Part 1 – Word Count  – 859           Reading time – 4 minutes

For the past few weeks I have been corresponding with a friend who does not share my spiritual beliefs. To call him a non-believer is probably a bit of a soft sell. Yet, calling him an atheist imparts in him a level of intolerance that is also inaccurate. Perhaps he is an anti-believer. In any case, he is a deep thinker and is tolerant of, if not sometimes curious about, my beliefs. He also has an ability that I have found lacking in the other atheist types with whom I’ve tried to engage. He has the ability to think through questions and provide insightful answers in a polite, intelligent way without accusing me of lying and without insulting me personally, denouncing my resource material and deriding my faith. I can have lengthy conversations with him that don’t degrade into slanderous, name calling events. Because of this I very much enjoy our exchanges and have benefitted from his well-reasoned perspective because it causes me to dig deeper into my beliefs in response. Although I don’t think that either of us has persuaded the other to give up personal belief systems I think we each come away from our conversations with a better understanding of another way of thinking. The following is an excerpt from a recent exchange that sparked some thinking that I feel might be useful to fellow Christians and others on the topic of suffering and why God allows it.

My friend likes his anonymity so I will refer to him as Mr. Devil’s Advocate, or MDA for short. We had been discussing the topic of faith and he made the following comment, to which I will add a small amount of paraphrasing:

MDA – “The idea of faith was ingrained from youth with me. Then coming into…not maturity… but a wider frame of mind perhaps, challenged me, like all of us, to look at the world, its people, faiths, science, outside inputs like animals, and plants…worldly functions. Factoring a grand design, basic natural end results and on and on…(I admit the thougt of all this happening by chance is a hard train to follow)…ad nauseum. End result was I could not honestly believe in a greater entity who would…pick a word of choosing that you want…ignore, challenge, to personal or mass death, construct such dilemmas or tragic testing as to destroy the subject whilst requiring love as a result, of all things, acceptance explained many ways, obedience, and unfailing faith with no clearly definable proof with that acceptance. Learn from everything without said faith gets the same end result, without praying or even admitting to said God. We still learn, suffer, of die through those experiences without bending a knee to a (? Figment of no proof). I mean no disrespect. And I will not question your belief. “

Mr. DA tends to pack a lot of ideologies into his responses. But the one that jumped out at me was his reluctance toward faith in respect to the idea of personal and mass death, dilemmas, tragic testing as to destroy the subject. I am taking the liberty of calling all those things suffering. I want to add my thoughts because this is a common point of debate among non-Christians when challenging the veracity of God. Assuredly, it is a difficult point to explain away and I cannot provide a clear and direct answer. However, I do have some thoughts on the topic that may shed some light on a few of the nuances of this complex subject. My response follows in Part 2.