Deadbody
JF-Expert Member
- May 30, 2015
- 4,276
- 6,585
HOT DISCUSSION:
==============
There is only one question which really matters:
Why do bad things happen to good people?
The misfortunes of good people are not only a problem to the people who suffer and to their families.They are a problem to everyone who wants to believe in a just and fair and livable world.They inevitably raise questions about the goodness,the kindness, even the existence of God.
I am a friend of a congregation of six hundred people.I visit them in the hospital, I officiate at their funerals, I try to help them through the wrenching pain of their divorces, their business failures,their unhappiness with their children.I sit and listen to them pour out their stories of terminally ill husbands or wives, of senile parents for whom a long life is a curse rather than a blessing,of seeing people whom they love contorted with pain or buried by frustration. And I find it very hard to tell them that life is fair, that God gives people what they deserve and need.Time after time, I have seen families and even whole communities unite in prayer for the recovery of a sick person, only to have their hopes and prayers mocked. I have seen the wrong people get sick, the wrong people be hurt,the wrong people die young.
Like every reader of this post,I pick up the daily paper and fresh challenges to the idea of the world’s goodness assault my eyes:senseless murders,fatal practical jokes, young people killed in automobile accidents on the way to their wedding or coming home from their high school prom. I add these stories to the personal tragedies I have known, and I have to ask myself:Can I,in good faith, continue to teach people that the world is good, and that a kind and loving God is responsible for what happens in it?
People don’t have to be unusual,saintly human beings to make us confront this problem.We may not often find ourselves wondering,“why do totally unselfish people suffer, people who never do anything wrong?” because we come to know very few such individuals.But we often find ourselves asking why ordinary people,nice friendly neighbors,neither extraordinarily good nor extraordinarily bad, should suddenly have to face the agony of pain and tragedy. If the world were fair, they would not seem to deserve it.They are neither very much better nor very much worse than most people we know; why should their lives be so much harder?To ask “Why do the righteous suffer?” or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is not to limit our concern to the martyrdom of saints and sages, but to try to understand why ordinary people ourselves and people around us—should have to bear extraordinary burdens of grief and pain.
I was a young teacher just starting out in my profession, when I was called on to try to help a family through an unexpected and almost unbearable tragedy.This middle-aged couple had one daughter, a bright nineteen-year-old girl who was in her freshman year at an out-of-state college.One morning at breakfast, they received a phone call from the university infirmary. “We have some bad news for you.Your daughter collapsed while walking to class this morning.It seems a blood vessel burst in her brain.She died before we could do anything for her.We’re terribly sorry.”
This is an attitude we will meet later in the book when we discuss the whole question of guilt. It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve.By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable.
We give people the best possible reason for being good and for avoiding sin.And by believing that, we can maintain an image of God as all-loving, all-powerful, and totally in control. Given the reality of human nature, given the fact that none of us is perfect and that each of us can, without too much difficulty, think of things he has done which he should not have done, we can always find grounds for justifying what happens to us.But how comforting, how religiously adequate,is such an answer?
The couple whom I tried to comfort, the parents who had lost their only child at age nineteen with no warning,were not profoundly religious people.They were not active in the synagogue But when they were stunned by tragedy,they reverted back to the basic belief that God punishes people for their sins.They sat there feeling that their daughter’s death had been their fault;she might still be alive.They sat there angry at God for having exacted His pound of flesh so strictly, but afraid to admit their anger for fear that He would punish them again.Life had hurt them, and religion could not comfort them.Religion was making them feel worse.
The idea that God gives people what they deserve, that our misdeeds cause our misfortune, is a neat and attractive solution to the problem of evil at several levels,but it has a number of serious limitations.As we have seen,it teaches people to blame themselves.It creates guilt even where there is no basis for guilt. It makes people hate God,even as it makes them hate themselves. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.Perhaps if we had lived before the era of mass communications,we could have believed this thesis,as many intelligent people of those centuries did.
It was easier to believe then.You needed to ignore fewer cases of bad things happening to good people.Without newspapers and television, without history books, you could shrug off the occasional death of a child or of a saintly neighbor.We know too much about the world to do that today.How can anyone who recognizes the names Auschwitz and My teacher,or has walked the corridors of hospitals and nursing homes, dare to answer the question of the world’s suffering by quoting Isaiah:“Tell the righteous it shall be well with them”?
To believe that today, a person would either have to deny the facts that press upon him from every side, or else define what he means by “righteous” in order to fit the inescapable facts.We would have to say that a righteous person was anyone who lived long and well, whether or not he was honest and charitable,and a wicked person was anyone who suffered, even if that person’s life was otherwise commendable.
