil. The world is ‘perfect’ if everything is fulfilling its nature, not necessarily that everything is ‘nice’ for everyone. For example, it may seem evil to a gazelle that it is being hunted by a cheetah, but it is actually good because the cheetah is fulfilling its nature.

Process theology argues that evil and suffering is a limitation of the power of God, and that God is not responsible for evil, he is omnipotent to a point- he can only do that which is logically possible to happen. So the origins of suffering and evil are the result of the limitation of God’s power.

Dualism is the idea that there are two opposing forces in the universe, good and evil, and they are locked in an eternal cosmic war, but good cannot always triumph over evil, and suffering and pain are the result of this war. To agree with this, one must accept that God isn’t wholly good or wholly omnipotent, or he isn’t the only one, and must ask is evil a force within itself or the privation of good?

The idea of Divine reward and retribution is that the suffering caused on this earth is balanced by the suffering of the wrong doers in hell. But this moves evil into the next life without answering it now, and raises the question why would God allow eternal pain and suffering in hell?

Hick and Irinaeus argued that God created an imperfect world, and that we are created in the image of God. Our purpose is to become spiritual and moral beings in the likeness of God, and if we do the world will be perfect. Creation is a two-stage process, we must go from the image of God to the likeness of God. They also say that evil is necessary for free will and evil is necessary for the greater good. We develop through adversity, and this includes natural evil. The world was created religiously ambiguous to enable an epistemic distance between us and God, and we all have the potential to be good.

Flew argued that true free will must come from choices within ourselves, not from outside forces. God could have made good-natured people who make good decisions, but he couldn’t or wouldn’t. A perfect world would comprise of all humans freely making good choices through good nature given to us by God. But then humans would be like little puppets, and by God influencing us like this it lessens our free will.

Leibniz argued that God is all powerful and good. He chose the very best possible universe from all possible universes. Every feature in the universe is an essential part of the divine plan. Therefore pain and suffering are essential parts of the best possible universe. Evil contributes to making it a better place than every other possible universe. All evil is for the best – we do not have the same perspective as God so we may not understand exactly how.

Swinburne argued that some forms of evil are the means to certain goods. God is all powerful and could stop evil but chooses not to. Without suffering humans cannot display virtuous acts in response. The existence of suffering makes higher-order goods possible. This is better than a ‘toy world’ without significant consequences. If there was no suffering and no opportunity to improve then all actions would lose meaning. Humans are free – the universe is unfinished – we need to live in a world with real challenges and actions matter. The world needs to be law-abiding – to form laws of nature God cannot intervene to remove suffering all the time.

The weakness to the above two arguments is that they seem too sort of, “convenient” to explain away all the horrible suffering when you witness it first hand. And this is where Dostoyevski comes in. He does not agree that evil contributes to a greater good, and uses the suffering of innocent children over and over again to enforce his point.

So anyway, they’re all the arguments that I know, and really what you have to do is go with what you feel is right, what you think is an appropriate answer to your life philosophy. Decide why there is evil and suffering in a way that you can accept and live with. Or don’t. Just leave it. It doesn’t have to be answered. It’s just one of those things.

@shrubbery

Great summary of how thinkers have treated the problem of evil. I think it’s a fundamental question on a human level; we can’t help but wonder why evil exists, since we have the ability to reason and form abstractions within the mind. I’d be interested in more detail about Dostoevsky’s ideas about the problem of evil. Are you referring to Crime & Punishment / Brothers Karamazov / Notes from Underground / Dream of a Ridiculous Man? I find myself agreeing more and more with his take on ethics and the human psyche.

I was referring to The Brothers Karamazov, which is the only one I have learnt about. We didn’t dwell on it in class though, so I don’t know much. I think you’d be best off reading the Wikipedia article, rather than me stumbling through a summary of a teacher who hasn’t read it either’s summary of a Peter Vardy summary :P Sorry.
I’ll just say that we talked about the story of the brothers talking about God and suffering, and the one who rejects God tells three stories of the suffering of children, and says that a God who lets that happen is not worth worshipping.

Wow shrubbery. That is awesome. Thank you!

(Out of interest, why do we always seem to stick by the individual deity, tending towards the Christian/Jewish God to argue against why there is evil when there are numerous religions across the world which believe in multiple gods as such. I don’t know the teaching’s of the other religions because It’s not something that someone gets taught in an in depth manner. I’ve got nothing against using a single God within the argument, I find it highly interesting and I keep my mind as open as I personally can. I just find that the arguments seem to just lead towards trying to disprove the existence of a judaeo-christian God, or do most people hold their argument against any god believing religion? I’m not looking at this from a religious direction, more of a, what about everybody else? Sure, I may have completely missed the point, please, do tell me if I have done so, but please don’t bite my head off.)

