Why do appalling things happen to innocent people and children?

Why do innocent people and small children so often suffer grave injustice, pain and sickness?  A religious person might say something completely irrational and meaningless like “Only God knows his reasons”, or “God works in mysterious ways”! Let me just take this opportunity to say this which is just my opinion. All religion is a fundamental block to our freedom of choice and is inherently disempowering, taking away responsibility for an individuals’ own life, spiritual wellbeing and a false road map to our destiny. If you believe in the devil, then to me, religion is his finest work. Genocide, mass murders, war and injustice throughout the history of the world has hailed “God on it’s side” with complete disregard for it’s own creed! Religion is the plague of humanity and responsible for a large portion of world poverty, misery and premature death. It uses fear and false promises as a tool to snare and entrap the innocent, the ignorant and the vulnerable.

It is a great hope that following our inevitable self-destruction, if anyone survives in a new post-apocalyptic earth, they may somehow rise above the ubiquitous deception and soul-destroying evil that has held back the spiritual growth of humanity since we first crawled onto the earth. In the words of Captain Fantastic, “All organised religions are the most dangerous fairytales ever invented, designed to illicit blind obedience and to strike fear into the hearts of the innocent and uninformed.”

An atheist might say that, “life is a random series of events over which we have little control” or “it’s survival of the fittest”. This might be more believable, and certainly if only the two options were available this is the one I might subscribe to.

However, like all raw truth the answer is simple. Hitler – started WW2, ordered the death of over 6 million Jews. Heinrich Himmler – architect of the Holocaust, Pot Pol – Cambodian genocide, regarded as a totalitarian dictator guilty of crimes against humanity, Osama Bin Laden – founder of al-Qaeda, responsible for the September 11 attacks on the United States when 2,996 people died, Joseph Stalin – widely condemned for overseeing mass repressions, ethnic cleansing, hundreds of thousands of executions, and famines which killed millions. Josef Mengele – physician in the concentration camp Auschwitz, thousands died under him tortuous experiments, known as the “Angel of Death.”. Saddam Hussein – torture, mass murder and crimes against humanity. Emperor Hirohito – torture, rape, mass murder, human experimentation, the list goes on. Nero – unspeakable torture and killings, even his own family. Leopold II of Belgium – torture and mass murder in the Congo Free State. Tomas de Torquemada – Spanish inquisitor – tortured and killed thousands who threatened the status of the Roman Catholic Church. When someone takes pleasure in maliciously and severely damaging an innocent person, do you not revile them, wanting them to suffer in the same way, so that they experience their wrong-doing themselves, hoping for enough pain to embed deep into their psyche, so they never do it again. In some cases you might be so angry that you become creative about the way they can suffer even more that the affliction they have themselves perpetrated!

Those children who were assumed to be born innocent that are diagnosed with some terrible debilitating disease that cripples their life, or a young boy or girl who is systematically and repeatedly sexually and physically abused. If you knew that those children were reincarnations of Hitler or Torquemada, that they have returned to pay for the brutal and heinous pain and suffering they have caused, how do you think you might feel?

Of course you would have to believe in Natural Law by which everything in the Universe is governed and specifically the Law of Cause and Effect; that is, “as we sow so shall we reap”. Even the bible presents this. The book from which all reference to reincarnation was removed by Christian authorities in order to push forward the notion of one god in control. The idea that a great benevolent being looking over everyone simultaneously, could feed and protect one person and let the next starve to death in this supposedly one single short life, is so absurd it’s almost laughable.

We are hopelessly lost. And yet still we fail to listen, fail to see that we are all made of the same substance, that we are all from the same source, that we are all connected and that whatever we do, whatever we think affects everyone and everything around us. But instead of creating a world of equanimity, care, empathy and truth, we are slaves and victims of a socio-economic system we ourselves created, that invokes deception, greed and egoism, preying on the weak, indifferent to the precious resources that sustain all life. Are we to believe that all those men who committed those atrocities against millions of innocent people like you and me, have gone to heaven, because all they had to do was ask God for forgiveness and he would grant it!

We pray for a salvation that never comes, charging others with the responsibility of our own comfort and needs, blaming others for our own circumstances. All we really need is a deeper knowledge of our own innate power to manifest our own needs. Our true ability to invoke change by our own life choices tempered with empathy, kindness and cooperation, and, if need be, any sacrifices we are prepared to make. With patience and focus we can achieve anything.

In conclusion then, when you view the apparent injustices in the stolen lives of abused and sick children through the blinkered eyes of a religious belief, you will never comprehend, and this lack of understanding will make you bitter and resentful and your desire to see justice done will be frustrated.  Suffering will recur for all of us. But for those who have inficted such harsh and lasting damage, they will reap the harvest of their deeds and know the suffering they have caused and this will be their reckoning, not the arbitrary forgiveness of some nebulous all-seeing deity in the sky!