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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