Saturday, March 19, 2022

Why Does God Allow Evil?

 It's because He allows you to do it. We've all done evil in our lives. We've lied, gossiped, slandered, raged and, in my case, typically do them all at the same time.

When the question of God permitting evil arises, it's almost always in reference to some monumental wickedness like the Holocaust or the blown pass interference call in the 2018 NFC Championship game that cost the Saints a trip to the Super Bowl. It's almost never in reference to that time you saw the clerk give you too much change and didn't say anything.

Those two sins aren't equivalent, but they're only different in degree. If we lived in a world where the Big Guy whacked us every time we did evil, we'd have no free will at all. Without free will, life isn't an our adventure, it's God's computer program, probably written in Fortran.

Anyway, that's my deep thoughts on the subject. It occurred to me while I was a Lenten penance service at our church. I hope you and yours are having a good weekend.

2 comments:

Mostly Nothing said...

The 2018 NFC championship happened the way it did because the likableness of Drew Brez does not completely erase the unlikableness of Sean Payton. Now that he has retired, the Saints can move on, and perhaps win a big game.

So there are still some spite subrouting in God's program. It's probably called "ball don't lie".

tim eisele said...

Speaking of thoughts, a few posts back you talked about how important it is to make a case for traditional Catholic teaching. It occurs to me that if you find yourself lacking topics to talk about, maybe you could spend some time making that case. In particular, if you could go through the Catechism one chapter at a time, and give your thoughts on how that chapter actually applies to life and how to live it, that could be pretty interesting.

I think that would be more useful than doing something similar with the Bible, seeing as how the whole point of the Catechism is to clearly and unambiguously explain Church doctrine, and so there shouldn't be a lot of room for misinterpretation there.