When Bad Things Happen to Good People / Harold S. Kushner
Schocken Books, New York, 1981
Now imagine God saying to a person, "How do you plan to get the money to pay your bills? Are you going to get a job which means getting up early in the morning and doing hard work, or are you going to grab an old lady's pocketbook and run off with it?" The man answers, "I was thinking of going out and stealing a pocketbook." God says, "No, that's wrong. I won't let you do that. Choose again." This time the man reluctantly agrees to get a job. A robbery has been prevented, but has the man been permitted to operate as a morally free human being? Has God permitted him to choose between the path of good and the path of evil? Or has God reduced him to the level of an animal by taking away his freedom to choose, and compelling him to take the better path?
In order to let us be free, in order to let us be human, God has to leave us free to choose to do right or to do wrong. If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either. Like the animals, we can only be convenient or inconvenient, obedient or disobedient. We can no longer be moral, which means we can no longer be human.
None of us can read God's mind, to know why, at a certain point in the evolutionary process, He had a new kind of creature emerge, a morally free animal who could choose to be good or bad. But He did, and the world has seen a lot of nobility and a lot of cruelty ever since.
Our moral freedom means that, if we choose to be selfish or dishonest, we can be selfish and dishonest, and God will not stop us. If we want to take something that does not belong to us, God will not reach down and pull our hand away from the cookie jar. If we want to hurt someone, God will not intervene to keep us from doing it. All He will do is tell us that certain things are wrong, warn us that we will be sorry for having done them, and hope that, if we don't take His word for it, we will at least learn from experience.
For more details on the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, please click here
In order to let us be free, in order to let us be human, God has to leave us free to choose to do right or to do wrong. If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either. Like the animals, we can only be convenient or inconvenient, obedient or disobedient. We can no longer be moral, which means we can no longer be human.
None of us can read God's mind, to know why, at a certain point in the evolutionary process, He had a new kind of creature emerge, a morally free animal who could choose to be good or bad. But He did, and the world has seen a lot of nobility and a lot of cruelty ever since.
Our moral freedom means that, if we choose to be selfish or dishonest, we can be selfish and dishonest, and God will not stop us. If we want to take something that does not belong to us, God will not reach down and pull our hand away from the cookie jar. If we want to hurt someone, God will not intervene to keep us from doing it. All He will do is tell us that certain things are wrong, warn us that we will be sorry for having done them, and hope that, if we don't take His word for it, we will at least learn from experience.
For more details on the book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, please click here