God and the Haiti crisis

[richard5za]

Dear John,

I can give you a credible religious answer as to why God allows earth quakes such as the Haiti crisis; one of the things I do in my spare time is help people explore the Christian message.

You may or may not agree with some or all of the points I have made. You may reject it all. But if you accept the points of faith the argument is credible.

First we need to look at the basic Christian theology. If we don’t then exploring the question “Why does God allow suffering?” makes no sense.

Start by taking God out of Christianity

1. A good place to start for many people is to take God out of the faith and look at Christianity as a philosophy, in a manner of speaking. If you examine the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth (real life name probably Yeshua) it is a “philosophy of reason which values love higher than anything else”. In English there is only one word to describe all the kinds of love, but the ancient Greek identifies different types of love, e.g. close friendship, sexual love, etc and the word for love mostly used in the Gospels is “agape”. In essence “agape love” is preventing harm or doing good to people in general i.e. my neighbour. Agape love is an action. A number of parables explain this kind of love e.g. the Good Samaritan.

2. We may be born innocent but in fact we are born very self centred (our fallen nature). To do agape love requires unselfishness, so if we are to do agape love we need to travel a journey away from selfishness towards selflessness.

3. If we score ourselves on how well we do at doing “agape love” we don’t do too well at all, in fact most of us do very badly. Its very easy to do the opposite of “agape love”: For instance, if I exploit the environment for my purposes I harm my grandchildren; if I don’t do something about making the world a fairer place I am neglecting to do “agape love” for people in need; and so on.

Now put God back into Christianity

4. The theological framework around the philosophy outlined above is that “God is love” and “the purpose of our lives is to learn about love, and practice doing love, so that one day we can live with God in a world of love.

5. The end result of love is joy, so the potential gift offered to all of us is an eternal life of great joy and happiness. In a sentence, the main purpose of our life is to prepare for eternal life.

6. The problem is that in our own strength (without help from God) we all do very badly at growing in love and doing love. And the danger, I surmise, is that when we get to the end of our short earthly lives, a world of love will look most unappealing; our selfishness is such that becoming selfless looks stupid.

7. So the root of all sin is our selfishness; not just what we do but what we don’t do and don’t say. Using this as the measuring stick we all do a great deal of sin.

The solution
There is an absolute wonder and total mystery of God so I can’t begin to tell you why God created us with a fallen nature; the fact is that even non religious people clearly see our massive capacity to do the opposite of love, namely evil.

But Christian theology recognises that God created us to live with Him eternally, and that God also created the solution to our fallen nature: (Some people find it helpful to see creation and salvation together)

8. Once we recognise that love is the best way for mankind to live and be happy, and we start to see what God has done for us, we want to be part of God’s plan, and in some small way we want to reciprocate. Some people say that they were spiritually blind and suddenly they saw how life works best, namely God’s way. Different Christian traditions deal with this step differently, but in essence it is making Jesus Christ the boss of your life, and following Him, and asking to receive the gift of God’s Spirit to live in you and to start changing you into the Way of Love. Our enthusiasm and desire to do love is now coming from God who is love.

9. Additionally, God created a solution to deal with our sin. He took our sin upon Himself as the sacrificial lamb for mankind upon the cross. The solution is God’s not ours. We have debt we can’t begin to repay.

10. And finally, therefore, and very important, we are thus enabled to receive the gift of and eternal life of joy; our real life begins at death; that’s when we go to our real home.

Why does God allow suffering?
With the above theological framework we can now examine this difficult question.

11. First of all, love is not genuine love unless we are given freedom to make choices; both to do love, and to do hurt and suffering to ourselves and others. God’s loving nature is such that we receive this freedom. Its an awesome responsibility.

12. Then let me suggest that at least 95% of human suffering is a result of unloving choices made by human beings, and these have absolutely nothing to do with God. This is the hurt we cause by what we say and what we do; the suffering we allow by not doing good for people in need. I live in a country with a high HIV / AIDS infection rate. That’s nothing to do with God; its about human choices. What God wants us to do in this situation is to be his instruments to love the infected people.

13. But does God have something to do with natural disasters? They cause human suffering, but it’s numerically very small compared to the suffering that humans cause.

14. In the case of Haiti it makes no sense to suggest that a God of love punishes people with an earth quake. You could get into all sorts of silly arguments about the whether Haiti leadership was to blame, other people to blame, and what about the people who are sincerely trying to follow a way of love.

