Why does God allow bad things to happen?

Perhaps one of the biggest facts facing those who have a hard time believing in God is all the bad that happens in the world.  If God is so powerful and he does exist why doesn't he keep this bad from happening?  How could someone who has the power to stop rape, or abuse, or even death from happening just watch idly as it happens.  There is a lot of bad things that happen in the world can't he help a little?  Why couldn't he at least help...  me...

Assuming that God truly does love each and everyone of us, this has got to be one of the hardest things he has to let happen... But why?  Here are the series of questions that helped lead me to the answer:

• What would the world be like if God did prevent all bad things from happening?  The world would be wonderful joyous no pain, only happiness.  Everyone would be with their loved ones, everyone would have what they need and want.
• Could all of us really have all that we want? Certainly the rapist couldn't have someone to rape whenever he wanted or the Murderer someone to kill whenever they wanted. 
• Why doesn't God just make it so they don't have those desires?  It could be argued that if everyone lived in a perfect environment they wouldn't have those tendencies. Although many children have lived in great families and homes and still ended up doing bad things to others.  So really what were saying here is he would have to remove those tendencies from them and force them to be good.  But remember we can't have him just stop with the rapist or the murderer, for everyone to truly be happy we would have to stop the cheater, the thief, the liar. We would have to stop the greedy, the prideful, and even the lazy.  Each of these things as well as all of our own flaws would need to be changed for everyone to truly be happy.
• Do I really want to be forced to be Good always? I don't know about you but I really hate being controlled or forced into anything.  I would rather figure it out through my own trial and errors.  Suddenly i'm not thinking this would be very happy at all.  
• But can't he stop just the really bad? To answer this I just had to think through it more, what is really bad? Where would he draw the line, If we truly put ourself in each person's shoes as God would see, they usually just take a small step worse then what was done to them. For example do we take away the free agency of the spouse who was cheated on because that spouse was about to kill the cheater? Or the free agency of the cheater even though they were abused and neglected, perhaps the free agency of the neglecter because they were lazy.  There are a million different things that influence people to be the way that they are, and while each of us should choose to not take that next step worse sometimes we do.  I think were gonna have to accept all bad or none at all which we already discussed doesn't really work.
• Is there good that comes from the bad?  Its hard to say that any good comes out of murder or rape, but the truth is it does give us a scale of good and bad. By seeing how bad the bad can get we appreciate how good the good is.  In fact it could be argued that if we had no bad at all in our lives we wouldn't know what we had with all the good. It really is the error part of the trial and error that makes us appreciate the success. Whether it is our error or someone else's we wouldn't really learn without it.

This is a hard one to accept but it really does make sense why God has to allow everyone to have our free agency and not step in to prevent us from doing bad.  We wouldn't be able to progress or improve who we are if we weren't given the choice to do so for ourself.  The after life will be a much better place to live in when everyone around us has grown and ultimately chosen to be good of their own free will, especially when we also truly understand the good that we are getting because we have lived through and experienced the bad.

Why is there no definitive proof of God?

So my previous post lead me to several more questions. One of the biggest, that I really needed an answer too was, if God did exist and truly was all powerful why is there no definitive proof of his existence?  If God wants all of us to worship him and benefit from knowing that he loves and is helping us why doesn't he just make it obvious so there is no way people could doubt it? My religious side tried to dispute this saying just look at nature and all the many beautiful things in the world, not to mention all the miraculous stories you have heard about of people being healed or blessed by God.  Of course my logical side countered saying, those are great stories but just because they believe it was from God doesn't mean it actually was God that did it.  The fact is, logically if you don't want to believe in God there really is no definitive proof forcing you to change your mind.

So to answer this question and because now I am defending that God does exist, I started thinking about this question slightly different with these questions:

• Why would God prevent proof of his existence from coming out?  In other words if their is no proof, but God does exist and has performed many miracles, he must be keeping it from being proven, why?  The only answer to this question I could come up with is that he wants us to believe in him without having proof.
• So then why is it important for us to believe without proof?  The answer to this came when I started thinking about everyone I have ever met who was successful at anything, and why they were.  All of them have had one thing in common, they "believed" that they could do it. In fact they believed it so strongly that it was like breathing. It would wake them up in the morning, it consumed them.  I too have experienced this success just because of what I believed and expected, I think we all have.  I have read countless Positive Mental Attitude books throughout my life that has confirmed this and encouraged more of this especially in the little things throughout life.  Clearly there is something to this belief thing. Is God trying to teach us this powerful ability?  My spiritual side was quick to point out that faith is the belief or at least hope in things unseen (I would insert unproven) but that are true.  In fact even just a tiny amount of pure faith without doubting, i.e. the size of a mustard seed, can move mountains!!!