Often, victims of misfortune try to console themselves with the idea that God has His reasons for making this happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge. I think of a woman I know named Helen.
The trouble started when Helen noticed herself getting tired after walking several blocks or standing in line.She chalked it up to getting older and having put on some weight. But one night, coming home after dinner with friends, Helen stumbled over the threshold of the front door, sent a lamp crashing to
the floor, and fell to the floor herself. Her husband tried to joke about her getting drunk on two sips of wine, but Helen suspected that it was no joking matter.The following morning, she made an appointment to see a doctor.
The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis.The doctor explained that it was a degenerative nerve disease,and that it would gradually get worse,maybe quickly,maybe gradually over many years.At some point Helen would find it harder to walk without support.Eventually she would be confined to a wheelchair,lose bowel and bladder control,and become more and more of an invalid until she died.
The worst of Helen’s fears had come true.She broke down and cried when she heard that. “Why should this happen to me? I’ve tried to be a good person.I have a husband and young children who need me. I don’t deserve this. Why should God make me suffer like this?” Her husband took her hand and tried to console her:“You can’t talk like that. God must have His reasons for doing this,and it’s not for.
Helen tried to find peace and strength in those words.She wanted to be comforted by the knowledge that there was some purpose to her suffering, beyond her capacity to understand.She wanted to believe that it made sense at some level. All her life, she had been taught—at religious school and in science classes alike—that the world made sense, that everything that happened, happened for a reason. She wanted so desperately to go on believing that,to hold on to her belief that God was in charge of things,because if He wasn’t,who was? It was hard to live with multiple sclerosis, but it was even harder to live with the idea that things happened to people for no reason,that God had lost touch with the world and nobody was in the driver’s seat.
Helen didn’t want to question God or be angry at Him.But her husband’s words only made her feel more abandoned and more bewildered.What kind of higher purpose could possibly justify what she would have to face?How could this in any way be good? Much as she tried not to be angry at God,she felt angry, hurt, betrayed.She had been a good person; not perfect, perhaps, but honest, hard-working,helpful, as good as most people and better than many who were walking around healthy.What reasons could God possibly have for doing this to her?And on top of it all, she felt guilty for being angry at God.
She felt alone in her fear and suffering.If God had sent her this affliction, if He, for some reason,wanted her to suffer, how could she ask Him to cure her of it?
The newspapers recently carried the story of a woman who had spent six years traveling around the world buying antiques,preparing to set up a business.A week before she was ready to open,a wayward bolt of lightning set off an electrical fire in a block of stores, and several shops, including hers, were burned down.
The goods, being priceless and irreplaceable,were insured for only a fraction of their value.And what insurance settlement could compensate a middle-aged woman for six years of her life spent in searching and collecting?The poor woman was distraught.“Why did this have to happen?Why did it happen to me?”
One friend, trying to console her,was quoted as saying, “Maybe God is trying to teach you a lesson.Maybe He is trying to tell you that He doesn’t want you to be rich.He doesn’t want you to be a successful businesswoman, caught up in profit-and-loss statements all day long and annual trips to the Far East to buy things. He wants you to put your energies into something else, and this was His way of getting His message across to you.”
We have all read stories of little children who were left unwatched for just a moment and fell from a window or into a swimming pool and died.Why does God permit such a thing to happen to an innocent child?It can’t be to teach a child a lesson about exploring new areas.By the time the lesson is over,the child is dead.Is it to teach the parents and baby-sitters to be more careful?
That is too trivial a lesson to be purchased at the price of a child’s life. Is it to make the parents more sensitive, more compassionate people,more appreciative of life and health because of their experience?Is it to move them to work for better safety standards, and in that way save a hundred future lives?The price is still too high, and the reasoning shows too little regard for the value of an individual life.
I am offended by those who suggest that God creates retarded children so that those around them will learn compassion and gratitude.Why should God distort someone else’s life to such a degree in order to enhance my spiritual sensitivity.
There may be another approach.Maybe God does not cause our suffering.Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God.The psalmist writes, “I lift mine eyes to the hills; from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, maker of Heaven and earth.” (Psalm 121:1–2) He does not say, “My pain comes from the Lord,” or “my tragedy comes from the Lord.”He says “my help comes from the Lord.”
Could it be that God does not cause the bad things that happen to us? Could it be that He doesn’t decide which families shall give birth to a handicapped child, that He did not single out Ron to be crippled by a bullet or Helen by a degenerative disease, but rather that He stands ready to help them and us cope with our tragedies if we could only get beyond the feelings of guilt and anger that separate us from Him? Could it be that “How could God do this to me?”
Is really the wrong question for us to ask?
Why bad things happen to good people?
========
WELCOME ALL TO THIS DISCUSSION
==============
There is only one question which really matters:
Why do bad things happen to good people?
