“If God exists, why does He allow such horrendous things to happen? Why does He permit people to be so evil?” We've all heard a similar lament and may have felt that way ourselves at times. While some may issue such a challenge out of cynicism and sincere disbelief, for others it has little to do with “not believing” in God and more to do with momentary anger and frustration expressed with a sort of symbolic defiance. If you were to suggest that God might not be a He (or a She), you might be roundly criticized (and wrongly judged) by a few of the same people who moments ago claimed to be non-believers.
- A declaration of non-belief is sometimes simply the refusal to accept current interpretations. Many of those who say, “I don’t believe in God” do not necessarily refuse to entertain the notion of an All-Encompassing Essence or God or Allah (or whatever group of letters one finds most comfort in using.) (I'm going to type, "God" as I go along because those are the letters I was raised with.)
Those who can (temporarily) no longer sense the existence of any sort of "higher power" usually take an inordinate amount of pride in thinking logically, not realizing that it is illogical to reject the possible existence of God only because a satisfactory understanding has not yet been developed. We would not apply such irrational thinking to science or business! And yet, sometimes we may feel that we must discard all things God-connected for completely illogical reasons.
While we may be open to the possibility that intelligent life (however defined) exists beyond Earth, most of us have never seen a UFO or anything else that might prove that there is extraterrestrial life. We do not disallow a belief in gravity just because we cannot adequately explain it ourselves, and yet we often permit ourselves to do this about the very state of Being that exists supra-dimensionally, and is a fundamental requirement of existence.
- We continually make decisions about the true nature of life; we are constantly choosing what to believe, whether we’re conscious of making those choices or not.
In a complex society such as ours, we may have so much crammed into our days and weeks that we have to rely on others to help us make some of our choices. We cannot control every aspect of our multifaceted lives; we must be able to trust the butcher, the baker, and the electronic candlestick maker, not to mention the pharmaceutical folks, the car and truck makers, our religious leaders, and our dear politicians.
To whom do we entrust our minds, bodies, and souls? What beliefs guide our lives? Again, we decide. Who is credible and who is not? Who espouses beliefs that are closest to what we already believe or sense? Yesterday the biggest thing we may have had to organize was a closet or a business, a financial plan or a vacation. Today it is clear that some of our beliefs need to be sorted, with the most self-destructive ones chucked in the nearest bin.
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