by: Rick Johnson 
PO Box 40451
Tucson, Az.
85717
RikJohnson@juno.com
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Some years ago when my daughter and I were driving home from one of her Tae Kwon Do meets, I commented that some of the kids there had no uniforms and were performing in sweats and a t-shirt.
Cerridwen said that it was because they were very poor and one in particular, was working as a janitor for the school to pay for his lessons.
So I thought about this for a moment and suggested that we donate to the school some of our older uniforms that didn't fit wither of us anymore. After all, we never used them and they should be put to some good use.
We eventually worked out a plan for her to give the uniforms to the teacher privately and have him pas them on to students who needed them, were dedicated and so on. A good plan and one that allowed me to teach my children the value of helping others.
Unfortunately, very shortly after the car blew up at a red light. We had to push it through the light and into a parking lot while I worried about how to pay for the repairs (Being a single father with 2 jobs and no help from the dead-beat mother limited our resources)
Cerridwen then asked, "Why is it that every time we try to help someone out, something like this happens to us? Where is that Three-Fold Law you keep preaching to me? Why doesn't the Goddess help out good people? WHY????!!!???
Well, I wasn't able to answer that question. Not then and not last week when I received a call from her in college asking the same question.
I've put this question to the BBS and to other people I know and the answers I get are thoroughly unsatisfactory. The main answer I get is that we are to learn a lesson.
"What lesson?" Cerridwen demands. "To not be good or help people in need or we get screwed over?"
After that is the old "You must have faith in the universe/God/Goddess" which is the most fucked-up useless response you can give to a child.
So I've been thinking about this and after September 11, 2001, I thought more. Those people who died were not bad people. They were generally good people trying to earn a living and support their families and suddenly, someone rams an aircraft into their office and kills them. I imagine a lot of them prayed to their god for their lives and, obviously, their prayers went unanswered. Lives ended. Children orphaned. Spouses widowed.
And not once did any supposedly benevolent god or Goddess show up to explain why this was allowed to happen. His, incidently, is the one irrefutable proof for Atheism. If there is a god, then any god that would cause or even allow such an act is not fit for worship.
Why is there evil?
In the old days the answer was easy. The Gods were neither all-good nor were they all-powerful. Some were good and some bad and some more powerful than others and sometimes we humans simply got in the way of the wars between the gods.
Sometimes the gods had a higher purpose that caused us to be pawns in their games. (Odin couldn't be trusted because he needed warriors for Ragnarok. So he would chose the best soldiers and ensure that they would die so he could have their souls for the final battle which he considered to be more important than the needs of the families of the slain warriors or the safety of the nation they were trying to protect.
In other cases, there were bad gods that simply liked to hurt people and sometimes they were stronger, or sneakier, than the gods who wanted to help humanity.
Then Zoaraster showed up with the answer. There was a divine war between the good god who did good things and the evil god who did bad things. Both were equally matched and we simply got in the way.
The Yezdi's of Iran have an answer to that. If god can't protect you, then pray to the devil. God, being good will forgive you and your prayers just might convince the devil to ignore you.
Then xianity showed up and stated the god was all-good and all-powerful. "Not a feather falls from the wing of a dove that god does not brush it away" is the description. Everything that happens happens because god, being all-powerful, causes it to happen. The sun rises because god makes it rise. The stars shine because god makes them twinkle. Flowers grow because god makes them grow. Mothers give birth because god gives them fertility. Famine happens because god blows the clouds away. Rapists rape because god wishes that woman to be beaten and assaulted. And those two aircraft struck the World Trade Center because god made them do so.
Wait a minute! We have problems here. God killed all those people? Yes! Because THAT is the definition of All-Powerful. Anything less than god's total control of the universe limits god. IF something happened without god's direct control, then god cannot be Omnipotent!
Then since god is all-good, then these deaths MUST be good. It was the will of god that they die because their deaths are good and the misery of their families is good because god is omnibenevolent!
Sucks! Don't it?
Ok, then, if we cannot accept that argument, then we postulate that the evil god, satan/devil/whatever must be causing all that misery. Good! God does good and devil does evil. OOPS!!! How? If god is all powerful, then he must control satan too. God must have ordered/forced/controlled satan to crash those planes into those buildings. Remember that god is all-powerful. If they crashed without god's will, then god is limited and there we go again.
This argument also eliminates free-will which cannot exist when god is all-powerful.
