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good-5

2024-03-16 View on smbc-comics.com → 1 revision
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good-5
Votey panel for good-5
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Explanation

This comic tackles the classic theological problem of theodicy -- why bad things happen to good people -- through a conversation between what appears to be a person and God (depicted as a night sky or cosmic presence).

The person asks "God, why do bad things happen to bad people?" -- already a humorous inversion of the traditional question, which asks about bad things happening to good people. God responds with a rapid-fire series of philosophical justifications: "Because this is the best of all possible worlds" (referencing Leibniz's optimistic theodicy), that personality is determined by genetics and random events so "bad people" don't really choose to be bad, and that everything good should "sleep" at least occasionally, including contentment, which must "take turns" with negative experiences.

As God goes on with increasingly convoluted rationalizations, the person in the final panel asks God to "please slow down so I can take notes" because they're writing a book and think they can "get three or four religions out of this." The punchline deflates the entire theological enterprise by suggesting that religious doctrines are essentially just people writing down whatever elaborate justifications they can get for the problem of suffering, and that the explanations are so varied and contradictory that you could spin multiple competing religions from a single divine ramble.

View History (1) Original Comic