Where does suffering, evil, or injustice come from?

Life is a test, and a real test must contain real difficulty (Qur'an 67:2). Evil comes from the free choices the test requires. Suffering is never wasted — it erases sins, raises rank, and can hide a good we cannot see.

Atheist thinkers give a natural account: suffering comes from an indifferent physical world — disease, earthquakes, scarcity — from evolved human drives like aggression and tribalism, and from the unjust institutions humans build. It is not punishment, and it is not a devil's work.

Agnosticism has no doctrine of evil. Agnostics typically accept natural and human explanations for the suffering we can observe — disease, scarcity, cruelty — and leave the ultimate 'why' open; Hume's Dialogues, a founding text, treats the problem of evil as itself a reason to suspend judgement about how the world is governed.

From the Fall: Genesis tells how humanity's first disobedience let sin and death into the world (Romans 5:12). Augustine taught that evil is not a thing God made but a corruption of good, born of the misuse of free will.

From human choice: the Torah sets blessing and curse before people and commands 'choose life,' and the rabbis speak of an evil inclination every person must master. The book of Job adds, honestly, that some suffering remains a mystery known fully only to God.

Not from a devil or a divine test: the Pali Canon traces suffering to craving (tanha) and ignorance, unfolding through a chain of causes called dependent origination. Evil acts spring from greed, hatred, and delusion in the human mind.

From karma: every act bears fruit, and present suffering is the ripening of one's own past deeds in this life or earlier ones. The Gita adds desire and anger, born of attachment, as the engines that keep the cycle turning.

Not from a devil: suffering and injustice flow from ego and attachment — acting for the self binds people to karma and rebirth, and ego holding power becomes oppression. The Guru Granth Sahib calls ego a chronic disease that nonetheless carries its own cure within.

Secularism offers no full theory of evil. The evil it targets is specific: the suffering produced when rulers impose belief and majorities turn the law against religious minorities, as in Europe's wars of religion; deeper accounts of evil are left to the worldviews citizens hold.

From two sources: nature (disease, disaster, scarcity) and human beings themselves (cruelty, greed, ignorance, unjust institutions). No devil, curse, or cosmic fall is involved.

Liberalism has no doctrine of cosmic evil; it explains injustice politically. The suffering humans can fix comes mostly from coercion, monopoly of power, and the denial of rights; the rest belongs to nature and to questions liberalism leaves to religion and philosophy.

Not from fate or biology but from history: laws that made wives dependents, economies that shut women out, and ideas that taught both sexes to accept it. Feminism's wings differ on the root — liberals point to unequal laws, radicals to male dominance itself, intersectional feminists to interlocking systems of sex, race, and class.

From domination: empires ruling peoples without their consent, conquerors erasing cultures, and — in modern accounts like Hazony's — universal projects that override nations. Injustice begins when one people decides for another.