So their was my answer God needs us to have faith first!  In fact that is one of the major reasons we are here in this life to learn how to have and increase our faith.  I want to close this post with letting the reader know that over the past few years since I realized the answer to this question I have grown in faith more then I ever imagined I could.  God, once he knows that you truly believe in him, is then able to show you his omnipotence. I testify to you that he has done so to my family, in fact in such a way that I can't even talk about it because it is too sacred, nor would I want to deny you the opportunity to gain faith for yourself.  Just know this, faith can move mountains!!!!

Does God Exist?

This question "Does God exist?" is the ultimate question, the most important one that needs answered if we want to justify spending more time talking about religion.  Before I can get into my logical discoveries however,  I need to give a brief background of my life.  I am very logical.  Every decision I make is logic based.  I was also raised very religious.  I internalized and became very close to it.  For 35 years however the two, faith and logic, never crossed.  I suppressed my logical self on religious topics.  I assumed logic had no place when I just had to have faith.  I was very happy in this state but never truly felt whole.

Around this time my wife asked if I would help in her therapy sessions.  In helping I suddenly found myself in therapy as well. What happened next completely turned my world upside down.  I realized I  didn't feel whole because I was suppressing this logical need. To truly gain integrity and fix this I forced myself to set faith aside and work through my religious logic. I had no idea how hard this would be. Ultimately I had to start all over again, My logical self was completely Agnostic.

Consequently this first question was a doozy for me to figure out.  I struggled with it for over a year, and I was forced to figure it out because both internal sides were constantly fighting over it.  It was taxing not only spiritually but mentally and physically as well.  I ended up gaining over 70 pounds because of the stress this caused me.  I went through many battles in my own head and reading/watching others online.  Everything from creation vs evolution arguments to hokey proofs of God's existence.  The most common battle I would have went something like this:

• Faith) Please God help me figure out a way to appease my logical side. Or at least send someone to comfort me.
• Logic) God is not giving me any answers, or sending anyone.
• Logic) Life is sure miserable I am so sad lonely and hopeless. This year is by far the worst year of challenges I have had to deal with.
• Faith) These were never feelings I use to have before.
• Logic) Hope in God may bring happiness and keep me from being lonely but if its not true is that really better? I would rather not be naive.

So there I was trapped in an eternal battle of logic vs faith and it seemed like nothing I did was getting me out of it.

Finally after a year or so and many life changing challenges that I went through without God, I had a breakthrough in my logical thought process by asking and answering these questions:

• Can emotions really be trusted?  Not really, people rally and manipulate people's emotions and beliefs all the time.
• Can logic really be trusted? Actually this is no also because often logic doesn't think things all the way through. Often there are missing hidden variables in the equation that can completely change it often allowing for something that we didn't think of to be possible. As a developer I can't tell you how many times I would of sworn that a bug was impossible yet have been proven wrong because the bug forced me to look at it differently.
• If nothing can really be trusted what are we left with? Really we just have to make do with a combination of facts and feelings. Basically just theorize about what is truth based on everything we do know and then continually strive to prove it right or wrong.
• What are viable theories of how we got here? At this point I listed every theory I have ever heard or could think of,  allow me to state two of the most common:
• Big Bang/Evolution: Life just happened into existence and evolved into what it is today. This theory in my mind has many holes and challenges in it but it is the basis for many of my other theories that do make more sense. The science community also seems to accept it as viable and therefore I will as well as a viable option.
• Loving God: A loving all powerful all knowing God created us, is helping us, and we will live with him and the rest of our loved ones after we die. In all my research I have never been able to find absolute proof that God does or does not exist. In fact I determined that this will always be a viable theory no matter what scientific facts are discovered. This is simply because this loving God can just be creating things via whatever way science discovers. This leads to a lot of other questions that I will explore in other posts but this should be sufficient to prove viability.
• If I had a choice of which theory was true, which would I choose? This is where the real breakthrough happened for me. If all of these are theories anyway, and there is no way to really prove any of them 100% true, why not believe in the theory that helps me out the most right now.  As I analyzed each with this concept in mind, the theory of a loving God stood out above the others 10 fold.  Believing that the most powerful being loves you and is their helping you through your challenges allows you to handle them so much better and easier. Believing that you will live with your loved ones again after death makes it so much easier to handle their deaths.  All of the other theories I came up with were bleak and depressing and really didn't help me at all.  Not only did the loving God theory help me now, but it was also extremely flexible logically, so much so that it would hold up no matter what scientific discoveries happened.  Remember this is just the theory of a loving God, were not taking any scriptural or religious beliefs into account yet. 

At this point it was a no brainer,  choosing to believe in God and defend that theory was a path I was willing to take.  I finally had a solid logical base that worked with my faith instead of against it. It was possible to have Faith and Logic at the same time! This has opened an extremely fulfilling journey that I am happy to share of Faith Filled Logic.