Talking about religion can bring about lots of hate, but I’ll do it here anyway. When looking at things like this, people need to try to accept other people’s beliefs, even if they don’t personally think that they’re true.
Life can be good and terrible sometimes, even both at the same time. You can’t ever predict anything properly. Life has its ups and downs, and you can’t change the fact that one day, we will be forgotten, and everything we have done will disappear due to the heat death of the universe.
People say that life is not what happens in the end, but that it’s about the journey; I agree. If you think deeply, you can find – and possibly even solve – some of these deep questions.
Just a quick note: I am trying to keep this as religion-neutral and unbiased as possible, but until I get other people’s opinions the arguments on this page will only be my own.
Why does evil exist?
People, whether they believe in a religion or not, sometimes wonder why there is evil. After all, if a god/some gods created the world and they were benevolent (all loving), would they really put us through evil and suffering?
I, unfortunately, don’t have any answers for other religions or for atheists quite yet, but I can give a view from a Christian standpoint.
In the Christian Bible, there is God, and he creates the world and all creatures. His loyal servants in heaven are the angels, but one of them constantly questions God’s choices. This angel is called “Lucifer”, “The Fallen Angel”, “Satan”, or “The Devil”. This appears to be the stem of all evil in the Christian religion.
This leads us onto an important question:
Why does God let us suffer? Doesn’t he have our lives planned out for us?
The reason that God lets us suffer is up for debate.
Some people think that the reason God lets us suffer is because he is dealing with something larger which needs solving before he can start to solve “smaller” problems. Remember, God is dealing with the scale of the universe, perhaps even the multiverse, but we are only currently dealing with the scale of, at the very most, our solar system. For any regular person, the only things they really need to worry about on a daily basis is their life (and maybe caring for some others as well).
Others say that suffering exists because we chose to suffer. God gave us free will to choose whatever we want to do and he lets it happen. In the Christian religion, God hopes we do the right thing and it pains him when we take the wrong choices. He knows what could happen in every consequence. After all, I believe that God is just an overseer, not a puppet master. He created the universe to spark creativity in the people who would evolve to create amazing things, but he also knew that there would inevitably be people who used the good things maliciously.
Another good point to make is that we learn from suffering. Suffering helps us to be better people. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic has caused so much suffering, but it has forced us to help others and be kinder than we usually may be.
I think suffering is a necessary-though difficult – part of our lives. Illness and death are all parts of life that we all have to go through. Sometimes suffering is self inflicted because we have made a wrong choice, sometimes it has been brougt on by the careless attitudes of others, eg. depleting the rain forrests, building dams which prevent other nations getting water supply, using up food supplies and not sharing what we have, building and selling weapons of destruction. These are not acts of God, but of man!
However, we can only hope to learn from our mistakes and greed. But without suffering we would not learn compassion, empathy, kindness, patience, love, all the wonderful attitudes that make us truly human and bring light and comfort to each other.
Sometimes when we suffer there is no one to turn to but God, and as we learn to trust him in our distress we find out how much he loves us and his power to change the situation, often miraculously, in just the right way. We grow as people through suffering!