People thought for a long time that the course of the history of suffering could be changed, in the modern process of emancipation, by man's assuming responsibility for his own fate. Self-redeeming, self-emancipating man was to take the place of the redeeming God; man instead of God was to direct the course of history. But, as we have seen, it is more questionable than ever today whether scientific-technological evolution or even political-social revolution could of themselves bring about a decisive turn in mankind's history of suffering. Certainly the suffering have changed but they have not thereby become less. And, instead of God, it is now man who is charged with being a perpetrator of misdeeds and thus compelled to justify himself; instead of a theo-dicy there has to be an anthropo-dicy. But, compelled to justify himself, emancipated man attempts to exonerate himself, to find an alibi and to shift the blame with the aid of a variety of excuse mechanisms. He practices the art of showing "that it was not him." As if he were responsible only for the successes and not for the failures of technological evolution. As if all blame, and all failure could be laid on the transcendental ego (Idealism) or on the reactionary, counterrevolutionary class enemy (Marxism). As if there were no one responsible for the suffering of history, but only man's environment or his genetic pre-programming, or his instinctive urges, or quite generally individual, social, linguistic structures.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Atheism, materialism, scientism are never subjected to the same rigorous standards that are commonly demanded of religion, they have a series of dodges, of claiming, for example, that atheism isn't a belief system when it certainly is, or an ideology when it couldn't be clearer that it is an ideological position and, in its aggressive forms, it is a program.
If atheism cannot give someone satisfaction on the question of evil it is certainly not recommended by that, even if it claims that it it never promised one. If religon is to be held to be contemptible and discredited because it not provide relief, an answer, a solution, to the question as posed, certainly those who pose it must be held to the same standard of judgement that they demand for their opponents. What matters in the end is whether or not the position held or, especially, demanded is valid provides the satisfaction which is the only useful thing in considering the question of pain or evil or suffering. If the person is left in pain and suffering, if the evil continues, then, as pointed out the last time, even looking for an answer, never mind never looking for one while asserting an ideological position is less than useless. If the atheist never intended to try to give an answer, bringing the question up for their own purposes certainly is nothing that someone who is in pain should be bothered with. They have enough to be getting on with without having someone who doesn't intend to help bothering them.
After the long attempt mentioned above, of trying to find various political or sociological, to make secular attempts to "solve" the problem of pain and evil are hardly great successes as compared to religious attempts to at least lessen those through the central value of the Jewish tradition, justice. Many if not all of those attempts in the West have been through ideas that are central to the Biblical tradition, especially under the influence of Darwinism, the atheists are far more likely to insist that inequality is salubrious and under Marxism that dictatorship is the answer. Those are certainly less than useless in answering the despair of a person in pain, suffering, they are a guarantee of the very evil that "the question of evil" is raised to address, or, more typically in the case of atheists, to use as a polemical weapon.
Religion offers the possibility of entirely more than atheism can hold out to someone in pain and despair, not an end to pain, not an end to suffering, not even a guarantee of an end of human created evil but the possibility that there is more than those.
Redemption alone makes man free at a depth which emancipation cannot reach. Redemption alone can lead a person liberated from sin aware that he is accepted for time and eternity, to a meaningful life, to an unreserved effort for his fellow man, for society, for the new men liberated from the misery of this world. For emancipation has by no means enabled man to escape his history of suffering sin and death. And if he still wants to find a meaning in meaningless suffering and dying, in the suffering even of the dead and vanquished, he is thrown back on the ultimate reality; confronted with God from whom he can certainly cannot demand an account, being himself no longer innocent but in need of justification. Emancipated man cannot bypass his substantial co-responsibility for the world and mankind as they are. In the light of this, his self-understanding is perhaps made easier today than it was for the non-emancipated Job, who apparently had nothing with which to reproach himself. Yet, in a fundamentally different situation from that of Job, he will never face God with his history of suffering. With intellectual arguments he gets no further than Job's friends. Suffering imposes a limit to all reasoning.
In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus asks his followers which of them, if their child asked for fish would give them a snake or if they asked bread who would give them a stone. In Luke the same account he includes the far more colorful request for an egg being answered with a scorpion. That is what the atheist discourse of the question of evil, the question of pain and suffering offers for the person in pain who cries out for help. It answers questions of pain with ineffective answers and, ultimately, no recourse. And that's when they aren't discounting the significance of pain and suffering and the minds who experience pain and suffering and the ability to identify the difference between good and evil.
Note: It should be pointed out that the story of Job, such an early and important part of the Jewish Bible, that the righteous, almost unbelievably good Job is not a Hebrew but was from Uz, most probably considered to be an Edomite, people who are certainly not treated very well in the later writings. Yet this story of the righteous Job is contained in the Jewish Scriptures and is important for both Christians and Muslims, as well. Job the non-Hebrew is made the very symbol of the question of evil, unearned pain, one of the most sympathetic figures in all of literature. I think its inclusion in the Scripture is something that adds enormously to the credibility of that that tradition.
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