How can can bad things happen to good people? Why is there so much suffering in the world? Innocent people are suffering all over the world. Why?
For the theist, especially Christians, God is on trial for this. “How can you, All Powerful God, who could wipe away all the suffering in a moment, allow for such suffering in this world?”
Be careful with this question. God could ask the same of you. How do you, with all your money and science, with your power and influence, with your church and community standards, allow such suffering?
God created a world in which no suffering existed but was possible. The choice was ours. That was a real dope setup. Live without the knowledge of good and evil or taste that fruit and make it a part of our lives. For whatever reason, and perhaps rightfully so, we put the knowledge of good and evil in our lives. Asking God why evil exists is a deflection of our own responsibility. We did it to ourselves.
Blaming God is a famous position and usually comes from those who need a scapegoat. Eliminating God makes total sense then – it makes sense that it’s just chaos and all meaningless. Suffering is the result of chaos (why that is, however, is a conversation to be had), but leads us away from a owning our role in the existence and persistence of unnecessary suffering.
That we haven’t solved it is on us, especially if secular humanism is our gestalt. Don’t we have the science and ethics to handle this? We should given our posturing around it.
God is nonetheless asking us why the world we want isn’t our reality. What world do we want and what will we do to make it real? Blaming God for our shortcomings is authentically human and why we need grace. We should still do all we can to make the world a better place by loving one another as we’d want to be loved. If we don’t – we deserve the problems we blame on God.
It's All Fired Up 