If God is good why do bad things happen?

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I was very impressed with the treatment of this issue in ‘‘When Bad Things Happen to Good People’’ by Rabbi Kushner.
 
I left God a long time ago because I was unable to wrap my head around this very topic. I did search and rescue in my first career and was involved in a major disaster where hundreds of people, including a lot of teenagers, died. I could not fathom how a loving God/Father could idly stand by and allow such suffering.

I left God for a long time, and I am still paying the price for that (marriage fell apart, divorce, kids are a mess, etc).

15 years later, a wonderful woman leads me to the Church and I enter RCIA. I am reading through the book of John, (chap 9 I think) about where he heals the man who had been blind since birth. The Pharisee’s thought the man was born blind because of his parent’s sin, but Jesus had a better answer.

Jesus said the baby had been born blind so that the grace of God could be shown.

I now practice emergency medicine, and when combined with my first career I can say I have seen more “bad things” (both manmade (evil?) and accidental) than most people. But I have also seen how these “disasters” both small and personal or large and national, have brought people, families, and communities closer to God.

I share this story often with my patients. I don’t expect this explanation to be “good enough” for anyone else, but it certainly explains it to me.
 
novusCatholic said:
Because, in general, we are bad. We live in a sinful world.
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This is the reasoning the Pharisees gave about the man born blind (is: it must’ve been because his parent’s sinned). Jesus said not so…it was so that the grace of God could be shown.

I do not believe God let’s disasters happen (plane crashes, massive tornadoes, etc) because someone sinned.
 
Boatswain2PA said:
This is the reasoning the Pharisees gave about the man born blind (is: it must’ve been because his parent’s sinned). Jesus said not so…it was so that the grace of God could be shown.

I do not believe God let’s disasters happen (plane crashes, massive tornadoes, etc) because someone sinned.
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When I used the phrase “we are bad”, I was speaking of humanity in general. I did not mean that because someone does “x”, then “y” will happen to them individually as punishment.

I meant that bad things happen because we live in a sinful world. If sin had not entered in, then we would still be in a perfect world.

That being said, we should also consider that David and Bathsheba’s newborn son did die as a result of David’s sin…
 
There is a great book that really helped me understand the answer to this question. It’s called “The Bells of Nagasaki” by Takashi Nagai, a Japanese Catholic who survived the Nagasaki bombing of World War II. Really, quite profound. But definitely not something that can be answered easily by any means.

To say something that contributes a little more, being humans we don’t know exactly how God’s plan works, nor can we understand his rationale or thoughts behind anything. And he gives us Free Will.
 
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