1.Problem of Evil - free will.If you have free will,you could be evil.End of story.
It's still a problem because God had to have designed the world to be
able to Fall in the first place knowing of a "chance" of it. Sin may be an unavoidable logical consequence, but Original Sin, to my recollection, was a
deliberate punishment for Adam and Eve
acquiring an independent moral compass. "Fruit of Knowledge of Right and Wrong", immediate consequences involved shame at nudity, very much looks like Adam and Eve did not possess the
capacity to understand their wrongdoing in any fashion but "God said not to".
If you start thinking of potential issues with the scripture, problems pop up
constantly. Catholic doctrine is far more epicycles added to cover these issues than getting across the original point.
2.Dante is not part of catholic doctrine,but one of our writer.You could start bitching about Silmarillion as well,becouse Tolkien was catholic writer,too.
With very, very little lay-worshipper buy in.
As with Tolkein, Dante did not do much in the way of conjure the ideas out of the World of Forms or whatever, he primarily remixed things already in the popular culture. Dante wrote biblical fanfiction with the omnipresent fanon of Hell as a place of obvious wordly-recognizable suffering, because the doctrine on that has no persuasive ability, so the spread of it
had to invent the fire-and-brimestone interpretation rather early on to make points Pagans would make any sense of.
And protestantism is dead.Once it was tool of rulers which made them mini-super popes,now it is something which made everybody head of his own church.
Like 70% of the Christians in the US come down to a half-dozen or so denominations. And unlike Catholicism's reaction to Protestants coming into being, they
just bicker about their differences instead of
starting wars over it. Which has a lot to do with how the English handled their remarkably repetitive turnover, giving the worst of the rabble-rousers over it the option to fuck off to the Americas, where they had no large-scale power structure to turn on the other guys.
Satan is not and never has been God's 'opposite' or capable of meaningful opposition, Satan is the original Big Lie, the fruit of sinfulness and lies, and the font thereof. Evil in the world is simply a consequence of our fallen state, if we all avoided sin and lived lives in accordance with God's will for us, there would be no evil in the world, for there would be no sin.
It answers the questions
far more readily, because the story of Original Sin is one of failing to be
blindly obedient. It was the Fruit of Knowledge of
right and wrong. Adam and Eve
did not have any comprehension of evil. Their
sole ability to understand it was what God told them. The first-order consequences involved them
coming to feel shame at nudity. It inevitably devolves to an axiom that God is Good, no questions
allowed.
Because being the First Cause and omniscient gives
total culpability over all events due to total command of initial conditions and awareness of their possible results. Giving free will to humanity? All consequences known, the
possibility of the Fall to the mistake of an
incomplete moral actor
incapable of understanding it is quite exactly a match for a failure of parental responsibility.
There's a cascade of ridiculous arguments arising from
needing God to be an
infinitely privileged actor, where we
cannot apply day-to-day morality to Him. Again, Catholic doctrine is
mostly ass-covering over a
no-limits fallacy. In the Old Testament, you get
plenty of
implications that God is not three-Os nor the only
existing divinity, thoroughly ignored by Christianity. For fuck's sake, under Judaism it's been valid to call God out for
overstepping His bounds!
This doctrine has no persuasive power to a sceptic. Because you
have to browbeat them into accepting God as
the moral authority
first before virtually anything else of Catholic doctrine can start making sense. Meanwhile, have the Serpent be something God
cannot wipe away,
cannot simply deny, and suddenly you get a cause for Evil that doesn't take
years of education to even
start justifying.