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#36
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02-20-2018, 08:37 AM
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| The Candyman With the Windowless Van Poster Rank:143 Join Date: Oct 2012 Posts: 11,455 Mentioned: 32 Post(s) Quoted: 6077 Post(s)
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Re: 6yo Schoolboy Killed
Same place he always is. Now here are some of the theistic responses (there are variations on the themes) that I have encountered many times over the course of my philosophy teaching career: (1) The most obvious approach is to point out that he was an "innocent little boy" and is now in heaven, having been spared the miseries of this evil, sin plagued world. When the victim lived in a poor/war torn (or both) country this tends to play well with the faithful, as one envisions a poor quality of life for him if he lived to grow up; (2) depending on the apologist's branch of theism it may also be argued that the kid was being brought up as an unbeliever (e.g., not a Christian, not a Muslim, etc.) and therefore faced not only a miserable earthly existence but one capped by an eternity in Hell. On this view God was especially generous in taking him "home" at such a young age, before he was old enough to make a thought out commitment to the "wrong" religion. Some theologians will complicate the story by bringing in such notions as "Limbo" for children and "election" (basically you are or aren't one of the "saved" by God's choice even before you were born, and there is nothing you can do about it, although you can look for "signs" in your life that may be indicators of which category you belong to. Whether this is consoling or the opposite I leave for the reader to judge.
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