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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

On my worst days I like to think "Well, at least I'm not a cockroach being eaten alive from the inside out, with my vital organs specifically spared long enough so I can survive as food for the thing eating me, by a parasitic wasp."

And, quite seriously, the existence of this type of horrific parasitism precludes the existence of any sort of benevolent god in my mind. It's easy to imagine a million different universes where this sort of abysmal torture doesn't exist, and it only makes sense in the view of "uncaring" evolution.

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This seems silly to me. Where is the line? Would a benevolent god prevent all parasitism? What about predation? Disease? Even if He were to do all of the above, horrific deaths would still be possible through injury, hunger, etc. Would a benevolent god prevent death and heterotrophy as well?

If you were to ascend to the heavens and obtain dominion over all of the universe, would you spend your time meandering around the cosmos, exterminating species whose lifecycles struck you as "horrific"? Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course?

> Would this behavior make you more moral than a god who simply permitted nature to take its course?

This makes no sense to me. Doesn't pretty much every major religion believe God created nature in the first place? Yes, if I were God, I would create a nature in which the horrific torture of innocent, sentient creatures was not possible. On the contrary, currently nature requires this horrific torture for creatures (the parasites) to simply survive in the first place.

Stephen Fry puts it better than I ever could: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-suvkwNYSQo

Would your nature prevent predation? Disease? Heterotrophy (and so hunger)? Violence? Aging? Death?

Keep in mind that any negatives you permit will be offered as proof against your benevolence.

These are all bad straw men and your "slippery slope" arguments are unconvincing. It's easy for rational people to disagree on the potential benefits of certain hardships. I for one would certainly want my own death (eventually), and as I get older I have less against the process of aging than I did in my youth.

But that's why the torture of this parasitoidism is so clear cut. I can't imagine any sane person thinking that this kind of torture is anything but pain and evil. Fry's example is a great one "The world has it in insects whose whole life cycle is to borrow into the eyes of children and make them blind that eat outwards from the eyes. Why? Why would you do that to us? You could have easily have made a creation which that didn't exist." If any person created that kind of torture device we'd consider them to be one of the evil-personified villains in a comic book novel. But yet we come up with all these ridiculous explanations about how a benevolent god created that, just for shits and giggles?

I'd think you'd need to add omnipotent though to be picky. Neither benovelent or omnipotent alone are ruled out.

Do you really think the cockroach feels pain to the same degree we do?

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