You’re right, I only know the Judao-Christian God because that is all I have been taught. I have studied Islam and have just started Buddhism as well, but as a whole, the history, rituals etc, and we do not focus on the problem of evil in each of these religions. Our teacher made an executive decision to focus on Christianity for the purpose of our study of the problem of evil because that is the predominant religion of the society we have grown up with, and that is the religion of our school etc. It would be interesting to study the problem of evil in depth of other religions, but there is just not enough time in the year and would make studying for exams hell. Maybe when I finish school and have a bit of spare time on my hands I’ll be able to look into the others.

He allows us to make that choice.

If i was to give a personal opinion, I would say that without “evil” acts we would have no reference point for what were felt were “good” acts.

As horrendous as it was, if Hitler hadn’t committed his atrocities then the world would not have such a strong aversion to genocide. The world now tries to respond more proactively to this type of behavior rather than blindly allow it to happen. Obviously, there is still a long way to go on this front.

My thinking is more in line with Hick and Flew above (whom I have never heard of, but will look into). People have the choice to be good – not perfect, good – and the more they look within to recognize the truth that resonates within, then “evil” will be less present in the world.

Parents can tell their children over and over that touching a hot stove will hurt, but many kids still don’t learn until they experience it for themselves. The more we collectively learn to trust God’s message, the less likely we will be to get burned.

Well over 1 million children died in the holocaust.

50,000 children are estimated to have died in the tsunami.

Every day over 26,000 children die from hunger, preventable diseases, and related causes.

If god were a human being they would have to be a sociopath or a psychopath to allow that kind of suffering to occur. If any of you could stop the holocaust or the tsunami from occurring, you would. Many of us would probably risk our lives if we knew it could stop even a fraction of this level of suffering.

Yet a loving all powerful being who could intervene at any time (and who it is claims sometimes does), and through no risk whatsoever to themselves, sat back and watched as the Zyclon B was dropped into the chamber…not once. But time after time after time. Despite the screams of children, despite the fear, despite the bodies piling higher, and the ovens burning into the night. Your God watched this and sat back somewhere betweeen 1 to 1.5 million times….and that’s just the kids.

Your loving god also watched the water sweep the 3 year old out of his mother’s arms and under the entangled wreckage to slowly die gasping for breath. Equivalent other merciful acts amounted to the tune of 50,000 drowning children.

Your loving god watches the life finally ebb out of the emaciated child, after months and months of just enough food to stop death, but not enough to give life.

Or months of fever, or months of dysentry or months of malaria.

Only it’s not just one kid, it’s 18 a minute. Whoops there goes another dozen. Thank you lord for your mercy.. At least they don’t feel anything anymore, and their mother doesn’t have to watch them slowly die for another month.

Why? Oh that’s easy. Because of “free choice”, or mia culpe, it was the devil, or because it helps us to have a strong aversion to genocide…(words fail me), or perhaps it’s because without the world’s suffering our BMWs wouldn’t smell so sweet.

PLEASE stop for five seconds and be honest. At the very best it makes NO sense if you believe in a loving god. Then you can console youself with protestations that although you as a mere mortal are somehow sufficiently wise to be able to judge God as “loving”, for some reason you are not sufficiently enlightened to understand why his acts don’t live up to your label.

Those of you who are forced to resort to these types of apologetics are just proving that you have a higher moral code than the very god you chose to worship. Congratulations. If I had the need and the choice between putting anyone of you in charge of the universe or magically pulling into existence the god of the bible, I’d take any of you any day.

Despite the ridiculous levels of cognitive dissonance that many of you seem quite comfortable with, your excuses for god show a desperate and genuine attempt to make him nicer than reality allows for.

So people of Fluther for God! The position is vacant and the biblical alternative was too cruel to contemplate.

Again, you are trying to personify God.
He’s not Zeus, he’s not sitting on a mountaintop.

Man has the choice to follow God’s teachings, which is to say, it is up to Man to care for each other.

The reason that the concept of the personal God of Abraham has lasted for many thousands of years is because of the Faith that people place in the teachings. Sure, there are always people who distort past messages, and there are always those without faith that refuse to believe. But the only way to bring people together is to recognize the faith they have and find a common ground.

Telling people they are wrong because you can’t conceptualize something more than a cartoon version of what many people believe in, is just hubris.

You seem to believe not just in supernatural energy fields, but one which has a penis, messages, teachings, and presumably is “loving”. I’m not sure what you define as personification, but doesn’t that count?

Regardless of your personal beliefs about god (and don’t take the penis comment seriously, I know it’s just sexist convention to refer to god as he), I think most people here are discussing or represent one of the Abrahamic religions. And the original texts of these religions personalise god with the best and worst of human emotions. Jealously, genocide, cruelty, as well as love and mercy. I can live with being accused of hubris, but think it a bit much to be blamed with personifying god. That’s the fault of the major religions, not me.

