soul building evil would not choose to go through such adversities themselves for soul building. Moreover, natural evil in the form of disasters destroys countless lives while claiming countless for good as well. The deadliest tsunamis Japan and Indonesia have suffered over the years have not led to mass reforms but destruction of masses on grand scale. The nuclear accident of Chernobyl didn’t lead to the residents becoming better people. It destroyed their lives. Therefore, saying that all evil is soul building is a gross understatement. Only a small proportion of evil is soul building .

A. Soul building of audience

There are some who argue that suffering of an individual is soul building for the witnesses as well . But this is also true for only a small proportion of evil. Most evils do not even have an audience they can subject to soul building. The evil that does get an audience only affects a small part of it in a positive way, the rest are either indifferent or unaffected because of their helplessness to aid the suffering. For example, everyday news from the atrocities being carried out in Syria, Kashmir or Yemen reaches every corner of the world. The number of people who are affected by this news is negligible compared to the number of people who are reached by this news. Furthermore, the number of people who resolve to aid the suffering of these people is again negligible compared to the number of people who were affected by the news. So, saying that evil is soul building for its audience is embellishing and exaggerating an understatement.

B. A sense of Pride

The concept of soul-building raises questions regarding why God couldn’t just create us strong in the first place . It is rather pointless to make humans endure extreme suffering and adversities for acquiring strength of character when God had all the power to create them with that strength to begin with. To cater this question, some people present the notion of pride . The notion states that if we acquired strength by God’s power and benevolence then the credit for that strength will go to Him but if we acquired it by our own efforts through suffering and enduring extreme adversities then the credit will go to us. We will have a sense of pride that could not have been acquired otherwise. But evaluating this notion raises questions like why do we have to be proud of suffering, why do we have to be given credit, what’s wrong with the credit going to God if the credit for everything else already goes to Him? These are questions that are not answered