The Ultimate Challenge to Religion and Spirituality: Why is There Injustice and Tragedy in the World?

We have the famous answer in the Book of Job from the the Divine Whirlwind, which essentially states that humankind's perspective and perceptions are too limited to encompass the broad aims of the Divine Will. We have Jesus' injunction that we must recognize and grow beyond the fundamental realization that nourishing rain and killing drought affect alike the rich and the poor, the just and the unjust. Some Christian Gnostics chose to answer the niggling problem of evil and untimely mischance by positing that this was a false world and that what people worshiped as "god" was a false god (a rebel angel), and that our souls had been "tricked" by this fallen angel and his cohorts into coming here; thus the whole purpose of their form of Gnosticism was to find a way "out" of this grand deception and become reunited with the True God, who wanted only joy and happiness for us in the "real world" (i.e., the realm in which our souls had originally been made to abide and thrive). Early Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and then later even the reformist thinker, John Calvin, cruelly reasoned that some have been predestined from the beginning of time to fail, know unremitting suffering and meet damnation upon their deaths, while others are fated to succeed, know joy and be welcomed by salvation when they die. Conversely, the forms of Christianity that have sustained the misfortunate have expressed the idea that suffering leads to a greater capacity for compassion and understanding; this blog can agree with such a notion under limited circumstances, but there are forms of suffering so intense or prolonged that they can destroy minds, damage psyches, disable bodies, or even make the victims cruel (though there are some incredible exceptions of perdurable nobility among those who have survived such hardships, either man-made or from natural causes). East Asian religions have determined that the suffering and loss endured by those who are living good lives derives from a form of karmic repayment for the errors of previous and forgotten incarnations of the soul. For atheists, the answer as to why good people sometimes meet with misfortune and bad people often go on prospering by their evils is that, first of all, there is no god to divinely intervene either way, and secondly, that the dynamics of nature are blind, and thirdly, that our collective biological instincts subvert the will toward pervasive and permanent social justice within our various forms of civilization. None of these is entirely satisfactory or completely unassailable in explaining the inevitable and often unnecessary suffering one encounters in this world. On the one hand, we are not in a position to fully comprehend the nature of the cosmos and the reason why many of us thirst for justice and happiness, even though we are a species that has evolved on a planet whose instability makes it so resistant to these worthy passions. On the other hand, the concepts of an eternal soul, a redemptive God and a heavenly "rest" provide some comfort and are inherently compelling to our psyches, in the face of this sometimes fickle and rough existence. Many of us believe that goodness and the good life throb too powerfully within us for these feelings and efforts to be mere hopeful delusions in an otherwise uncaring void. If we were truly beings of body only, we would accept our harsh mortal lot the way an insect might. But we do not, even when we have rejected a belief in a Supreme Being. We crave wholesome joy and express a rebellious mercy, even in the blunt face of Nature. Christ was a healer, so we must heal the world in his wake, not allow it to do its callous will. Christ honored the poor and the suffering -- he did not condemn them. Prayer is central to faith, taught by Jesus himself, and so there can be no such thing as predestination. God wants the best for us, and we must realize that we are each of us worthy of that.