The believer will try to answer. In fact, the believer often truly believes he has the answer. But his answer is just one of man's homilies, usually one of the following three:
1. God allows evil to display the need for and glory of His redemptive work, His mercy, grace, patience, etc.
2. Free will. God allows people to make their own choices, and most of them are bad, leading to the degenerate state of the world.
3. God allows evil because, although we cannot see how from the midst of it, it is part of a greater plan that works for a greater good.
None of these answers, or any of the lesser known answers, would satisfy the child, or the family of the child pictured above. Currently we are witnessing the Israelis inflicting incredible cruelty upon the Palestinians. This is not a historical anomaly. The Jews themselves suffered incredible horror during WW II, and, in fact, human history is littered with such suffering, both on the collective and the individual level.
Even those who seem strong in their belief in a Higher Power can abandon that faith when tragedy afflicts them.
Only one answer is somewhat satisfying to the human mind, the mind that assumes fairness and justice are obligations of existence. Only the hope of Universal Salvation can ease the sting (and it doesn't completely ease the sting) of evil. The belief every human being, at *the end of time* will be resurrected to eternal glory, an eternity free of tears and pain, which then offers at least a joyous future as compensation for the present misery. But Universal Salvation is a tiny minority belief in the religious and scientific faiths, and is rarely discussed or debated.
If there is no Higher Power, no responsible Creator, then the world's pain and suffering is simply a byproduct of the accident of life. Life mutated into horror.
But for the person of religious or scientific faith in a Higher Power, is there really nothing better to be offered as a consolation for the suffering? Is there really nothing more we can say than trust God's plan, His ways are not our ways, and in the end glory awaits (at least, glory awaits for some)?
Is there anything else we can offer the injured, dying child, and his family?
No.
Hindus believe in karma, but that gives little solace in the here and now of misery, and besides, if we honestly assess human history, we see an overwhelming unbalance in the favor of bad karma.
The infidel shouldn't be troubled or surprised by the agony of life. The unbeliever is convinced life is the result of a random act of violence so terrifyingly powerful it continues without end, and all the accidental life forms that it tore from the void suffer and die for whatever life form exists in the present, and they too will suffer and die and be the genesis of the universe's next miserable creatures.
Personally, I find solace in the life of Christ. Jesus was despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, so much so He seemed stricken and smitten of God, He was tortured and murdered.
So when I look at the broken body of the Palestinian child, the victim of Israel, I hear the words of Jesus:
The servant is not greater than his Lord. If they have persecuted Me, they will also persecute you.
I can only pray all the miserable people of the world are called to serve the Lord.
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