Philosophy
Why Bad Things Happen To Good People
Around Christmas time I was at a friends house where I and I few friends got into a discussion with her father about religion. An older man who had been through a lot in his life, Terry, had some incredibly valid points concerning his contempt for Christianity. He told one story in particular which really struck me about him standing over a man he had just killed in Vietnam and wondering what this man had done to deserve this horrible fate. Obviously in times of war there's a policy of kill or be killed, but aside from that, why had a just and perfect God taken away so many innocent people through the way of wars.
Shortly after a new semester began. I was at Barnes and Nobles buying books for a Shakespearian literature class I was taking when I remembered that I needed a book for my philosophy class.
Jared Kushner of the New York Observer.
Ellen Kushner at Finncon 2010.
Tony Kushner and Angels in America's 20th Annivers...The only title on the list of possibilities that I could recall off hand was Kushner's Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. I began reading the book later that evening and was stunned by the way it was addressing a conversation that I hadn't been able to shake for the past month. It began by displaying the injustices of the universe through example after example of terrible things happening to people who just didn't deserve them, and how these events effected them psycologically. By this I mean that Rabi Kushner through his work with the church was finding that many people assumed, since they believed they worshiped a just God, that the tradgedy in their lives was somehow their fault. That God was punishing them for some small sin they had committed months, maybe years earlier.
I continued reading feverishly, waiting...