Some Thoughts On Morality

The purpose of the world is to refine souls in preparation for eternal life. God created man as a parent gives birth to a child, and the growth of a child into adulthood requires failure and suffering. A person must die in this life before they can be reborn as something eternal and godlike. A seed must die in the earth before sprouting into a tree. God is responsible for suffering just as every parent is responsible for the suffering of the children they bring into the world. God is responsible for evil just as a parent with an evil child is responsible for bringing that child's evil into the world. God created man in hope that he would become an eternal being in relationship with him, parents have children in hope they will become wise adults in community.

The world's structural problems are likely not problems, but necessary elements in the process of refining souls. Personality differences and inequality are necessary factors for humans to navigate during the refining process. Resource shortages and illnesses are similarly necessary aspects of experience. Different kinds of souls might need different kinds of circumstances to reach different kinds of refinement, and this is why the world is diverse and unexplainable in its details.

Complaints against the way things are cannot be used to judge God because he is using the world to refine billions of souls we do not entirely understand. The worst societal conditions can create the context for the best refinement. Final value judgements about the world cannot be made in a temporary time period, just as immediate value judgements cannot be made about stabbing children with needles in the context of an unfinished vaccination process. 

Humans are responsible for our moral will, not for what results from our will's actions. Only God knows the ultimate results of our actions, finite humans cannot acquire enough knowledge to completely control the results of our actions. Our first obligation is to properly direct our will, and then we must act in a way that corresponds to the properly directed will. We can act out of a desire for social justice, but we cannot control the outcome. We would not be good people if we did not try to improve society, so we must act. God uses the way things are, even social dysfunction, to refine our souls, but this refining process assumes that humans in the refining process will try to act virtuously.