Where is a God in all the recent bad events?

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Lee3

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When I was a child, I was taught an old song “he’s got the whole world in his hands”
It’s a nice sentiment - is it true or not though?

There are so many bad things happening lately, from Covid ranging to the growing racial divides and tensions between black and white people in America.
Does God have his hand in all this?
Sometimes it is hard to see this because of all the negativity and anger in the world and so on…
 
I would highly recommend reading the book of job. I found it very helpful when having similar questions and struggles!
 
Lee3 said:
When I was a child, I was taught an old song “he’s got the whole world in his hands”
It’s a nice sentiment - is it true or not though?

There are so many bad things happening lately, from Covid ranging to the growing racial divides and tensions between black and white people in America.
Does God have his hand in all this?
Sometimes it is hard to see this because of all the negativity and anger in the world and so on…
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Metaphysical evil is not truly evil but follows from the imperfection of nature. Yet, the Holy Trinity sustains nature. The Holy Trinity permits moral evil and its results.

Catechism of the Catholic Church
311 Angels and men, as intelligent and free creatures, have to journey toward their ultimate destinies by their free choice and preferential love. They can therefore go astray. Indeed, they have sinned. Thus has moral evil , incommensurably more harmful than physical evil, entered the world. God is in no way, directly or indirectly, the cause of moral evil.176 He permits it, however, because he respects the freedom of his creatures and, mysteriously, knows how to derive good from it:
For almighty God. . ., because he is supremely good, would never allow any evil whatsoever to exist in his works if he were not so all-powerful and good as to cause good to emerge from evil itself.177
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God’s in the same place he was when the last 10,000 years of bad events happened.
Bad events are not something new.

I’m not sure why people seem to think this era is somehow worse than previous time. Based on the stories I have heard from parents, grands, others who lived through the first half of the 20th century, this stuff happening today is nowhere near as bad. And there are many previous horrible history times before that.

In any event, God is with us and in us and calls for us to live out his will and be his hands in this world.
 
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Even my aged parents in their 70s think it’s worse now though lol.

How do you be Gods hands in a practical sense?
 
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Well, I’m sure different people have different experiences. My parents saw people in USA hungry and living in tents, no welfare then. My friends’ parents and my own great-grandparents had to escape massive famines where huge percentages of population died. Nowadays the biggest concern is not how people are going to get food at all in USA but rather, whether it’s going to be fresh veggies or government cheese or McDonalds. We won’t even get into WWI, WWII, and some of the stuff that happened behind the Iron Curtain (I know some immigrants who escaped that too).

How to be God’s hands and so forth?
  • Keep his commandments
  • Be kind to people you meet
  • Help those in need by donating your time, talent and treasure
  • Pray and sacrifice for others and for the world
  • Try to live out your Christian vocation the best you can, whether that’s as a single person, married, parent, son or daughter, clergy, religious, etc
 
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Lee3 said:
When I was a child, I was taught an old song “he’s got the whole world in his hands”
It’s a nice sentiment - is it true or not though?

There are so many bad things happening lately, from Covid ranging to the growing racial divides and tensions between black and white people in America.
Does God have his hand in all this?
Sometimes it is hard to see this because of all the negativity and anger in the world and so on…
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I don’t want to downplay the bad things happening now. Disease is bad. Social unrest is bad (although this is caused by abuse of Free Will). All that is bad - but what’s worse is corruption of the soul (which is literally Hell). All the pain and suffering in the world doesn’t hold a candle to the corruption of a soul. When people say that God has the world in his hands, I don’t think they necessarily mean He will protect you from worldly evil - even Jesus warned that we would have to endure suffering. That we’d have to take up our own crosses. But what God will do is prevent your corruption if you allow him to. That is his main concern at the moment. All the evil in this world can’t tarnish a blessed soul. All the good in this world can’t save a corrupted soul.
 
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Tis_Bearself said:
I’m not sure why people seem to think this era is somehow worse than previous time.
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Completely agree.

Which is worse; ethnic tension with riots in a few cities, or actual chattel slavery based on ethnicity only ended by an armed conflict that lasted a good chunk of a decade and involved people from every state then in the US?

Which is worse; a new virus that has killed around 870,000 people worldwide since it was discovered, or a recurrent plague that in one of its appearances killed around 1/3 of every human living in Europe at the time?

Which is worse; a buffoon in a high political office who can be voted out after 4 years and who in any case is not allowed to continue in office after 8 years, or an absolute ruler of an empire who, if he were alive today, would be classified as clinically insane?

It’s not all peaches and cream, but it isn’t nearly as bad as it could be or as bad as some would have us believe.
 
God allows virtually unlimited freedom on earth, according to His wisdom and for His purposes. Here we experience-we literally know-both good and evil in a world which is effectively separated from Him as far as our direct experience is concerned. Suffering here is inevitable; that spiritual separation alone is a wound which we can become increasingly aware of; man was made for communion with God and is lost and perpetually restless until that wound is healed.

Here we can come to learn of our need for Him and of the beauty of a time when His will reigns completely in our lives-as is the right order of things. Meanwhile man’s will reigns here (Adam’s sin and ours to the extent that we wish to continue in it) with often disastrously ugly effects, and physical evils abound as well but our sufferings are temporary; this world is not our true home and the light has appeared which reveals an unimaginably bright future, an eternal one as the resurrection makes clear. Sin/evil and corruption/death are ultimately overcome.
 
