Why does God allow bad things to happen

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 The world must seem a scary place at the moment.  Russia is a growing threat, the current leadership in USA appears to be unreliable, there is an increase in hatred and violence all over the world.  People are threatened by the impacts of Climate change, migration levels and financial inequity.  


I was talking with a good friend yesterday and we got onto the topic of how crazy things are and they mentioned something that their daughter had said.  Essentially, they were asking a valid question of why did God allow the Bondi Beach shooting to happen.  It is a question that has been asked before of course over time.  But it remains a good question and one that on the surface would appear to be difficult to answer.  Certainly, the God who is all powerful and all seeing and yet stands by while innocent people are killed is definitely not a god who I would bow down to, or even accept.    

It got me thinking of how I would answer that, I did to a level in our conversation but carried on thinking and later that day I wrote the following poem which I shared with my friend for her daughter.  

It is basically a set of questions.  Questions that hopefully invite the reader to re-think and to re-imagine their concept of God.  For I think a possible approach to this is that it is not that God is uncaring, rather that our perception and understanding of God is poor at best.  The world challenges us to reset, and to reflect critically what do I believe. 

                                                             Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash






Location: United Kingdom

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