Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!cs.utexas.edu!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!athos.rutgers.edu!christian From: hall@vice.ico.tek.com (Hal Lillywhite) Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian Subject: Re: An atheist's question Message-ID: Date: 29 Oct 90 05:39:44 GMT Sender: hedrick@athos.rutgers.edu Organization: Tektronix Inc., Beaverton, Or. Lines: 27 Approved: christian@aramis.rutgers.edu [This is a response to a question from duncant, who described a multiple killing, and asked how God could permit this. --clh] Well, this may be another of those "Your God can't exist if he allows this" shots but I'll bite anyway. Actually for one who believes in an afterlife, the this is not a great problem. The victims are still living in a different state, they just arrived there a bit sooner than they expected to. We're all going to die anyway, it's just a question of when. Our lack of knowledge is in the area of why one person lives 100 years on this earth while another is taken while very young. I could speculate on some possible reasons but I certainly claim no knowledge of any proposed reasons applied to specific individuals. In fact given our tendency to gossip I suspect God deliberately witholds knowledge of why he treats one person one way and somebody else differently. After a while in eternity it probably won't make much difference if we lived a few more years on earth, or even if those years were spent in a mansion or a concentration camp. What will matter is what we learned from our experiences. Probably much of the experience we are given is to help us learn. Different people get different experience because they need to learn different things. To me the real tragedy of this event is not the deaths but the fact that someone could be vicious enough to cause those deaths. They are probably in a living hell already.