I don’t have all the answers, but to me, any discussion about theodicy is a discussion about pain, and God’s intentions and use of pain.

The tension of a tragedy seems to be, “God where are you? God, how could you?” My argument comes from the a priori belief in Christian theology. I believe the idea of God leaving things to chance is not the Christian belief. God DOES ALLOW seemingly bad things to happen. “Allow” is not the correct word. God “controls and uses” bad things, is probably closer to the truth of the matter. Not only bad things, but evil as well.

I think I can get here from Biblical example, but I want to skip the heavy-lifting of this for now. In brief, have a look at Job. God makes no apologies to Job for submitting his servant Job to a “prove it” dual between Him and Satan. In the beginning God and Satan are having dialog. Imagine that.

Moving on. OK, so what happens in a tragedy? Many horrible things, but often times mass amounts of people die, or suffer horribly. As I make the following point, I hope I do not trivialize the death of anybody, but my point is, do not ALL OF US die?

I’ve only been close to a couple of deaths in my lifetime. Family members. It’s sad and it’s disturbing to a very deep spot inside you, but death typically has much pain associated with it. I remember the nurse making sure the morphine-drip was cranked-up on the day of my mother’s passing.

How many times have you heard someone say, “At least they went quickly.” The point being, at least they did not struggle with excessive pain.

Great for them. What about the people we know who have struggled for years on end with a cancer battle? Perhaps then the issue is not so much early death, but PAIN.

I’m with the perspective that whether a falling roof cracks my head open, I drown in the ocean, or I yield to cancer, my death will probably be painful.

So God designed the world with pain as part of man’s condition. It seems to be a part of the condition of all the animals too.

Death will never be easy to watch. And observing it on a mass scale, as in Haiti, or the south Pacific, does have a different difficulty about it. But on the level of the individual who lost his life that day, it must be accepted that his day to die, was simply THAT day.

What is it about man that we feel something quite significant about constructing unique perspectives that stand as obstacles between us and God?

Questions such as: “There’s so much pain and suffering in the world, where is God?” Seems like a thoughtful enough question. “You get me through this one, God, and I will have an easier time following you.”

Do we WORK AT such questions? Or is it rather that once erected, they serve us well as our conundrum for years on end?

What’s the nature of what we classify as “pain and suffering?” There’s much that can be said about this. I think we will find that man inflicts MORE pain and suffering upon one another, than God’s natural disasters ever do.

If we must have a reason for God’s natural disasters, how about this one. In the face of disaster, it suddenly becomes very clear that those that are able, need to tend to those in need, and we need to do it now.

It’s quite easy to loose sight of loving and caring for one another when the fridge is full and the game is on. Not that love and care does not happen in these moments either, but I think you get my point.

If you are to this point. Thanks for reading my post. I look forward to learning more from the thoughtful words of this blog.

We should, however, factor in free will. We have free will. We bear the costs of our own decisions. God may, for his own reasons, or out of sheer love for us curious hybrids (cf. C.S. Lewis), intervene to save us from the consequences of our own, or our neighbors’ decisions, or might not. Does nature have free will? Probably not in any sense of conscious, intelligent, self-aware, directed, will, but nature has not been carefully arranged to that we never get hurt, or everything always goes our way. If it did, our free will would be of little significance.

Rousseau has a point about our living in ways that invite greater disaster, e.g. crowding into large cities and tall buildings. How extensive would the damage from planes being crashed on 9.11.2001 have been if they crashed into an extensive tracts of bungalows, let along isolated rural farmsteads? This is where I really think overpopulation is a significant consideration. Maybe our technology and intensive agriculture can manage to support increased population, but how much more vulnerable do we make ourselves to tsunamis and earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes, in the process? There are other issues about what we are living for when we take that course.

