A cool guide to Epicurean paradox

I don't know if I misunderstood you, but "making millions of people suffer horribly and needlessly for no fault of their own might just be the most ethical thing there is, you never know, so let's not draw any conclusions about God allowing that to happen." just seems like a rather unconvincing line of thought to me. It's essentially just saying "God is always right, accept that"

I guess god just gave us the moral understanding that his (in)actions are insanely immoral to test our unquestioned loyalty to him, or he just likes a little trolling. Or maybe he just doesn't exist...

An all-knowing, all-encomposing God may have an understanding that we as mortals are incapable of understanding or perceiving.

That being could make us understand.

If you skip the "evil" part and just start talking about "things that are bad for us humans" it's still true though. Sure, maybe child cancer is somehow moral or good from the perspective of an immortal entity, but in this case this entity is obviously operating on a basis that is completely detached from what's meaningful to us. Our lives, our suffering, our hardship - obviously none of all this is relevant enough to a potential god to do anything about it. Or he would, but can't. Hence the Epicurean paradox.

One answer I've heard from religious people is that life after death will make up for it all. But that doesn't make sense either. If heaven/paradise/whatever puts life into such small perspective that our suffering doesn't matter, then our lives truly don't mean anything. It's just a feelgood way of saying god couldn't care less about child cancer - because in the grand scheme of things it's irrelevant anyway.

To us humans, our lives aren't meaningless. Child cancer isn't irrelevant. We care about what's happening in this life and to the people we care about. How could a god be of any relevance to us if our understanding of importance, of value, of good and bad, is so meaningless to them? Why would we ever construct and celebrate organized religion around something so detached from ourselves? The answer is: We wouldn't.

Either god is relevant to our lives or he isn't. Reality tells us: He isn't. Prayers don't work, hardship isn't helped, suffering isn't stopped. Thought through to it's inevitable conclusion the Epicurean paradox is logical proof that god as humans used to think about him doesn't exist, and if something of the sorts exists, it's entirely irrelevant to us.

I think the fundamental issue with this is that it presumes that our understanding of morality is perfect.

By that measure, all religions have the fundamental issue of presuming that they have any actual knowledge or understanding of their god(s).

"Uhhh mysterious ways is why children get cancer"

This is a copout and you're a silly little guy

Regarding your first paragraph:

According to the christian bible their God literally told them that for example killing is evil. And yet, it exists and God is a mass murderer according to bible accounts. There are various explicit and implicit definitions of good and evil available in that book which is supposedly written by their God in some way or another. Therefore, the omnipotent being defined clear rules of morality which it doesn't even uphold itself.

allow people to believe how they want and stop trying to convince people one way another about their beliefs

Although I agree in principle with the notion of "live and let live", organised religion has caused unfathomable suffering and it still does. In a lot of religions it is sadly incorporated into their very core. That's something which I can not tolerate and will speak out against.

Double this.

Basically God's evil != Human's evil