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God Is Dead
How does one’s faith survive the unspeakable horrors that we see all the time?
God is dead.
When I see the devastation wrought on millions of innocent women and children around the world, my heart breaks into a thousand pieces.
The images of the victims of the Rwandan genocide is one that I can’t get out out of my mind, however hard I try; dozens of bloodied bodies all lying on top of each other in what was supposed to be the sanctuary of the heavenly father.
The images of the dead in Falluja, Iraq, are forever seared into my memory and will remain so; how can one not be moved by the wanton slaughter of women and children, all because of their beliefs?
The footage of the victims of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia is another that can never be expunged in my head, when the murderous Slobodan Milosevic took it upon himself to kill his Muslim compatriots in their thousands in the late 1990s.
When I look at the destruction of our environment by countless multi-national firms, in the pursuit of oil and the continued deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, which is central to our existence on planet earth, in the quest for vast profits, I remember the Sunday school classes that I was raised with, which extols the beauty of God’s creation and our collective responsibilities as guardians and custodians.
And when we think of the unspeakable horrors of the twentieth century; the millions who were sacrificed in the trenches of Flanders and Gallipoli, those who were sent to the gas chamber at Auschwitz and not forgetting to mention those who perished by way of starvation in the Bengal during the second world war, I am impelled to pose the following questions:
Where was God in all of this?
What was he doing to ensure that those who invoked his name while committing the most appalling crimes failed?
If God was as Omniscient, Omnipotent as the Bible would have us believe, why have these acts of wickedness (rape of women and the killing of children) taken place?
Why have there been no consequences for the actions of the insatiably rapacious in our midst?
These questions take on higher level of importance with the events in Ukraine in the last few…
