This is incontrovertible proof that God is evil. God does not live by his own golden rule.

[muriel_volestrangler]

83. "God created man in his own image", and as you said, that's about sentience

That's in the foundational text for 2 out of 3 of the Abrahamic religions (and I suspect there's something similar in Islam).

If you think that thorns are comparable with, say, 1 million deaths per year from malaria, and hundreds of millions suffering from that one disease, for millennia, let alone all the others, then there won't be much point in continuing the conversation. If a Creator were following his Golden Rule, he'd have looked at those deaths and how to prevent them. If he's completely alien to human ideas of empathy - fine. That's what would make him 'evil'. A Creator of this universe cannot be said to be benevolent.

Coincidentally, I read this today:

Children were crying as horrible diseases stripped them of any hope of joy.
Vibrant active young adults became crippled and died by every manner of injury and disease.
Mental illness played a changeling game with entire personalities, leaving behind strangers who couldn’t cope.
Cancerous evil that was devouring individuals, families and communities seemed to be everywhere.
...
I understood he was just parroting what he had been taught. This was, after all, the worldview of my church and the majority of evangelicalism. Placing evil in the context of God’s will was a coping mechanism that shut out the human voices of pain and reduced responsibility. But what sickened me was that everyone I knew agreed with this twisted view of God and human suffering. So I decided right then and there that this had to stop. I would find a resolution to The Problem of Evil that would answer my own nagging doubts and quiet the human voices that had kept me awake for so long, even if it killed me. And it nearly did — “Till human voices wake us and we drown.” T.S. Elliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

That day was followed by many years of reading books, journals, and essays from every theological and philosophical perspective possible. For my seminary master’s thesis, I argued that God wasn’t involved or even concerned about individual suffering. Instead, he allowed a specific kind of suffering for the purification of the church, his new Israel. It was a good piece of work but, in the grand tradition of theology, was complete rubbish when it came to the real world. So I continued to struggle with the issue after seminary and for many years after leaving the ministry. Obsessed, I truly felt that although human voices had awakened me to a major problem with the Christian view of God, I was now drowning in a murky sea of theology and philosophy with no lifeline in sight. I grew increasingly depressed and mentally exhausted with what became my personal “koan” (a Zen problem, riddle or puzzle that cannot be resolved by rational thought), until, like a Zen student, I let go, realizing that, like any good koan, the answer is in the riddle itself.

Why does an all-knowing, all-powerful and perfectly good God allow evil? He doesn’t, because he doesn’t exist. After all, where was he while I so fervently sought the Holy Grail? You would think defending himself would be one of his major concerns.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rationaldoubt/2016/12/help-castle-haunted/