15. In the same way that I can’t explain why God created us with a fallen nature, I can’t explain why the earth is constructed the way it is. It has earthquakes, tidal waves, storms and other phenomena, all of which can and do cause natural disasters, and human death, hurt and suffering. The same argument applies to illnesses and diseases that exist upon the planet.

16. What we can say of a God of love, is that when there is a natural disaster, God expects us to do His love to the best of our ability. Interesting hidden benefits result: People doing love for the disaster grow in love; people receiving the love find the way of love attractive, and together with people calling out to God in their hurt, seems to generally result in a high conversion rates; people watching the people doing love are likewise attracted to this religion of love. So the way of love increases; God is able to use a natural disaster to assist his good purposes. (In the early church certain disease epidemics where the Christians looked after the sick, were seen by pagans as very attractive and became important growth accelerators for the faith)

17. We humans are eternal beings living out our short earthly existence before our real lives begin. We put too much emphasis upon the here and now and not enough upon eternal life. No one can look inside themselves and see what they believe, we can only look at our attitudes which are a reflection of our beliefs, and at our behaviours which are a reflection of our attitudes, and from all this try to work out what it is that we believe. But our attitudes and behaviours suggest an abhorrence of something that happens to all of us: Death and going to our real home. Consider this parable which in different ways is quite common: An eighty year old man is diagnosed with terminal cancer; he panics and spends a million dollars and extends his life by 3 years. A million dollars for three non quality miserable suffering years! It would have been kindest to everyone not to artificially prolong his life. And would the way of love not be better served if he had given the million dollars to make the world a fairer place? Something at which the whole of heaven would have rejoiced?

18. And now we start to see that in the same way that we live in a spiritually imperfect world which causes great human suffering, and to which God has a solution, so we also live in a physically imperfect world where likewise the solution is God.

19. Finally, we always need to remember that when we suffer, God, the suffering Christ, suffers with us. We are not on our own ever.

Why are there too many people in the world? This simply causes wars?
20. First of all there will never be too many people. The abundance of God’s generosity is greater than us, or what we can conceive. Each additional people born is another person receiving God’s rich gift of eternal life. The sadness is for all those who could have existed but have not existed and haven’t received the gift of eternal life.

21. The reason for the wars is not too many people, but our lack of love. We are too selfish to make the world a fairer place. Shared in love, there is abundance for all and no need for wars.

Regards
Richard

[John]

Dear Richard,

I'm actually sorry that I went down this road because, as I've said,
I like religion, I think it plays an important role in people's
lives, and I don't think that there's anything to be gained by
scrutinizing it too closely. On the other hand, I can put forth an
argument within what might be called a Christian "world model," but
all the rules of logic still have to apply. God may be all-powerful
in this model, but God can't create a universe in which "P and not-P"
is true for some proposition P.

The two issues that I raised are actually contradictions within this
world model, and the answers that you gave are really a kind of
political spin.

The first issue is the Haiti earthquake. If I understand your
argument in verse 16, the reason why God created a world in which
earthquakes kill innocent people is to give people an opportunity to
help one another.

That's a good political answer, but it's hardly very satisfying, and
it's not consistent with the Old Testament (which, admittedly, I
haven't really looked at much in several decades, so I may get some
things wrong).

In the Old Testament, as I recall, the purpose of natural disasters
-- famines, fire, brimstone, etc. -- was to punish sinners. Today,
no one would even argue that's the case, and so much of the Old
Testament is thrown into doubt.

I was surprised that you mentioned HIV/AIDS in verse 12, and implied
that it's God's punishment for sinning. I know that you're referring
to sins of sex, but as a Catholic you must know that the protection
against HIV/AIDS is to compound the sin of extramarital sex with a
second sin of using a condom. The two sins cancel each other out.

Verse 19 is like saying that Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs
(who, incidentally, is doing God's work), suffers along with the
people who lost their life's savings because of the toxic securities
he created. It's the same as saying the God suffers along with the
people that were maimed and smashed because of the earthquake-prone
world he created. Somehow it doesn't quite ring true.

The second issue is that population grows faster than the supply of
food. You say in verse 21 that wars are caused by a lack of love.
That's provably wrong. God created a world in which the population
grows faster than the food supply, and that's the cause of war.
In fact, the more love there is, the more kids there are, causing war
to occur even more quickly.

John

[The Grey Badger]

The more love there is, the more kids there are - in an "every act of love must be open to the transmission of life" model. In an urbanized society, where children are expensive and nonreproductive sex is accepted, that may not always be the case. Japan and Europe are not even replacing themselves. The United States is, partly due to immigration. And as developing nations become more urbanized, their fertility rates are dropping as well.