Faith & Tragedy
As much as I read spirituality- and religious-oriented books and articles, I
am still unable to reconcile why indiscriminate tragedy throughout time
has happened and continues to happen to unfortunate people around
the world. It makes me fell atheistic, which is something I wish I would
not feel inside. I’d much rather believe there is a benevolent eternal
entity or entities who take us into a happy afterlife following an
indiscriminate tragedy that strikes us down. I’d much rather believe that
everything happens for a karmic reason instead of randomly, which is
nearly impossible to fully accept. A religious person would say, “George,
Ye have little faith,” but actually I do.
Most religious dogmas profess that notions about good and evil and why
bad things happen to good people are mysterious and not worth the
effort to try and figure out. Seeing a benevolent God as being there for
us as a protector and consoler when tragedy occurs – and not the
controller of catastrophic events - is much easier to accept.
Regrettably, I can’t simply chalk it all up to mystery.
God’s Real Role
Rabbi Harold Kushner writes in his famous book, “When Bad Things
Happen to Good People,” that tragedies are “not the will of God.
Tragedies “represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of
His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and
saddens us.” He also noted that if we can “bring ourselves to
acknowledge that there are some things God does not control, many
good things become possible. We will be able to turn to God for things
He can do to help us, instead of holding on to unrealistic expectations of
Him which will never come about.”
Kushner is saying that believing in complete randomness, uncontrollable
by any omnipotent force, and the evil of chaotic tragedy that often
comes with that, does not mean we do not believe in a God. It’s not God’s
responsibility to control things; it is God’s image in us as humans that
helps us when we encounter tragedy.
I can’t accept Kushner’s theory. There’s part of me that cannot see the
logic of a God capable of creating a complex universe who at the same
time is incapable of stopping indiscriminate tragedy. I’m also unable to
accept that justice basically does not exist, that evil – such as genocide
and unnecessary wars that kill innocent people, for example, go
unanswered - that there is no karma. So, Hilter dies and that’s it – he
does not have to account for the millions of innocent people he is
responsible for murdering. I hope that’s not the case. If we all believed
that, the world would be an increasingly horrible place that would never
get any better.
If I’m not mistaken, I think Kushner was agnostic about the existence of
an afterlife. So, basically God in us gives us the strength to overcome
adversities and the propensity to do good and overcome evil, but
whether or not there is an afterlife in which we must answer for and/or
be rewarded for our free-will-oriented deeds is unknowable. Or, does evil
dwell in the unknowable afterlife as well?
I can believe that some force beyond our imagination created a Big Bang
that was the beginning of a totally random and chaotic universe that
hurtles us through space to some unknowable end. While we are alive, as
any good atheist will explain, we must simply make the best of it and
help each other out so we live harmoniously – no religious dogma, blind
faith, or spirituality needed. Put your faith in provable science and logic.
Transending the Scientific
However, our deep thoughts and inner voices constantly speak to us in
ways that very much seem to be outside of our physical consciousness –
we feel, for instance, transcendence and wonder from experiencing
something beautiful and eternal, something that comes from God that
cannot be proven by science. Or are these thoughts simply part of our
unique neuro transmitters.
Suppress such feelings and emotions…. I think not. Therein is where faith
resides.
God’s Imprint or Not
In “Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality” by first-
rate NPR journalist Barbara Bradley Hagerty, we get a fairly
comprehensive view of these seemly diametrically opposed feelings and
beliefs, which ‘ll refer to here as scientific materialism versus objective
idealism.
Hagerty did some thorough investigative reporting on the topic of
“neurotheology”—the study of the brain as it relates to spiritual
experience. She asks the following: “Is there a spiritual world every bit as
real as the phone ringing in the kitchen or my dog sitting on my foot, a
dimension that eludes physical sight and hearing and touch? In the end,
my questions boiled down to five words: Is there more than this?”
She visited with and interviewed professional scientists and mystics from
around the world who are “wrestling with these questions. Sometimes
they are called parapsychologists, a demeaning title that makes them
sound illegitimate if not a little bit unhinged. But today’s iconoclasts have
an advantage their predecessors lacked. They have technology. They can
peer inside a brain as it meditates in prayer or trips on psilocybin. They
can look for markers in the brain, and, like forensic detectives, they are
studying the evidence left behind by ‘spiritual’ events that occurred out
of their eyesight. They are trying to discern the fingerprints of the
one—or the One—who passed through a person’s psyche and rearranged
his life. They are analyzing these “spiritual” moments, in the form of
epileptic seizures or psychedelic experiences, meditations in a brain
scanner or out-of-body experiences. In the process, they find themselves
in a world of mystery.”
She writes that at least half of Americans have experienced some deep
form of transcendence beyond the ordinary. These folks have been
“overcome and radically transformed by a sudden encounter with the
spiritual.” Are such deep experiences merely our three-pound brains
firing off neurons that simply cease when we die, or is there something
more going on?
After an exhaustive study into such matters, she concludes that it’s really
all about choice and hope because science can neither prove nor
disprove the existence of God, adding that “if there is a God, He or She or
It operates outside of nature and beyond the reach of scientific
measuring instruments.”
So, in the end, contemplating why there is indiscriminate tragedy
basically brings no solid answer, and, as is always the case, you can
choose to believe or disbelieve that everything happens for a reason, and
you can only hope that there is something beautiful beyond death that
justifies everything.
Like Hagerty ultimately does in her book, I choose hope.
Thanks for stopping by,
George
“If there is a God,
He or She or It
operates outside
of nature and
beyond the reach
of scientific
measuring
instruments.”
- Barbara Hagerty