Why Bad Things Happen To Good People

Recently a very close friend of mine had the traumatic experience of witnessing a horrific accident. While sitting on his porch, enjoying a nice summer day, a reckless driver came speeding down his street and struck his neighbor who died from his injuries just hours later. In the flash of a moment, a person's life was taken and the lives of the witnesses, friends, family and community were changed forever because of the carelessness of one person.

In the wake of this tragedy, my grief-stricken and traumatized friend was left asking "why". When he spoke to my husband the next day, he stated that he couldn't understand how, if there is a God, he could allow something like this to happen. It's exactly that type of question that used to burn in my mind when I was an atheist. After all, explain childhood cancer if there's a God. Why does racism exist if there's a God? There seems to be no sense to any of this pain if an omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent God exists. When this question is posed to Christians, the usual lazy response one gets is that God works in mysterious ways and that we can't know his reasoning. I'm here to call bullshit on that. How can I be expected to worship a God who not only allows these tragedies to occur but further cannot explain why he allows them to occur? If I do choose to worship this cruel, unaccountable God, how am I suppose to distinguish between him and the devil?

A Matter Of Perspective

I certainly can't claim to know the definitive answers to these questions now just because I'm a "believer" who's gone through what Newberg & Waldman call "big E enlightenment", and I warn you to question anyone who claims they can. My personal motto, and I invite you to adopt it as well, is "beware the man who calls himself guru". That being said, my understanding of the nature of God, spirit and reality have been altered to the point where I can at least allow enough room in my logical mind for the answers to exist.

In the Abrahamic religions God is portrayed as the paternal figure-head. We in the West tend to take this templating even further and think of God as an old man sitting high in the cosmos on his golden throne looking down on us all with judgment, waiting for the day we die so that he can sentence our souls to an eternity in either heaven or hell. Alan Watts stated it best:

"Now when you come to that conclusion [that humans are intelligently created] you must be very careful. Because you may make an unwarranted jump. Namely, the jump to the conclusion that that intelligence, that marvelous designing power which produces all this, is the biblical God. Be careful. Because that god, contrary to his own commandments, is fashioned in the graven image of a paternal authoritarian, beneficent tyrant of the ancient Near East. And it’s very easy to fall into that trap. Because it’s all institutionalized in the Roman Catholic Church, in the synagogue, in the Protestant churches, all there ready for you to accept. And by the pressure of social consensus and so on and so on, it is very natural to assume that when somebody uses the word God it is that father figure which is intended, because even Jesus used the analogy the Father for his experience of God. He had to. There was no other one available to him in his culture."

So it seems the key first step in answering the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people is to change our understanding of who, or what, God is. Tesla stated that "If you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency and vibration" and we know, because of EEG, that this applies to our consciousness as well as to physical matter. Like all frequencies, our consciousness has an energetic equivalent (energy is equal to frequency multiplied by Planck's constant, E = hν). Therefore we must ask what energy is producing the vibrational frequency of our consciousness.

We know that consciousness does not come from our brain which gets it's energy from the calories we consume, but rather our brain is more like the radio transmitter that converts our conscious vibrations into thought, action, sound etc.

If the first law of thermodynamics is true, then we know that whatever this energy is, it must not have been created nor destroyed, but has always existed. In other words, energy is eternal. It can change forms, but all the energy in the Universe is constant. It is my personal belief that the frequency of consciousness is produced by the energy of the soul. The energy of our soul comes directly from God, who exists as that eternal energy source from which all life is born.

You Are An Arrow, Life Is A Bow

Now I realize that there are probably plenty of scientific holes and tons of speculation in my statement, and again, I'm not claiming this as the definitive truth. This is just my understanding of what God is based on my experience and I'm more than open to hearing other interpretations. But just for the sake of argument, let's assume my hypothesis is correct and that God is the eternal energetic source of all living things and not a man with a white beard sitting in the clouds. Would that assumption help answer the question "why does God allow bad things to happen to good people"?

If my neighbor plugs his chainsaw into the wall and cuts down a tree which then falls on someone and kills them, is that the power plant's fault? Of course not. We are not mindless puppets being controlled by source energy. We have free will and not even God can violate that.

Now some spiritual teachers will take the free will example to it's most extreme scenario and say that at some point, and on some spiritual level, your soul chose it's path and therefore any pain you have experienced is of your own doing. This is also bullshit.

Pain is the result of outside forces acting upon you in a harmful way. It is a physical and/or emotional response that cannot be helped. Suffering, however, is a choice and one can experience pain without choosing to suffer.

This concept was one that I struggled greatly to grasp. Those familiar with my background know that I was the victim of a violent sexual assault that nearly cost me my life and has resulted in multiple, chronic physical and mental health issues. I was someone who was suffering greatly because of pain. That suffering kept me in a cycle of depression and anger that was a fate worse than death. I was a prisoner in my own mind. When I finally realized that I could choose not to suffer and that I could take control of my emotional reaction to the pain, I began to feel joy again. A joy that increased everytime I realized how powerful I was to be able to look at this pain and just breathe through it. My ability to appreciate love and happiness was almost in direct opposition to the amount of suffering I had experienced. How would I even be able to recognize this incredible bliss if it were not for the agonizing pain? I even found myself becoming almost thankful that I had been hurt so badly.

I suppose that my musings aren't very original and that all of this sciencey-woo-woo stuff won't bring much comfort to anyone who's currently suffering. However, if you currently find yourself trapped in the cycle of suffering and can't seem to break free, try imagining yourself as an arrow and of life as a bow. The bow may be pulling you back into the furthest reaches of despair right now, but it can't hold that tension forever and when you are finally released from it, imagine how far you're gonna fly?

https://books.google.com/books/about/How_Enlightenment_Changes_Your_Brain.html?id=Pye3CwAAQBAJ&sourc