Beyond Theodicy: God Needs No Vindication

Could the rabbinic and church fathers or the ancestors of philosophy have truly anticipated the level of servitude and confinement to which modern popular ethics would confine humanity? Perhaps-- but I think that I have a certain advantage living in this age, a certain perspective that they may have never imagined--one only made possible by the increasing remoteness of freedom and liberty in contemporary life sold in a faustian bargain for safety, predictability and control.

Traditionally and historically, most meditations and dialogues concerning theodicy presumed a moral playing field that placed suffering, pain and destitution on one end and pleasure and glory on the other. But what of this premise? Are those the most absolute poles of what is good or evil, or natural results of benevolence or malevolence?

What if those polarities, what if that spectrum, wasn't about pleasure and pain or glory and destitution at all? What if, instead, the proper poles were freedom and slavery? On such a playing field and within such a spectrum, there is no need for meditations vindicating an omnibenevolent, omniscient, omnipotent God from the reality of painful things happening to good or innocent people, because the pole of good is the equivalent of the pole of freedom. In other words: God needs no vindication because freedom is inherently and intrinsically good and it is only through offering an allowing it that his omnibenevolence can be expressed, fulfilled and defined