Guinness has set before us in clear and forceful language what our contemporary intellectual context finds unspeakable: the raw reality of rampant evil. He touches upon the deepest of issues, and, through his incisive analyzes, gives us hope of being able to deal with evil in our personal lives and our social settings.

Outstanding book. Is one of those books that makes you think and provides memorable impression to cause you to revisit it again. ( )

Guinness argues there are 3 ways to respond to the question of evil: as an Eastern believer in the need to extinguish meaning; as a secularist/humanist believer that the individual creates meaning; or as a Christian believer that God gives meaning to human suffering by having suffered Himself.

(1) "The Buddhist remedy for suffering is stern, even drastic. If 'the great deathless lake of Nirvana' is a state of extinguishedness, what is extinguished is not only suffering but attachment, desire, and - finally - the individual who desires.... as the philosopher Ninian Smart concluded bluntly, 'There is Nirvana, but no person who enters it.'
"To say it again, in the Buddhist view there is quite simply no remedy for suffering in this world. Nor is there any prospect of a coming world without suffering. There is not even the hope that you and I will ever live free of suffering. And finally, there is no 'you' or 'I' at all. As Buddhagosa said of his state of enlightenment, 'I am nowhere a somewhatness for anyone.' There is only the nobility of the compassion of the enlightened on their road to the 'liberation' of extinction.
"As I see it, the modern, global era raises a titanic challenge for the Eastern family of faiths at this point. These faiths are essentially and explicitly world-denying, whereas the modern world is essentially and explicityly world-affirming...." (119-120)

[Sounds like the Buddha was clear-eyed, hard-headed & realistic. He never promised us a rose garden.]

(2) "Humanism's all-decisive claim is that, since there is no God, there is no revealed meaning and no intrinsic meaning in the universe at all. Therefore meaning is not disclosed or even discovered. It has to be created. Human beings are both the source and standard of their own meaning, so it is up to each of us to create our own meaning and impose it on the world. And if we cannot impose our meaning on the world as a whole, we can impose it in our own small lives as an act of self-creation." (129)
"Here we can see the modern world's grand challenge to the secularist family of faiths. These faiths appeal to society's intellectual elites (seen in George Steiner's description of agnosticism as 'the established church of modernity. By its somewhat bleak light, the educated and the rational conduct their immanent lives'), but they hold little or no attraction for ordinary people. Bloodless as well as bleak, they are too cerebral for everyday life. This is a fatal flaw, and a central reason for the decline of atheism and the weakness of the secularist movement.
"[Bertrand] Russell prescribed this ethics 'for temperaments like my own,' but how many people are included in this sweep? How many of us, having been told about the bleakness of human prospects, will still adhere to the nobility of humanist ethics - especially if it appears that the author himself did not? Why should we care for others as ourselves? Would it not be just as consistent to eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die?
"On Camus's tombstone are these words from The Myth of Sisyphus: 'The struggle toward the summit itself suffices to fill a man's heart.' But how many will find rebellion to be a satisfying reason for existence when we know from the beginning that we can never reach the summit? When we know that, like Sisyphus, we can never roll the stone to the top of the hill, that even our best, highest, and ultimate efforts can end only in final defeat?
"....
"Are secularism's bleakness and narrow appeal to elites signs of strength or weakness? Are these qualities proof of secularists' honesty and a badge of their unflinching realism, or are they an admission of secularism's ultimate inadequacy?" (133-134)

[Sounds like secularism is just too "hard" for stupid people.]

(3) "God is all-good: no other god has wounds.... In contrast to the Eastern religions, the biblical response to evil and suffering is one of engagement, not detachment. And in contrast to secularist beliefs, we are not on our own as we fight evil. Precisely because of a wisdom and strength greater than our own, those who combat wrong can have solid grounds for trusting in the final triumph of good over evil. Our individual prospects end only in death, and the cosmic prospects for the planet are a stay of execution only delayed somewhat by a few billion years. But Jewish and Christian confidence is not in science and human efforts. Even when we die, God keeps faith with us in the dust." (145)
"In contrast to those who think religious belief is mere human projection, the God of the biblical story is not simply personal for us but personal in himself. He is personal because of his own nature, not because we need him to be personal. He is not made in our image; we are made in his. And there is no other ground for justifying the preciousness and inalienable dignity of each human being. Those who prize human rights without this root will find it a cut-flower ideal as disappointing as it is short-lived." (146)

[Sounds like magical thinking to me. And there have been plenty of wounded gods in the history of religion. Check out http://www.librarything.com/work/300526 .]