I’ll try my best to make this short, just so its easier for you to highlight the obvious limitations in my conceptual faculties. Furthermore, let’s not get tied up with which or who’s god Im being unfair to…let’s just go to the basics of the argument.

This is my point. We can’t have it both ways. If you claim that god is loving (not my personifying claim, but the core of this thread), then why? Surely we need to justify this claim by considering the state of the world around us (we have nothing else to go by).

If you claim that we cannot know god’s ways or intentions or the mind of god, or that it is simplistic to even think that we could do so because he she or it works in mysterious ways, then it is equally beyond us to determine whether or not he is in fact a “loving” god?

So, we can either start with the premise that god is loving, and then work our way backwards and forgive or contort everything that doesn’t fit with this perception. Not exactly an objective way of approaching an issue.

Or we can start from the other direction and ask the same question. If god exists, and by definition is omnipotent (unless the word god means something less) is there any real evidence on this planet that god is loving. What would such a world look like? Like this one?

That’s my argument. We are either not in a position to judge god (in which case we can’t know if he’s loving and the label is vacuous), or god is not loving by our standards (in which case we can’t call him loving, or the word ceases to mean anything), or he’s not there, or he’s impotent.

take your pick.

Why is Loving a personification?
Is Loving particular to Humans?

I think it is really amazing that your intellect is so superior to the hundreds and hundreds of thinkers who have come before you and could not answer this question.
And to be able to boil it down to a simple dichotomy, is really impressive.

I think the question as asked was answered by several people according to their beliefs. You just didn’t get the answer you wanted to hear and have decided that everyone else has their beliefs wrong.

@fireside
You can attempt to attack Critter’s by playing with his semantics, and claiming he doesn’t understand your god, but the fact of the matter is he has brought up questions you are unable to answer and have purposefully avoided. Being hung up on the idea of using “Loving” as a personification (one of the many examples he brought) only shows that you can’t answer any of the actual questions at hand.

And I happen to love the take most theist ultimately come to, the whole “Atheists are so arrogant because they think they are intellectually superior”. It’s as if you finally come to realization that atheists have cornered you into the conflict of your faith and human reason and the only way you can solve it is by deciding you must stay ignorant of the information at risk of too becoming atheist. So you attack the act of gaining knowledge. Hell for the god of Abraham, it was in fact the first sin. The sin of knowledge. And I’m sorry, I can’t support a belief that has convinced everyone they must remain ignorant to truly understand god.

Ok, to answer Critter’s questions:

You seem to believe not just in supernatural energy fields, but one which has a penis, messages, teachings, and presumably is “loving”. I’m not sure what you define as personification, but doesn’t that count? Are you referring to me when you say “you”? Show me where I said what you claim.

If you claim that god is loving (not my personifying claim, but the core of this thread), then why? several different points of view were shared here

If you claim that we cannot know god’s ways or intentions or the mind of god, or that it is simplistic to even think that we could do so because he she or it works in mysterious ways, then it is equally beyond us to determine whether or not he is in fact a “loving” god? several different points of view were shared here

What would such a world look like? Like this one? several different points of view were shared here

If an answer was really what Critter wanted, then Critter should go do some studying, as was suggested here.

Instead, Critter is just telling everyone that there is only a single choice, rather like the concept of Process Theology referenced here

When did I ever say that people must remain ignorant? I think true ignorance is only holding your point of view in the face of so many varying opinions about a metaphysical topic. I don’t claim to know the answer. Critter does.

“The more we collectively learn to trust God’s message…”,
“Man has the choice to follow God’s teachings…”
”, he’s not sitting on a mountaintop.”

If you say that “loving” is not personification of god, then where do you draw the line? Which human emotions or attributes count as “personifying” and which don’t? Just remember that you started this…(nah nah) by accusing me of trying to personify god. My questions are not points of accusation, merely trying to point out that the whole “personifying” label appears to be arbitrary.

But on to your links.

Where does the post by Shruberry negate the four choices I propose? Where you seem to see refutation in that post’s wonderful summary, all I see is centuries of people wrestling with the topic and choosing options sometimes very similar to the ones I present. We can’t define evil (our labels don’t apply which works for loving equally well), or we can’t understand the workings of god (I think this was my first point), or god can’t rid the world of evil (god is impotent with respect to evil), all fascinating if you ignore the vast amount of unsubstantiated conjecture that is at the base of many of the arguments. But it doesn’t counter the options I present that are specifically in relation to the thread.

And contrary to your claim, I don’t present a single choice or a dichotomy. I present four options which may or may not be mutually exclusive. God could in fact be impotent and unloving. I grant that.