The misfortunes of good people are not only a problem to the people who suffer and to their families.They are a problem to everyone who wants to believe in a just and fair and livable world.They inevitably raise questions about the goodness,the kindness, even the existence of God.
I am a friend of a congregation of six hundred people.I visit them in the hospital, I officiate at their funerals, I try to help them through the wrenching pain of their divorces, their business failures,their unhappiness with their children.I sit and listen to them pour out their stories of terminally ill husbands or wives, of senile parents for whom a long life is a curse rather than a blessing,of seeing people whom they love contorted with pain or buried by frustration. And I find it very hard to tell them that life is fair, that God gives people what they deserve and need.Time after time, I have seen families and even whole communities unite in prayer for the recovery of a sick person, only to have their hopes and prayers mocked. I have seen the wrong people get sick, the wrong people be hurt,the wrong people die young.
Like every reader of this post,I pick up the daily paper and fresh challenges to the idea of the world’s goodness assault my eyes:senseless murders,fatal practical jokes, young people killed in automobile accidents on the way to their wedding or coming home from their high school prom. I add these stories to the personal tragedies I have known, and I have to ask myself:Can I,in good faith, continue to teach people that the world is good, and that a kind and loving God is responsible for what happens in it?
People don’t have to be unusual,saintly human beings to make us confront this problem.We may not often find ourselves wondering,“why do totally unselfish people suffer, people who never do anything wrong?” because we come to know very few such individuals.But we often find ourselves asking why ordinary people,nice friendly neighbors,neither extraordinarily good nor extraordinarily bad, should suddenly have to face the agony of pain and tragedy. If the world were fair, they would not seem to deserve it.They are neither very much better nor very much worse than most people we know; why should their lives be so much harder?To ask “Why do the righteous suffer?” or “Why do bad things happen to good people?” is not to limit our concern to the martyrdom of saints and sages, but to try to understand why ordinary people ourselves and people around us—should have to bear extraordinary burdens of grief and pain.
I was a young teacher just starting out in my profession, when I was called on to try to help a family through an unexpected and almost unbearable tragedy.This middle-aged couple had one daughter, a bright nineteen-year-old girl who was in her freshman year at an out-of-state college.One morning at breakfast, they received a phone call from the university infirmary. “We have some bad news for you.Your daughter collapsed while walking to class this morning.It seems a blood vessel burst in her brain.She died before we could do anything for her.We’re terribly sorry.”
This is an attitude we will meet later in the book when we discuss the whole question of guilt. It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve.By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable.
We give people the best possible reason for being good and for avoiding sin.And by believing that, we can maintain an image of God as all-loving, all-powerful, and totally in control. Given the reality of human nature, given the fact that none of us is perfect and that each of us can, without too much difficulty, think of things he has done which he should not have done, we can always find grounds for justifying what happens to us.But how comforting, how religiously adequate,is such an answer?
The couple whom I tried to comfort, the parents who had lost their only child at age nineteen with no warning,were not profoundly religious people.They were not active in the synagogue But when they were stunned by tragedy,they reverted back to the basic belief that God punishes people for their sins.They sat there feeling that their daughter’s death had been their fault;she might still be alive.They sat there angry at God for having exacted His pound of flesh so strictly, but afraid to admit their anger for fear that He would punish them again.Life had hurt them, and religion could not comfort them.Religion was making them feel worse.
The idea that God gives people what they deserve, that our misdeeds cause our misfortune, is a neat and attractive solution to the problem of evil at several levels,but it has a number of serious limitations.As we have seen,it teaches people to blame themselves.It creates guilt even where there is no basis for guilt. It makes people hate God,even as it makes them hate themselves. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.Perhaps if we had lived before the era of mass communications,we could have believed this thesis,as many intelligent people of those centuries did.
It was easier to believe then.You needed to ignore fewer cases of bad things happening to good people.Without newspapers and television, without history books, you could shrug off the occasional death of a child or of a saintly neighbor.We know too much about the world to do that today.How can anyone who recognizes the names Auschwitz and My teacher,or has walked the corridors of hospitals and nursing homes, dare to answer the question of the world’s suffering by quoting Isaiah:“Tell the righteous it shall be well with them”?
To believe that today, a person would either have to deny the facts that press upon him from every side, or else define what he means by “righteous” in order to fit the inescapable facts.We would have to say that a righteous person was anyone who lived long and well, whether or not he was honest and charitable,and a wicked person was anyone who suffered, even if that person’s life was otherwise commendable.
Often, victims of misfortune try to console themselves with the idea that God has His reasons for making this happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge. I think of a woman I know named Helen.
