RE: (fwd) Did God Create Evil?
Since it’s Halloween and the witching hour is nearly upon us, it only seems right to break out an e-mail exchange from last October that I was going to post for Halloween 2003 but never got around to.
Last year, just before Halloween, a friend of mine got an annoying evangelical/fundamentalist Christian chain letter from a coworker who had been busily praying for her (presumably damned) soul. This friend passed the chain letter on to a couple of people, myself included, with a request to help get the fundie off her back. What follows is my response, in equal parts serious philosophical exploration, a search for common ground on the topic, and unrepentant fundie-baiting with the best anti-fundamentalist tool in the world: the Bible itself.
The people involved in this exchange both have careers in religiously conservative Kansas to worry about, so their names have been changed. As for myself, I have the benefit of working in the relatively sane and reasonable environment of a college campus where debate and free thought are encouraged.