Anyways, I think they are a reasonable summary of the options available. You seem confident that I am wrong. Well, please enlighten me as to where I have stuffed up. And as a favour, spell it out to me, don’t point me to other posts.

Hey and let’s make sure we attack the argument not the person. I wish you no ill, I don’t disrespect you or anyone else on this thread. But this is a place where people seek answers. And if I think that an answer is misleading or incorrect, or unsubstantiated or silly or inconsistent, then I will say so. And I am sure everyone else here will pays me the same courtesy of trashing my arguments whenever my arguments deserve it, and I will be the better for it.

Hey and as a side note, don’t assume that because thousands of others have worked on a problem, that any one of us couldn’t have a better answer. That’s an argument from authority proposition, and it should never apply. An argument is as good as the logic and evidence that goes to support it. It’s irrelevant from whom or which book it originates.

Ok, first off Loving is something that is not unique to humans, so it would be hard to call it personification. Sure it is an attempt at personification to just classify it as “loving” but the idea is that more than just humans care for and nurture others.

I can love my friends but may not be able to help them when they make the wrong choices. I can get mad at them, or try to help them, or turn my back on them, or just be there to support them when they are down on their luck because of the choices they made or because of the way things have happened for them. To say that i don’t love them because I can’t help them out of the hole they are in, is false. Since there is no way to scale this up to a cosmic level, I would just have to leave it there.

Secondly, I can see your confusion about the difference between how I use the term “God” and “God’s teachings”. To me “God” is an individual concept that changes from person to person, precisely because “God” is so encompassing that no one point of view would ever suffice.

When I speak of “the teachings or message of God” then I am referring to the traditions that have been passed down through the ages.

I am personally not a big fan of the dogma that has built up in the various religions, but that dogma has always served either a temporary or a more timeless purpose. Burning incense and chanting in candle lit cathedrals was intended to help people step into a different frame of mind and leave the worries of the Dark ages at the door. Prayers, Chants and Mantras are all forms of meditation that give a person the opportunity to shut down their conscious mind and allow for a free flowing stream of thought without the need for grasping at distractions.

It’s the unifying messages that have been given to all peoples through many different sources that appeal to me. Jesus, Muhammed, Buddha, Krishna, Moses, and so many others have had the same messages of unity and love. Those messages are the core of what I would call “God’s teachings” not the concepts of Heaven and Hell, which change from age to age.

It seems to me that you really take issue with the fact that there is hardship in the world and you seem to be saying that by God not coming down to resolve the problems, that is proof that God a)doesn’t care b)isn’t there or c)can’t help.

Fair enough for you to feel that way.

However, you should keep in mind that there are scores of volunteers who travel the world to help people in need, solely because they have faith in God’s teachings.

That faith is real and alive and making a difference in the world.

Absolutely agreed in regards to the “loving” issue.

With regard to helping friends. Of course. We do what we can. And you’re right, it doesn’t scale up.

Just to clarify. I don’t actually take issue with god not fixing things, I don’t believe in anything supernatural. So yes it bothers me that we haven’t managed to do more to reduce the amount of suffering in the world, but god doesn’t come into the equation for me. It’s completely up to us.

This is a change of topic, but agreed, many people do nice things in the name of their faith, as do my atheist and agnostic friends for other reasons.

Also I assure you that most atheists would agree that faith is alive and well and does make the world a very different kind of place to live in. Agreed. :)

It’s late where I live and nice to end on a positive note.

All the best and thanks for clarifying your position. If more people had your view of religion, I honestly think the world would be a nicer place. Hell of a compliment from an atheist.

God doesn’t allow people to suffer. PEOPLE allow people to suffer.

Don’t wast time. God isn’t real it’s that easy. Still beleive in god? Well think aboutit and you won’t anymore

< < doesn’t believe in Karnate111.

Does your mother or father follow you everywhere you go to make sure you do what’s right? No, at some point, they send you out into the world with hope that you’ll do what’s right on your own. It’s a thing called free will. I teach you what to do, and u go out there and apply what you learned. Simple concept. I can’t blame my mother and father for my screwups. I’m the one who screwed up. So don’t blame God for the shit you did, blame yourself. Blame society. Blame their lack of ability to exercise goodness in a world of free will. People always blame inanimate things as their source of misery. How come nobody blames Satan?

“How come nobody blames Satan?”

Some people do blame Satan. Those people scare me.

If God exists he apparently designed the universe in a way such that suffering is possible in it. This makes God evil, if he exists.

@Critter38: I’m glad I scare you. People like you should stay far away from me anyhow.

God doesn’t cause people’s suffering, PEOPLE cause people’s suffering. We took what God gave us and f-cked it up. Blame yourself.