Free Republic

"Where was God in those days?" asked Pope Benedict XVI as he stood in Auschwitz last week. "Why was he silent? How could he permit this endless slaughter, this triumph of evil?" It is the inevitable question in Auschwitz, that vast factory of death where the Nazis tortured, starved, shot, and gassed to death as many as a million and a half innocent human beings, most of them Jews. "In a place like this, words fail," Benedict said. "In the end, there can be only a dread silence, a silence which itself is a heartfelt cry to God: Why, Lord,...

DID GOD WHACK NEW ORLEANS? A THEOLOGICAL INQUIRY By Don Feder Was Katrina a warning - the ultimate wake-up call for a morally somnolent nation? Even religious conservatives are afraid to speculate, so successfully have we been cowed by a culture of disbelief. Regarding the way God works in the world, there are four possibilities: 1. There is no God and everything that happens is the result of the random collision of molecules. 2. There is a God, but he's an absentee landlord. He arranged the world, including nature, as a self-regulating mechanism, then sat back and allowed it to...

Compassion is the best response when humanity faces the problem of evil, writes Edward Spence."Why did you do this to us, God? What did we do to upset you?" asked a woman in India this week, a heart-wrenching question asked in common these past few days by Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Christians. Nothing could have prepared us for what happened when the tsunami unleashed its terror. So we seek answers where answers are hard to come by, in either secular or sacred realms. Traditionally, the Judeo-Christian God, considered the most supreme and perfect being in the universe, has been ascribed...

It is has become commonplace to regard Ivan Karamazov’s "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" as a prescient parable glorifying human freedom and defending it against the kind of totalitarian threats it would face in the twentieth century. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s angry atheist delivers an uncanny prophecy of the omnicompetent, freedom–denying state that would arise in his own native Russia. But concerning the liberty that is the only cure for state–sponsored oppression, Ivan is terribly wrong. The Christ of the Grand Inquisitor advocates an idea of freedom that Dostoevsky considered an abomination. It is linked to Ivan’s critique of God for allowing...