THE ESSENTIALS:
Becoming a better person during and after suffering does not prove that the suffering was a blessing in disguise. Or even a part-blessing. A following B does not prove A caused B. Plus situations, lives and persons are more complicated. People only think they know how complicated it is. It is much worse than that. There is more than one cause and we don't know what extent suffering had an input - it could be more than we think or less than we think. It might not be doing it at all.
Some sufferers might turn from evil thinking, "If this is what evil is like, I must change." That is very forced. Real change is spontaneous and firm. Suffering is not changing them at all. They are and they are not themselves.
Fighting pain can lead to more damage and pain. Suffering is deeper than pain and wounds and degrades you.
If suffering can change you that does not justify anybody saying God is right to let it happen. And if God himself says it he has no right to either. God is one thing but people speaking for him are playing God by opening their mouths. Suffering can only be justified if it inherently has the power to heal evil hearts and work for positive change. It has no such inherent power at all and it is extremist to say it does.
Saying suffering changed you to make you more socially aware and devout and compassionate is deliberately picking a piece out of a situation that needs to be read in full. It is trying to fool yourself and others. You need the detailed picture and to know all the knock-on effects. Arrogance is a strange thing to strive for. Just because it is not obviously obnoxious arrogance does not mean it is not arrogance.
And human nature never really does enough for others so going to a religion like Christianity which says Jesus chose the cross for suffering is redemptive and to accompany sufferers in their spiritual and faith progress is not endearing. Why? If there are flaws in how much you care for others it is easy seen why you would want to claim that suffering as a power to train and redeem and cleanse and reform. "Maybe I am not doing enough. Maybe I am not even as good as I think. So what? The suffering that I fail to help with will help them. God will provide."
Remember it is possible to be atheist and think suffering has some inherent power to wash out bad traits and improve a person. But an atheist does not HAVE to think that. The believer in God is thinking it for it and a loving God go hand in hand. The end result is a love that sounds too much like abuse.
THE DIVINE PURPOSE TEACHING OPENS THE DOOR TOO MUCH FOR GASLIGHTING
People pray when the plague hits or the hurricane or when society gets violent. They then reason that their prayers, or rather the power of God's love, explain why somebody survived or helped survivors. The ignore that the good would appear among the mess prayers or not. They ignore how it is a complicated situation and many parts of it got worse after the prayer. They are trying to convince themselves that God is healing and that they are co-operating. Without that notion about prayer the search for a divine purpose for evil would be pointless. There would be no point in even suggesting such a purpose.
So people pray and they notice good happens and that is what they really mean when they say God turns evil to good and good always wins. They know fine well that somebody who thinks good things happen after saying Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! Beetlejuice! will say the same thing. Nobody has the slightest right to take the good that you see happening and claim that their prayers did it. That is using another person's life and benefit for your own ego.
We are told that vicious evils like cruelty are sure to thrive when good men do nothing. The nothing is not literal. You need to be doing good to be called good. What it really means is that the good stand back on OCCASION and that is where things go wrong and evil gets a foothold. Prayer could be doing nothing about some evil. Praying may not take it away. Or it could work but your intention could still be to feel you are doing something while doing nothing. Prayer would surely be a big reason why evil gets in. We could say that there are times evil succeeds because good people pray.
Good does not always win. What wins is something that is a mixture. Just because something is not evil does not mean it is good.
The argument that you must believe in God to get a sense that you should help the stranger, or any person at all, is very common. But it is a deliberate lie. It is told because religion needs to sell the God concept on the basis that it allegedly makes us happier and kinder to think we are part of a divine and benevolent plan.
And why believe? If you slightly think there may be some God surely he can use that to reach you to be a disciple of his compassion? Can your good will keep him out? Surely he is bigger than any wrong notions you have? Paradoxically there is not as much confidence in God in those religions as they say there is.
The argument assumes that God lets evil actions happen out of respect for our free will and to bring good out of it. So we need belief in order to let this good come about. We need to let belief change us.
That is a cynical use of our power to believe in the service of religious ideology. To use the suffering of others to scare or direct us to belief is hardly compatible with concern for those people. Our reverence for God's plan becomes thin.
Anyway the argument that you need to believe implies that if there is no God you shouldn't bother helping the person who needs it. Or that it does not matter one way or the other. You neither should or shouldn't. The compassion of a person who would concur with that is skin-deep indeed. If you are helping because you believe in God you are not helping for the person's sake. You need God as a crutch so that you can persuade yourself and others that you are really caring.
If you link God and humanitarianism you are very much mistaken. It is BECAUSE there is no God that we will look after the person. Period. We don't have to. But it is better to just do it BECAUSE there is no God or anything saying we have to.
Suppose for the sake of argument that it is true that you should help people only if there is a God.
There is a starving child on the street. You can give her your loaf of bread. You assume that it is God's plan that you do this. But is it really? Who are you to decide that it is God's plan? Do you see into God's mind? Religion hauls in notions that God has revealed his will, his commands, in the Bible and through the popes and so on but that does not help. Those authorities are manmade. It is right though that without revelation there is no real way to be sure what moral conduct is. I mean if there is a God unless he tells you what actions he condones and why he is useless and anything goes.
Religion denies that the girl is starving just because God wants to test if you will help her. It however says that part of God's plan is about testing us. Is it the biggest part? If God can send cancer to your baby because in some way it is going to make most people better off in the scheme of things that implies that those people must co-operate enough with the plan to let it work. So it is mostly a test.
To adore God who hurts your family to test you is putting great value on your virtue! It is egotistical extremism.
Religion believes in small plans worked by God but these are part of an overall plan. He lets evil things be done and good things be done for the sake of the plan. So the good you do is not the goal but a means to the goal. The good you do is not the plan but at most it is a part of it and it is a means to implementing the overall plan.
Some conclusions follow.
You are not doing real good unless you do it for God's will and his plan.
You are not doing real good unless it is about the overall goal and not about helping the person as a goal.
You cannot do good unless you believe in God and in his plan and then your good is counterfeit and about looking good and not about being good.
In short, if you do little acts of goodness every day and see them as goals in themselves it is a sin. This is a disgraceful insinuation.
The believer's goodness is intrinsically and implicitly judgmental and vindictive towards the atheist. The atheist helps the suffering baby and does good for her because for her or him this benefit IS the goal.
The atheist does not care if improving somebody's well-being or health is good in the sight of God or not. If God says it is good then the atheist cares that the wellbeing coincides with God's will. She cares about that and not God.
If you cannot do good and make it the goal and have to glorify the good as part of a universal good plan then you are acting like, "Nothing good is worth doing unless it is for a greater good." This shows that your empathy for others is weak. Even without that thought, the fact is that you don't know what this greater good will be so you are really only guessing. Being vague about benefits is a classic sign of being a con artist.
There are many things in life that degrade people without them feeling degraded. Or perhaps they are afraid to admit it. Saying to suffering people that they are in God's lovely plan risks being another degradation in that way. But that aside, it is intrinsically degrading. And believers have no right to get away with it. Challenge them!