The biggest obstacle to faith

For me, there is one great big obstacle for believing in a loving compassionate God. I have spent years trying to excuse it, work around it, ignore it, work through it, yet it still persists. I have prayed for an answer, any answer, but the silence is deafening. It is the big elephant in the room that simply won’t go away.   It is why God’s creation lets bad things happen to perfectly innocent helpless people.

No, I am not thinking about atrocities and the horrors of war. People make wars and are responsible for all their consequences, not God.   Nor am I thinking about tragedies that result from human greed or deliberate carelessness such as a drunk drivers killing people, or bridges collapsing because of cost-cutting or faulty design.  No, I put those squarely on human shoulders.

It is horrors over which people have no input on, and are totally blameless. Example abound such as the recent death of Johnathan Petrie as a result of a horrid skin disease, or an innocent young child contracting bone cancer.  Neither of these did anything to bring this on, nor is there a human agent behind them.

Oh yes, I have read more than one apologia including the one presented by Rabbi Kushner in “When Bad Things Happen to Good People, along with every treatise I can get my hands on. Still nothing.

And this leaves me looking over the edge of a mihilistic abyss where one of the following has to be true: God does not care, God does not exist, or God is a mean nasty travesty of a being who I want nothing whatever to do with.

If you have any possible useful apologia, please oh please sent it to me. No dogma ir empty platitudes please.

In the meantime, I will continue my long search spurred on by the terrifying beauty of the universe and the certainty that compassion, love, as expressed by Jesus offer hope for all of us trapped in the state of life,