In the end, I simply suggest that if things are going well, thank God, and if they are not, obviously things are not in perfect order with the way God would have things be. Nature is not perfect, we are not perfect, in some fumbling sense that even we don’t perfectly understand, we are supposed to perfect ourselves, and our world. “REPLENISH the earth and subdue it…”

I am very much disappointed to hear that Fiat and many other companies are shifting their production centres from Italy or their home ground. As everybody of us knows that, it will create a community of unoccupied peoples and poverty in the society. Here the main issue is that, the companies are shifting their production centres to other nations, only for increase their profits. On those nations these companies are getting only the manpower at a low coast. All other cost of productions is almost same with their home land. So only for this reason (availability of labours at a low coast) they are shifting their production plants and creating a community of non working peoples and poverty in their home lands. But here the interesting thing is that, these all companies are looking to market their products mainly in the home land. For this they are spending a good amount as the shipping and other transportation. They want to market their product, where they are not interest to work. I am trying to say to these companies that, if the peoples over the country where you want to market your product, and are not having a proper job and falling into poverty, how you can market your product or how they can buy your product? So don’t try to look only your pocket, try to look after the peoples behind you. If the peoples over a country cautiously lost their jobs the crisis will be remain as the same……………

Perhaps potency is enough for us. If it is, count on fear, dread, lust and revenge continuing their dynamic reign. There will always be another hurricane , earthquake, volcano or war. Their aftermath reminds us of the trail into Being we forsake at the altar of amusements called Potency.

Needles to say, Dr. Pangloss will be there to smile and tell us to soldier on cheerfully while Mephisto lurks in the debris-laden background, harvesting our industrial output of strivers. Meanwhile, the pridefully righteous will tut-tut in chorus, like the click-clacking of dung beetles in the duff, rolling little balls of shit as if their life depended upon it.

Still, this attempt at Being deal is better than a kick in the head, which it sometimes is. Anybody with the bad form to accuse victims of any tragedy as deserving their fate, particularly when said accusation is rendered from the comfort of a televised confessional….well, they should keep an eye peeled for incoming.

In one particularly striking passage, Ivan compares the thought of a mother forgiving her child’s murderer to non-Euclidean geometry in which parallel lines do in fact eventually meet — he cannot conceive or understand either occurrence, and thus refuses to accept them.

I’m of the opinion that attempting to discuss theodicy without reference to it is akin to discussing ethics without reference to Alasdair MacIntyre.

“To obey is better than sacrifice
I don’t need your money
I want your life.”

But sometimes, things happen, seemingly randomly and most certainly tragically – routine surgery that goes inexplicably wrong, or a drought that wipes out local subsistence agriculture for three years leading to massive famine. God gets the blame when we are faced with circumstances we cannot explain. Dissonance occurs when our image of God is undermined by our experience of reality. We get entangled in complex discussions of the relative boundaries of human freedom and divine sovereignty, and we are uncomfortable with the implications of every attempted solution.

For those who understand the Christian Scriptures as revelation, there is much that the Christian Trinity has revealed about himself and his ways. But there is also still much that is left unexplained. Evil is one such issue, as is God’s apparently hands-off treatment of it, at least in our limited experience. Somehow, the equation of God’s risk in creating creatures with the capacity to love (which meant creating creatures with the capacity to choose not to love), combined with the actuality of our choices, multiplied by the implications and consequences of those choices reverberating across countless relationships, including, most seriously, brokenness, alienation and death itself, somehow all this goes a long way towards comprehending the slow-motion train wreck we all seem to be participating in. But it also goes a long way towards explaining why incarnation, cross and resurrection, reconciliation and the restoration of the ability to love make up God’s unexpected answer to our plight.

Those who wish to follow Job’s wife’s advice to curse God and die have the harder task of explaining why God would choose to take on our curse and undertake death itself – his own theodicy, as it were. Could it be that there is something bigger going on than we can fathom?

However, there are “political” sciences e.g. “politically correct science,” clearly illustrated in the recent revelations that certain climate data was falsified by radical leftists to justify a lie, which suggests that scientific information will have to be closely monitored.

What do you make of the advocacy of some on the environmental left for “green jobs”? Is this not a way to have your cake and eat it, too? We can be kind to nature while also creating jobs and wealth through green technology. This strikes me as being distinct from a left that “insists upon the merits and necessity of scientific advancement, and embraces a Rousseauian environmentalism that condemns science and technology out the other side of their mouths.” I mean, Na’vi don’t drive Prius’s, but many self-righteous leftists do.