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Suffering From A Powerful And Good God

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Pain and suffering in the face of the idea of an all powerful and good God has presented difficulties for philosophers and theologians alike for centuries. The 20th century Jewish French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas attempts to explain pain in his essay, Useless Suffering. Levinas suggest through an abbreviated phenomenology and subsequent thrashing of theodicy that suffering is best understood as “meaningful in me, useless in the Other.”1 While Levinas 's phenomenology is logically consistent, his assessment of usefulness of theodicy in light of the suffering of the 20th century is suspect, however this does not impact the validity of his understanding of suffering in the inter-human order. Levians 's attempt to address the phenomenon of suffering from his observations led to a flawed mindset that excused the work of theodicy rather choosing to explain “useless suffering” from an inter-human perspective apart from God. Levinas approaches the topic of suffering from the discipline of phenomenology. Attempting to explain suffering in the world, Levinas approaches the problem from conscious perception of suffering. From observation of pain and suffering Levinas states the following conclusion:
This elevated thought2 is the honor of a still uncertain and blinking modernity coming at the end of a century of nameless sufferings, but in which the suffering of suffering, the suffering for the useless suffering of the other person, the just suffering in me for the unjustifiable

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