Tragic Events and God it

Tragic Events and God

It is the evil that builds in the hearts of men and gives rise to atrocities like the World War II holocaust, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzgovina, genocide in Rwanda and, now, the ongoing genocide in the Darfur region of the Sudan. The Biblical and Q'uranic personage most commonly attributed with the level of evil associated with these kinds of atrocities is the Devil, Satan, the "adversary," of God; although the Christian and Muslim interpretations of "the adversary" are starkly different (Dictionary of Theology and Religious Studies, 2008, p. ). Still, how is it otherwise explained when history or, more importantly, current times are revealed that shed light on such atrocities, or even acts of tragic natural disaster, such as a tsunami, other than to attribute it to the one entity that has the power to challenge God's grace, which is the devil? How is it that God, who is the all powerful force in the universe, can be out maneuvered or be challenged by the devil such that it results in the loss of human life on a massive scale? In other words: How can God let this happen?

The Answer to the Question

How does God let this happen? He does not, is the answer, but mankind does. While mankind resorts to the psychological ease of attributing holocaust and genocidal evil to the devil, the reality is that it is this evil which resides in man and is commonly associated when mankind, a man, or group of men, has succumbed to greed. Whether that greed be the hunger for power, the hunger of hatred, which eats at the hearts and minds of men and women; it remains that these are acts of mankind's free will. That is, the power of free will which is a power given mankind by the creator, God.

Whether mankind acts accordingly in the direction of good or evil, is the choice, the will, of mankind. Are not those of us who sit idly by shaking our heads in disgust and disbelief over the news of atrocities in Darfur not as much to blame as those actually commit the murder of men, women, and children in Darfur? When genocide was being waged in Rwanda, President William Jefferson Clinton held fast that what was happening in Rwanda was an internal civil war, an internal matter to be reconciled by Rwandans without the interference in those events by the United States (Power, Samantha, 2001, p. 84). Since leaving office former President Clinton has publicly remarked that he deeply regrets not taking action in Rwanda in 1994 while genocide was being waged against the Tutsi minority in that country. This is the exercise of free will, which God empowered mankind with (Rickaby, S.J., Joseph, 1906, p. 142). To the extent that exercise of man's free will is resultant in an evil so incomprehensible to the mind, man then turns to the psychological band-aid of transferring the incomprehensible evil from a human being, to religious scapegoat, the adversary of God, or the devil.

When the death and destruction is of a natural disaster or event, certainly that is within God's power to prevent, or to create. However God empowered mankind with the authority over the earth; and He never said it would be an authority without challenges. It is not a game that God plays when mankind experiences the forces of nature, and loses, but a natural course of events with which mankind must contend. Time and again mankind has proven himself to be resourceful, skilled, and deliberate in taking on the forces of nature. When mankind acts in a way that is contrary to the forces of nature, such as building fixtures or structures in the path of well-known paths of natural destruction, then mankind is challenging the forces of nature that bind mankind to the earth - the domain that God created for and gave to mankind.

However, when mankind succumbs to his own inner capacity for evil, then he is exercising free will. That that capacity for evil is capable of reaching extraordinary levels of destruction is the manifestation not of the devil, but of man's own reaction to the incremental levels of evil, the fueling of power that comes from exercising free will over others who are not capable, or who won't, act to prevent that exercise of free will over them.

The answer as to how God allows mankind to commit atrocities is that He exercises no more control over mankind's free will than He does over the forces of nature. To explain mankind's capacity for evil as being the work of the devil, it is a description, the visual, if you will, by which man relates to in attempting to psychologically understand these horrific events.