Haiti and how we respond to suffering

Q: Many have criticized Pat Robertson's suggestion that the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti was the work of the devil or a form of divine punishment. But if one believes God is good and intervenes in the world, why does God allow innocents to suffer? What is the best scriptural text or explanation of that problem you've ever read?

The first question in the Bible is the one God speaks to Adam, "Where are you?" but as every believer knows, it can also be reversed "Where are You?" Where is God amidst all the anguish of this world?

Religion has traditionally assumed that aim and end of life is for human beings to grow in soul; the poet Keats' called the world a 'vale of soul-making.' Growing in soul, to deepen our understanding, broaden our imaginations, enhance our courage and compassion, can take as many forms as there are people; there is no single path. To grow requires that the world be so constructed to enable us make choices. And the ability to choose requires free will.

Humanly-caused suffering is of course only a part of what human beings must endure. Disease and natural disasters have plagued our history, and there is no adequate answer to the anguish and death these have wrought. Part of the response of faith is to understand what role suffering might play in the way human souls grow. (Read more about Judaism, suffering and the problem of evil.)

When we ask why bad things happen to good people, we have to recognize the consequences envisaged by that question. Imagine good things always happened to good people and bad things always happened to bad people. Every time you robbed, you would be stricken with disease. True, you would never steal, but the choice not to steal would have no moral meaning. We would be like rats in a Skinner box, pushing the bar to receive a pellet of food. Morality in its highest form consists in being good regardless of what befalls us. To be good only to get something in return is not goodness, but expedience. If the aim of all life is to grow in soul, goodness cannot be merely prudence.

Many of us might readily forfeit purity for goodness - let people get rewards, so long as they are good! But the best way to destroy goodness is to make it always dependent upon a reward. In education we begin by rewarding a student but to get a lifelong learner one must cultivate love of learning itself. To get a reliably moral person there must be a commitment to morality that cannot be simply shaped by reward.

A program of simple reward and punishment destroys the intrinsic meaning of being good. Human beings respond to a very complicated and always shifting system; rewards and punishments matter, but they cannot be all. To do good is to do good without any certainty of reward. Achieving goodness in the world as a demonstration of soul growth is a crucial aim of all serious religious traditions.

An ancient Rabbi notes that we see not through the light of the eye but through the dark of the eye. Pain is indispensable to growth. Once I was asked to address a group of recovering alcoholics. After the meeting, one of them approached me and said that he was now forty and had been sober for five years. He began drinking at sixteen, and when we stopped at thirty five he still had the maturity of a sixteen year old. "You see" he explained, "from sixteen to thirty-five I was always drunk and felt no pain. Since I was never in pain, I never grew."

Any physical world is an impermanent one. The reality of decay and death is built in to our world, since a cosmos composed of material, of 'stuff' by its very nature cannot be perfect. I believe that there is a spirit, a Divine spirit in the world. The existence of spirit does not change the reality that the world through which it moves is physical and therefore perishable.

Free will, moral growth and the reality of matters' impermanence are ways in which religious thinkers see to understand evil. All of these considerations have helped me, but I know them ultimately to be inadequate.

Our understanding of ultimate questions is limited beyond even our understanding of the limitation. As theologian Milton Steinberg said: "The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else."
Yet we know that to offer an explanation in the face of pain is itself a kind of cruelty. Nothing, no sophistry, no genuine theology, no well meant preaching, can stand in the heat of human anguish. The scale of pain in this world dwarfs, at times, any attempt at explanation. So we turn form "why" to "what." Not why does God do this, but what would God have me do. We move, at times of crisis, from explanation to action.

By David Wolpe | January 19, 2010; 2:41 PM ET Save & Share:
Previous: You can't always get what you want | Next: False beliefs in a fallen world

Comments

Please report offensive comments below.

"Not why does God do this" Actually, that's the question. Why does God do this?

"The believer in God has to account for the existence of unjust suffering; the atheist has to account for everything else." Do you really think the believer has the better end of this dichotomy? Because everything else is orders of magnitude easier to answer than unjust suffering.

And lest you forget, death is suffering too. Just how do the dead grow their souls?

Okay, two more, how in the Sheol do you get to be #1 pulpit rabbi? Who is #1 outside the pulpit?

Posted by: NorwegianShooter | January 26, 2010 10:48 PM
Report Offensive Comment

i like the idea of a smiling rabbi, keep up the good work... i guess i'm more methodist than any other butt i'm not sure they wood claim me on all days or me them... i was thinking about the perception in different people minds in different places in possibly different times or not the idea of who .... Job... would be as a bible charictar or a person in thier community. just how would a millionaires life spent keeping the faith and being true in all thier interactions be different from the person who has had to hunt animals to eat and get by on and has very few things of material wealth but things that they have treasured just the same. and all the shades of grey and yellow and red and blue and green and black and white. How would thier actual life actions and deeds be looked on by the other. Its not like we can pretend it doest really happen in real life... oh i guess that is what we did do up until now and tomorrow i don't know but when a actual life event happens.. human beings actually respond like human beings... it never seems to amaze me that certain people in our... world no longer recognize some human beings of what ever color ...i never ceases to amaze me that people come to lake ella in Tallahassee to feed perfectly good bread to ducks who have plenty of food and look right through the homeless like they aren't there. now in Tallahassee if i know them thier idea of fixing the problem would be to keep the homeless from going to the park and bothering the duck feeders.as human... i think we have a falure of some people to se others as actually human maybe i guess if God was come up with a slogan he would keep it short and powerful.. he might just say luv Haity

Posted by: artistkvip1 | January 21, 2010 3:03 AM
Report Offensive Comment

I agree with Christians' & Muslims' basic commandments:

1. One should exploit others suffering to spread one's own religion.

2. Charity should be done with an ulterior motive to gain power.

3. One should identify weakness in another country and culture. Then, instead of letting them correct problems, one should exploit.

4. Divide and conquer.

5. Always pretend to do charity. This provides the perfect cover for the true agenda.

6. Always remember that my god is better than the other's god. Use this belief to justify and rationalize acts of deception & destruction.

7. Religion is about winning and expanding, not about spiritual development.

8. Might is right.

9. If the whole world can be converted to Islam or Christianity, we will win. Then we will destroy the other inferior religion.

David Wolpe

Posts By Category

Posts By Date

Haiti and how we respond to suffering

Comments