Yes, it is noble and good for people to attempt to alleviate suffering currently on earth. But what power does secular humanism really have to end all human suffering for all time? Seems to me that history teaches that there will be no end to suffering in this world.
In contrast, the Christian faith promises eternal life in a new heaven and new earth without any more suffering. The resurrection demonstrates God’s power to fulfill this promise.
Just this morning I read this reflection on how these promises from God can also help people who suffer in this life.
Jesus entered the world as the Son of God. That is not nothing.
He will praise religion and faith and his upbringing, but I just checked - as your quote says - he isn’t active in organized religion and I couldn’t find any indication he personally believes in God.
Promises, promises. It is this life, this earth that most care about. If Christianity is powerless in this life on this earth, why should anyone believe them about eternal life in a new heaven and a new earth? Sound like a con game to me. Worship and obey God in this life and He promises to reward you in the Next life. Even as a child, I knew that this was a crook when the nuns told me.
An all powerful being, existing prior to the Big Bang, waits 13.8 billion years to impregnate a young Jewish girl so that He can grow up and be used as a human blood sacrifice of suffering and death to appease for sins against Him. Yes, makes prefect sense.
I don’t actually believe in what you wrote. I only believe he waited 4000-5000 years. It does make sense: How else can He be a God of love and justice? We had to be able to make a choice to love and He had to be able to administer justice while loving us if we choose not to love Him.
Also I was thinking about how suffering is not a very good reason to dismiss the existence of God. We as humans already know suffering is worth it when we have a goal - people endure chemo in order to be well, extreme athletes torture their bodies, and my husband hauled himself up the side of the mountain while sick with a virus because he wanted to summit it. I decided to be pregnant knowing that I’d probably feel like for a long time because I knew it would be temporary. And I cry almost every day because it really isn’t fun. Suffering only asks us to either decide it’s meaningless or if there might be a goal or greater plan.
God is with us in the midst of suffering, providing comfort, helping scientists find solutions, and ultimately pointing us to the better place He has prepared for us in the next life.
What comfort does atheism provide to those who have lost loved ones this year? From an atheist perspective, why do you call the pandemic a bad thing? Its just the outworking of natural processes.
I resent the connotations of this greatly. Christians don’t have a monopoly of human empathy and compassion. Atheist doctors and secular healthcare workers did more to minimize human suffering this year than all the pastors, priests, popes, bishops, evangelicals preachers combined. I am applauded at the sear uselessness of the Christian community worldwide during this pandemic. Instead of minimizing suffering, they advocate praying to an utterly useless god as well as going to Supreme Court to be allowed under freedom of religion to have super spreader events in the name of their god. I am sure that one of the casualties of the Post Corona world will be a rapid secularization of the world. I am sure that the Nones (Atheists, Agosntics, Nothing in Particular) will exceed 50% in the United States in 2020. We are now in the post Christian America where secular values (and not Christian values) will be the norm going forward. Covid accelerated this process by a decade. The post corona world will be secular.
Christianity is not completely powerless, even by the standards of a skeptic. You might have thought the nuns were crooks, but they taught you math, science, English, and a lot of other things else, didn’t they? And clearly they didn’t do such a bad job, since from this foundational education you eventually managed to obtain a PhD in electrical engineering and become an IEEE fellow who contributed positively to society. The Catholic school that you studied in probably also produced many other remarkable individuals, even if not all of them remained Catholic. Catholic groups have done a considerable bit to help improve education and literacy around the world. Even if you think secular humanism can do a better job now, at least acknowledge that Catholicism did some good in contributing positively to society, including in your own personal history.
You’re now a secular humanist, but my guess is that your preferred brand of secular humanism shares many values with the Christian West. The rise of secular humanism itself cannot be disentangled from the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, which themselves arose from various streams of thought in the Medieval era. This is why the values and ideals of modern secular ideology found in China, for example, are very different from that of the West.
“From an atheist perspective, why is it bad that millions of people get seriously ill and/or die?”
It’s bad for the same reason you consider it bad - we generally regard human suffering as bad. Just because a death is natural doesn’t make it any less painful to humans that possess empathy and miss people when they die. I’m baffled that you genuinely felt the need to ask that question.
Well, a lot of us are also baffled why atheists keep asking us why we believe in a powerless God. Clearly we don’t believe that God is powerless; we just think he works in a different way than some atheists expect.
One could make a far stronger case for God having sent this particular plague as a pointed message to US and Brazilian evangelicals for their political choices.
That’s fine, although I think few atheists would actually ask a Christian “why do you believe in a powerless god?”, because it seems quite obvious to me that the answer is as you described.
Maybe I’m just biased, but it seems more reasonable to me to ask Christians questions about the nature of God and how he might intervene in the world, since this can be a very complex and nuanced subject, than it is to ask an atheist why they think it’s bad if millions of people suffer and die, which seems perfectly straightforward and obvious. If nothing else, the latter can come off as quite insulting, don’t you agree?
for a long time because I knew it would be temporary. And I cry almost every day because it really isn’t fun. 
Suffering only asks us to either decide it’s meaningless or if there might be a goal or greater plan.