In a recent post on his blog, Brian McLaren attempted to respond to a parent's grief concerning the loss of a child. Having lost my own first born only 4 months ago, I found his answers very much not satisfying. Brian's blog post on the subject can be found at:
http://brianmclaren.net/archives/blog/q-r-agony-nothing.html
So, I believe that Mr. McLaren has failed to answer the question properly because his religious tradition fails to accept the obvious, the simplest explanation.
Let me explain:
I am afraid that my own feelings are still too raw to go into much detail about the loss of my own daughter. As a child, she was the light of my life. As an adult, she suffered from severe depression and substance abuse. Her death was an accidental overdose a week before her 25th birthday.
Even before my daughter died, I had been trying to understand loss and suffering through my own depression and grief for several years.
This is the theory that I have come to accept, at least for now. I will expound:
First, I realize that I am not the only person who suffers loss and grief. It does not take much thought about historical tragedies that have occurred in the last 100 years or so to realize this. The planet has endured two world wars and numerous smaller conflicts in which millions have died. During the Holocaust alone, millions were killed over a decade or more. In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, tens of thousands were killed in an instant. Many thousands more died horrible deaths from radiation poisoning months or years later.
There have been numerous natural disasters: Katrina, the Indonesian tsunami, earthquakes in Japan and many other natural disasters throughout the world in which many more perished.
Right now as I type this, there are more than a billion people on this planet who are malnourished. On a daily basis, there are murders and accidents in which people die. We inflict terrible pain on each other by using rape, torture, and more.
My point is that many people grieve because of these things. Unless humanity finds a way to cease all future wars, to more effectively prevent and respond to natural disasters, and to cease physical harm to one another many more will grieve in the future.
If God is a caring God, why doesn't God stop these things from happening?
If God is all powerful, why can't God simply wave God's little pinky and make it all go away?
The answer?
Occam's razor.
Some religious folks would claim that evil exists and that is why God cannot prevent or stop these tragedies.
If this is the case, they either must assume that God is not all powerful or either not all caring. Otherwise, why would God allow God's children to undergo such suffering? Even if evil does exist and God is all powerful, why would God have allowed millions of Jews or Cambodians or countless others to die terrible and painful deaths. Maybe God doesn't care about us? Or maybe God simply is not all powerful, Occam's Razor.
Some would say that it is a "mystery". This is childish thought kind of like trying to explain to little children how Santa Claus manages to squeeze down all those chimneys in one night. Santa does not squeeze down all of those chimneys, let alone in one night. Lazy theologians attribute pain to "mystery".
The reality, I believe, is that God created an imperfect world and that God is not perfect. Nothing in this universe is perfect. The sun will eventually die, but not before destroying all of life (if there is any left by then) on earth.
Suffering exists because God cannot prevent it. Occam's razor. It is the simplest explanation. It does not require us to twist logic, to create evil and then say that God allows evil to flourish as a mystery.
The Buddhists would say that life is or ultimately leads to suffering.
Perhaps they are right.
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