God's Problem Read Online Free PDF Page A

that takes place in our world, dealing with evil as an “idea” rather than as an experienced reality that rips apart people’s lives.
    This book will neither provide an easy solution nor attack the question philosophically by applying difficult intellectual concepts and making hard-to-understand claims with sophisticated and esoteric vocabulary. My interest for this book is instead with some of the age-old and traditional reflections on evil found in the foundational documents of the Judeo-Christian tradition.
    The questions I will be asking are these:
     
    What do the biblical authors say about suffering?

Do they give one answer or many answers?

Which of their answers contradict one another, and why does it matter?

How can we as twenty-first-century thinkers evaluate these answers, which were written in different contexts so many centuries ago?
     
    My hope is that, by looking at these ancient writings that eventually came to form the Bible, we will be empowered to wrestle more responsibly and thoughtfully with the issues they raise, as we ponder one of the most pressing and wrenching questions of our human existence: why we suffer.

Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God: The Classical View of Suffering
     
     
    Suffering and the Holocaust
     
    How can we discuss the problem of suffering without beginning with the Holocaust, the most heinous crime against humanity in the known history of the human race? It is relatively easy to cite the standard numbers of those murdered by the Nazi killing machine but almost impossible to imagine the intensity and extent of the misery produced. Six million Jews, murdered in cold blood, simply for being Jews. One out of every three Jews on the face of the planet, obliterated. Five million non-Jews—Poles, Czechs, gypsies, homosexuals, religious “deviants,” and others. A total of eleven million people killed, not in battle as enemy combatants but as human beings unacceptable to those in power and brutally murdered. Knowing the numbers somehow masks the horror. It is important to remember that each and every one of those killed was an individual with a personal story, a flesh-and-blood human being with hopes, fears, loves, hates, families, friends, possessions, longings, desires. Each of them had a story to tell—or would have had, if they had lived to tell it.
    The firsthand accounts of those who survived will haunt you and give you nightmares, accounts of being systematically starved, beaten, abused, experimented upon, worked almost to death in foul and inhumane conditions. We treat animals better.
    It is the killings, of course, that are most remembered: some three million Jews from Poland; one and a half million from Russia; entire Jewish populations of some smaller places. From Budapest: 440,000 Jews were deported in May 1944; 400,000 of them were killed in Auschwitz. In Romania, the city of Odessa had some 90,000 Jews when the city fell to the Germans in October 1941. Most of them were shot to death that month. 1 So too in nearby villages, as recounted in a later report:
     
    In the fall of 1941 an SS detachment appeared in one of the villages and arrested all the Jews. They were arrayed in front of a ditch by the road and told to undress. Then the leader of the SS group declared that the Jews had released the war and that the assembled people had to pay for that. After this speech the grown-ups were shot and the children slain with rifle butts. The bodies were covered with gasoline and set on fire. Children who were still alive were tossed into the flames. 2
     
    Children burned alive. This is a theme repeated throughout the sources.
    Most of the Jews, and others, were killed in the camps. One of the best-known and most widely read survivors of Auschwitz, Primo Levi, provided one of the earliest firsthand accounts in his Auschwitz Report. 3 Levi was one of 650 people crammed into cattle cars for transport to Auschwitz from his hometown of Fossoli, Italy. In the end, only