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When the pandemic hit, I knew people who were either “God will save us!” Or else “Haha there’s no God because pandemic” or else “God is punishing us!”

How about, “God, what do You want me to do in this circumstance?”

(For the record, I’m not particularly astonished by natural phenomenon. I wasn’t raised to think Nature owed me anything)
 
Perhaps we don’t see God’s hand in all of this is because not enough of us have asked Him to have a hand in all this…
 
I am with those who say ‘things are better’ today. Famine has largely been eliminated, terrible diseases brought under control and war, while common, has been largely contained in regions rather than becoming world scale. Pain is much better managed. People have more material wealth. Far more countries are democracies. Women and men are more equal. Racism has been pushed from a central part of many nations policy to personal prejudice. There is awareness, for the first time in history, of the human responsibility to other living things. Environmental damage caused by humans has not stopped but it has slowed and there is huge awareness…
 
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FiveLinden said:
I am with those who say ‘things are better’ today… In this situation belief in god(s) has been reducing. It is increasing in areas where the old problems persist (Africa, Middle East…).

Are the two linked? I think so, but in complex ways as there are many other factors at play.
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This seems a potentially disrespectful interjection into the answers being given to an individual Catholic’s query about the problem of evil, inquired about on a Catholic forum.

I understand that you’re not a believer yourself, and you don’t have to be a believer to come on this forum. At the same time, your post sort of reads to me like a subtle implication that either people become religious as a reactionary coping mechanism to bad circumstances (with the potential implication that they don’t ‘need’ religion once they’ve achieved otherwise good circumstances), or bad circumstances follow from religion (or are exacerbated by it).

Either way seems like a bit of a can of worms to drop into a religious forum thread that was more targeted and was otherwise answered decently by previous posters. I don’t see how the original question called for this kind of a response.
 
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MNathaniel said:
Either way seems like a bit of a can of worms to drop into a religious forum thread that was more targeted and was otherwise answered decently by previous posters. I don’t see how the original question called for this kind of a response.
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I intended no disrespect. It’s just how I see things. Everyone is free to disagree. I don’t have any religious views to offer. I am here because I want to understand more about belief and appreciate discussion about my point of view. My opinion on the relationship between the miseries of the world and the appeal of religion is a fairly common one among non-believers. Even some believers hold it as an observation of what generates faith.
MNathaniel said:
they don’t ‘need’ religion once they’ve achieved otherwise good circumstances
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This is not my view. I think many people who are personally in good circumstances find religion a way of explaining the bad things happening to others because of the human instinct for empathy. So While I think on average improvement in circumstances is likely to reduce religious believe it does not apply below the population level.
MNathaniel said:
or bad circumstances follow from religion (or are exacerbated by it).
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I said nothing at all remotely like this inference you have drawn. My view is that religious belief often improves bad circumstances. I think it likely that the tendency to religious belief was actually an evolutionary advantage to our ancestors in helping them through bad circumstances. And it is therefore possible (though not established) that there is a genetic hard-wiring of the tendency to religious belief.
 
FiveLinden said:
I intended no disrespect. It’s just how I see things.
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I appreciate and am not disputing your general respectful participation on CAF. What I’m suggesting is to maybe move your description of how you see things to a different thread if you want to talk about it (or at least to pause in future before posting on a thread and consider whether your planned post is actually the right fit for what an OP is seeking or has laid their parameters open to).

I still don’t see how your comments contribute to this thread (in which a Catholic asked other Catholics for the Catholic perspective on how God is still holding everything (and is still good) even when circumstances seem evil.)

Rather, your response sort of struck me as if you saw some key words and used them as a jumping off point for something you’d rather talk about.

My objection isn’t to you sharing your atheistic perspective on CAF in general, it’s just literally that in this thread I don’t understand what benefit you expected the OP to get out of the specific post you posted.
 
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Hello Lee3! 😊 🙃 😊

I think that God still has His Loving Hands.
  1. Maybe we did something hurtful to God. We could have been punished for bad choices we’ve made, I mean sin. (God punishes to let us know our wrongdoings and reflect}
  2. To test our fidelity. God knows our fidelity but He is testing us for preparation on future challenges. (where we could lose our faith)
  3. To teach us a lesson. Maybe we have done something offensive to God a lot of times or could be something that will put us in danger.
  4. To encourage us, to build us and recreate us.
  5. To repair the harm that was made by bad choices.
  6. So we can love God more of ourselves.
  7. So we can help other people who are in need.
There are times that I blame God for my own sin, after a while, it made me realize that I could have been in a state of danger. God saved me by discipline and repairing my fractures. In short, God is by your side. Whenever you feel alone, so He does. Whenever you feel happy, so He did, as long as it is good. Whenever you feel frustrated, He’s not, but He’s sad for you but anyways He is still helping you.

Sorry for many words! I’ll suggest that you’ll listen on this song:


It’s entitled Holy Darkness, Blessed Night by David Haas and inspired by St. John of the Cross’ poem.

Please watch this video:
:smiling_face_with_three_hearts: 😁 😍
 
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whatistrue said:
or an absolute ruler of an empire who, if he were alive today, would be classified as clinically insane?
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Who?

I think people only compare to 1900 onwards - not Middle Ages when naturally thing were worse due to no hygiene and bubonic plague and so on.

These days so many peoples seem to want to fight, whether it’s rioting, fighting physically or verbally in the street, or over social media…

And then with Covid -
In Melbourne Australia and some other places police are even physically forcing masks onto people who refuse to wear them
 
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