God is all-good so everything that god does is good. God is all-powerful so everything that happens is by gods direct command. Evil happens so evil must be caused by god and evil must be good….
The argument is called the Dichotomy of Evil and has never been resolved. The best the theologians can come up with is "Have faith in the divine plan". What a fucked-up system and totally useless answer. Try telling that to a child who just lost his father.
We Witches have tried to resolve this with a different system.
1) The Gods are not all powerful. Yes, They are powerful, but not all powerful. The Goddess gave birth to the Universe some 13,000,000,000,000 years ago (more or less) and She set it up to run like a machine with rules and laws. And like any machine, the universe breaks down sometimes. Things happen because while the Goddess is busy preventing a war in country "A", she isn't around to ensure that country "B" gets enough rain to prevent a drought.
The Gods want to help us but They need our help to help us.
2) The Gods are not all-good. Sometimes the Goddess has cosmic PMS and when that happens, it is a good idea to just keep out of Her sight. And the Horned God has a warped sense of humor and enjoys a good joke… which just happens to be on us sometimes. And the guy who you played the joke on rarely thinks it was as funny as the guy who played the trick.
Again, The Gods want to help us but They need our help to help us.
3) A lot of what we think of as "evil" is just stupidity on our parts. Really! You KNOW that the Mississippi River will overflow and flood the plain every few years so just why the **** did you build your house there in the first place?
4) And there are many gods and goddesses, some good and some bad and some indifferent. Some fight each other and some torment or aid humanity and some just do what they do.
But, like all people, even witches need a reason. So we invented the Three-Fold Law.
"Everything that you do, be it good or ill, will return back to you three-fold. Three times bad and three times good. Once in kind, once in spirit and once in need." We have free will to do good or ill.
Now we are getting someplace.
Those planes crashed into those buildings because people had free will and chose to cause evil and so did so. Or maybe some evil god is causing this.
But the question now becomes…. "Why?"
Why, if the Goddess and God are essentially good, did They not work harder to stop this tragedy? Are They not as powerful as another god? If so, then perhaps we should reevaluate which side we are on. And what about the Three-Fold Law? If we get back three times what we do, then those people on those aircraft and in those buildings must have been really evil to deserve that kind of return.
It still doesn't make sense.
No matter how you look at it, it just doesn't make any sense.
No matter how you look at it, it just doesn't make any sense.
How could a Goddess who loves us create or allow or fail to prevent such misery?
It is exactly the same as when Cerridwen and I tried to help those kids in need and our car blew up. Only on a far smaller scale. We do good and receive evil. Those people on the aircraft and in the buildings were trying to do good. Yes they may have cheated on their spouses or taxes or walked off with an overdue library book but I don't see how they could have done enough evil in their lifetime to earn this Three-Fold Return.
And to state the usual arguments "It is our higher selves teaching us a lesson" or "The gods work in mysterious ways" or "We must have faith" simply doesn't work. These are arguments for those who refuse to think. For those who have turned their brains off with the horror of the world. For those who have given up.
No rational person can accept those arguments. If you do, then it is an admission that the Gods ignore our prayers and spells. That all the good we do is meaningless. That our lives are empty in the grand scheme of things and we shouldn't even try.
I started this paper in an attempt to answer a question posed by my child. I asked other people wiser than I, or so I thought, and never got an answer that made either me or my daughter or even my neighbor feel any better. And if we cannot do this, them what are we doing calling ourselves priests of the gods?
Am still seeking an answer and if anyone out there has one, please let me know. If it is more than the crappy responses we heard in Sunday school that encouraged us to seek other faiths, then I will gladly print your paper here for all to see.
As for me, somehow a lot of what I once believed in and once gave me comfort now seems empty in the face of this one burning question?
"Why is there evil and why do bad things happen to good people?"
Since writing this I have received a number of responses and EVERY one quotes the christian view. Only most try to hide it under some new-age idea of balance. There must be evil to enable us to appreciate good.
It is as if I am unable to appreciate a sunset unless somewhere a child starves to death. "Gosh, I'd like to do you a favour but if I do, then the universe will flood a city and kill thousands to balance out my kind deed."
No, I refuse to accept any argument that relies on 'balance' to explain my question. To do so implies that:
To contact me:
RikJohnson@juno.com
by: Rick Johnson
PO Box 40451
Tucson, Az.
85717
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