Re: A Prayer Request, March Letters
The realities of this cruel and unjust world has made me, and many others, more non-spiritual regarding the (for lack of a better term) true value of praying to God for divine assistance.
Today, although I believe that there is a (genderless) God and that prayer can have a positive effect on one’s—or others’—health, I’m bewildered by the notion that God would allow any suffering or, even more important, cause one praying couple’s child to survive an illness while allowing another such couple’s child to perish, and even with great suffering.
I believe that prayer changes things because some scientific studies have proven that; but I do not believe such prayer is responded to by the divine.
Furthermore, I cannot but reluctantly find that, for example, by saying grace before a meal—because of the bitter reality of earthly starvation—we, the well fed, are in effect assuming/concluding that our Creator has found one portion of this planet’s populace worthy of nourishment while allowing another to starve.
My perplexed musing is not simply a matter of “why does God allow bad things to happen to good people?” Rather, my query is, why do so many fortunate people believe that God would bless “us” while neglecting “them”?
Not to be mistaken, I do indeed believe God cares deeply about humankind’s suffering. However, God has permitted humanity’s insistence on having the right to choose, whether that be choosing evil over good, good over evil or somewhere in between, while many innocents have to suffer because of those choices.
