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,
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,
The only conclusion that I have come to is that the sacrifice of these lives is for us to learn something from their struggle. What that lesson is is where the Divine enters in and helps us to see the world anew through the gift of those who have been lost. Jonathan's life and the young one with bone cancer's life will make someone else's life better. The education gained by their brave struggle and the help it can bring to others is, in my opinion, why bad things happen to innocent people. I also believe that the Divine walks beside us in those moments of loss and trusts that His people will learn from that loss how to better care for others, honouring those who have gone before.
ReplyDeleteI think it was from C.S. Lewis I learned "This is a broken world, and broken things happen in it." Not that there's no good, just that it's no longer possible for it to be all good everywhere.
ReplyDeleteWhich does imply that God at least limits Godself from things that might be corrected by Divine intervention. Why that? I don't have a stock answer either.