- We know that He gives us free will, and that bad things are caused by sin, but why does He allow other people’s sins and free will hurt an innocent child? Why doesn’t He protect them - they didn’t choose to sin - it was others who sinned. They should be the ones suffering for their own sins.
This is a hard thing, and I can understand the atheist (agnostic?) children’s concerns. But free will is meaningless unless the natural consequences are allowed to flow from the actions. Without that, you are not truly free.
Free will is the most beautiful and terrible of the gifts that God has given us. It is true that it allows us to perform terrible sins, like that of abusing a child. But without it, we would be unable to perform great acts of virtue and himility, like Bl. Teresa of Calcutta. If all suffering for sins was experienced by the person committing them, then persumably, all of the good results of a virtuous act would have to be experienced by the person performing
them as well. Much of the pain, but almost all of the beauty would be removed from life. If we cannot sin out of love of self, we cannot be virtuous out of love of God, either, and that is the point of life. If all our sins rebounded on ourselves invariably, even we ourselves might not know whether we were behaving well out of a desire to behave well, or a desire to avoid punishment.
Besides that, the question that the children are asking indicates a fully materialist view. In fact, all of the justice that they want is going to happen after death. The One who judges souls knows all of the suffering of every person. He even knows the sufferings of the child abusers, who are frequently former victims. He alone knows how much our choices were truly made by free will, and how much they were made by physical and psychological causes over which we have no control.
I know it sounds like “it’ll all work out when you are dead,” which I admit appears to be a cop out. But if you step back and look at it, life isn’t merely a series of discrete acts, each one of which should deserve praise or censure. Life is a single, organic whole–a person living one unified existence through time. The only way appropriate judgement can be made about that single thing is as a whole, which can only happen after death, when it is complete.
God treats us with respect, and we have to endeavor to earn at least some of it. He shows us that respect by allowing us to make decisions that have consequences–not only temporal consequences that we can see, but also eternal consequences. If we are not free to choose badly, we are not free. If we are not free, then life is pointless. But as it is, even in the strictest prison, we can choose our own actions freely, and freely choose to accept the consequences. I cannot choose whether I will be mugged on the way home from work, but I can choose whether I forgive the mugger and whether I curse or praise God afterwards. This is a terrible responsibility, and I think if we truly thought about it very often, we might be afraid to do anything. Instead, we look on our ability to choose freely not as an incredible responsibility and gift, but as a matter of course–something that belongs to us by right (a right which, however, the children are proposing to take away from child abusers). But if you picture the world where that was taken away, you can see how different it would be.
Imagine a situation where you have just cheated on a test, and you find yourself, through no wish of your own, raising your hand at the end of the test and confessing your cheating. It would feel like you were watching someone else moving your body and mouth. But unless this happens, innocent people (your classmates who did not cheat) will be at an unfair disadvantage. You may affect the curve with your cheating, and even cause them to get worse grades than they would if you were honest. Why should they suffer for your sin? Unless you are treated like a puppet, this will happen, as a natural consequence of your cheating.
God permits this. But you must see that if He permits this, He must also permit much more terrible sins to work the same way? Unless you want God to miraculously intervene as soon as a sin reaches a certain level (which persumably you get to decide), but not to intervene in smaller sins that you don’t consider as important? Where is that line to be? Child abuse, yes, presumably murder, what about rape? What about assault, where permanent physical damage may result? Where is the demarcation line between sins that are small enough that free will can be allowed to operate, and those that are big enough that it should be taken away?
In fact, God, who has a much better idea about what is fair or not than we can have, has determined that there is only one person on Earth (at any one time) whose free will is interfered with in any way, and that is the Pope. The Pope is not free to teach errors on faith or morals definitively, although he is free to sin, to teach errors on subjects other than faith and morals, and to speak or write errors in faith and morals in his private capacity as a man. This is the curtailment of freedom that he accepts when he becomes Pope, and God only allows it so that He can fulfill His promise that the gates of hell will not prevail against the Church, so that His body will always remain on the right path. Even if ALL of the members wander onto the wrong path at the same time, the teachings of the Church will still be there, when their children or grandchildren wish to know Truth. But by the extremely limited scope of the exception, you can see the importance of the rule.
I don’t know how much this would help 13-year-olds. It has been a long time since I was one, and frankly we didn’t discuss particularly deep issues when I was that age. But I hope some of it helps a little.
–Jen
