Yesterday, I scanned Twitter, that great marketplace of ideas and current thought, to see what the grassroots are saying. “Stay focused,” one person wrote. “No matter wht comes ur way; opinions, doubt, fear, anxieties, etc. God is in control. Trust .”
Trust is very hard. Then I stumbled across a blog by Orthodox Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (on an unrelated topic) where he asks why some children are abandoned in this world and others are not; why evil falls in one place but not another. Like the rest of us, he doesn’t know.
“The Creator chooses, for reasons unknown to us,” he writes, “to hide behind the veil of nature and it is we humans who must fill in the seemingly empty spaces.”
Interesting to read the comments that follow Julia’s article on the Post website. There are about 128 so far, and after scanning the first 30 or so I decided they all pretty much say the same thing: “There is no such thing as good or evil” as objectively true categories; and “there is no god.” Human beings invented both. Religious people are naive, and they waste their time asking questions like, “Did God allow the tragedy in Tucson?”
I was surprised to see this opinion expressed so uniformly by so many people. Does this really represent the worldview of most people in this country, or are Post readers as a group generally out of touch with the country?
I don’t consider the US a Christian country– I’m not sure there is such a thing– but I’m pretty sure that more people in this country are struggling and praying to make sense of the shooting in Tucson in light of their faith in the God they believe in.
Pax Christi!
Chuck Bradshaw
Hulls Cove, Maine
I am very glad to hear from Julia Duin and have missed her reporting since she left the Washington Times although she has kept a helpful blog.
Why do bad things happen? I have heard all sorts of explanations ranging from because of our free will to the fall of Man from the garden. The only thing I am clear on is that evil is not in God’s Will.
Job puzzled on this as well, and I am not sure that, like the Rabbi, he ever found the explanation, save that we cannot understand God’s ways; but He will let us know Him and He will be with us in the midst of our troubles.
As God says to Job:
[blockquote]Would you condemn me to justify yourself?
Job 40:8[/blockquote]