The trouble started when Helen noticed herself getting tired after walking several blocks or standing in line.She chalked it up to getting older and having put on some weight. But one night, coming home after dinner with friends, Helen stumbled over the threshold of the front door, sent a lamp crashing to
the floor, and fell to the floor herself. Her husband tried to joke about her getting drunk on two sips of wine, but Helen suspected that it was no joking matter.The following morning, she made an appointment to see a doctor.
The diagnosis was multiple sclerosis.The doctor explained that it was a degenerative nerve disease,and that it would gradually get worse,maybe quickly,maybe gradually over many years.At some point Helen would find it harder to walk without support.Eventually she would be confined to a wheelchair,lose bowel and bladder control,and become more and more of an invalid until she died.
The worst of Helen’s fears had come true.She broke down and cried when she heard that. “Why should this happen to me? I’ve tried to be a good person.I have a husband and young children who need me. I don’t deserve this. Why should God make me suffer like this?” Her husband took her hand and tried to console her:“You can’t talk like that. God must have His reasons for doing this,and it’s not for.
Helen tried to find peace and strength in those words.She wanted to be comforted by the knowledge that there was some purpose to her suffering, beyond her capacity to understand.She wanted to believe that it made sense at some level. All her life, she had been taught—at religious school and in science classes alike—that the world made sense, that everything that happened, happened for a reason. She wanted so desperately to go on believing that,to hold on to her belief that God was in charge of things,because if He wasn’t,who was? It was hard to live with multiple sclerosis, but it was even harder to live with the idea that things happened to people for no reason,that God had lost touch with the world and nobody was in the driver’s seat.
Helen didn’t want to question God or be angry at Him.But her husband’s words only made her feel more abandoned and more bewildered.What kind of higher purpose could possibly justify what she would have to face?How could this in any way be good? Much as she tried not to be angry at God,she felt angry, hurt, betrayed.She had been a good person; not perfect, perhaps, but honest, hard-working,helpful, as good as most people and better than many who were walking around healthy.What reasons could God possibly have for doing this to her?And on top of it all, she felt guilty for being angry at God.
She felt alone in her fear and suffering.If God had sent her this affliction, if He, for some reason,wanted her to suffer, how could she ask Him to cure her of it?
The newspapers recently carried the story of a woman who had spent six years traveling around the world buying antiques,preparing to set up a business.A week before she was ready to open,a wayward bolt of lightning set off an electrical fire in a block of stores, and several shops, including hers, were burned down.
The goods, being priceless and irreplaceable,were insured for only a fraction of their value.And what insurance settlement could compensate a middle-aged woman for six years of her life spent in searching and collecting?The poor woman was distraught.“Why did this have to happen?Why did it happen to me?”
One friend, trying to console her,was quoted as saying, “Maybe God is trying to teach you a lesson.Maybe He is trying to tell you that He doesn’t want you to be rich.He doesn’t want you to be a successful businesswoman, caught up in profit-and-loss statements all day long and annual trips to the Far East to buy things. He wants you to put your energies into something else, and this was His way of getting His message across to you.”
We have all read stories of little children who were left unwatched for just a moment and fell from a window or into a swimming pool and died.Why does God permit such a thing to happen to an innocent child?It can’t be to teach a child a lesson about exploring new areas.By the time the lesson is over,the child is dead.Is it to teach the parents and baby-sitters to be more careful?
That is too trivial a lesson to be purchased at the price of a child’s life. Is it to make the parents more sensitive, more compassionate people,more appreciative of life and health because of their experience?Is it to move them to work for better safety standards, and in that way save a hundred future lives?The price is still too high, and the reasoning shows too little regard for the value of an individual life.
I am offended by those who suggest that God creates retarded children so that those around them will learn compassion and gratitude.Why should God distort someone else’s life to such a degree in order to enhance my spiritual sensitivity.
There may be another approach.Maybe God does not cause our suffering.Maybe it happens for some reason other than the will of God.The psalmist writes, “I lift mine eyes to the hills; from where does my help come? My help comes from the Lord, maker of Heaven and earth.” (Psalm 121:1–2) He does not say, “My pain comes from the Lord,” or “my tragedy comes from the Lord.”He says “my help comes from the Lord.”
Could it be that God does not cause the bad things that happen to us? Could it be that He doesn’t decide which families shall give birth to a handicapped child, that He did not single out Ron to be crippled by a bullet or Helen by a degenerative disease, but rather that He stands ready to help them and us cope with our tragedies if we could only get beyond the feelings of guilt and anger that separate us from Him? Could it be that “How could God do this to me?”
Is really the wrong question for us to ask?
Why bad things happen to good people?
========
WELCOME ALL TO THIS DISCUSSION
