Why bad things happen to good people

Sh*t hap­pens. God-dess isn’t doing it and our karmic involve­ment might just be being in the wrong place at the wrong time like a drunk dri­ver hav­ing a head on col­li­sion with a fam­ily on the way home from the tem­ple. Just because bad things hap­pen to peo­ple doesn’t mean God willed it or they deserved it or there’s some grand mas­ter plan that we just don’t under­stand. There is the law of karma, but there is also the law of ran­dom­ness and chance. Of course if you join the army in the U.S., there’s a good chance you will be sent to Iraq, and out of those sent to Iraq, there’s a good chance of get­ting maimed or killed, but not every­one does. My son was in the National Guard and was being trained with his unit to go to Iraq, but then in the mid­dle of train­ing he got out on a tech­ni­cal­ity because he had already served in Egypt with another unit. Luck, good karma, my prayers, both his par­ents being devotees?

As a pas­tor, I’ve dealth with a lot of dying per­sons and their sur­viv­ing rel­a­tives and friends all try­ing to make sense of it. This is the best explaina­tion I can come up with: We just need to be able to accept the exis­ten­tial mean­ing­less­ness and sense­less­ness of so much suf­fer­ing and focus on the good, lov­ing, spir­i­tual aspects of life so that we cre­ate the best pos­si­ble futures for our­selves. We do cre­ate our own futures to a degree within the lim­its of our sit­u­a­tional posi­tion. We are at the mercy of the laws of nature and evil per­sons and sys­tems. God-dess does not micro-manage our uni­verse or our lives.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 14th, 2006 at 10:53 and is filed under Steve's Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.