Perhaps this will help: suppose a girl is taken to Auschwitz and murdered, along with her family and neighbors, as whole villages and regions were emptied out, so there is not one person who remembers her. Since she is a little girl, she has not had the opportunity to contribute to any Higher Purpose. Her death means nothing, for she is not a martyr, but merely a victim of an evil ideology. It does not edify, nor further a cause.
Now, who would find it satisfactory to say that death is natural, and why should we be afraid of it, and our lives will go on as the elements of our bodies decompose and spread to surrounding nature? How would we give her death meaning? There is none, it is an evil. Even if she did not suffer, even if she were drugged and unconscious throughout the ordeal, it would be evil. The evil is not in the suffering, but in the killing. It is in treating people like vermin to be exterminated, it is in taking little girls and depriving them of the chance to fulfill their promise, it is in treating human lives as if they were so much garbage to be disposed of.
Is there any chance at all that her death can be redeemed, that moral balance can be returned to the universe? And when I say that, I don't just mean can we hang a few Nazis, or learn some lessons, or memorialize the unknown victims. All of those things are steps in the right direction, but they seem directed at the idea of the Holocaust, and not commensurate with the enormity represented by the charred remains of that little girl, much less each and every victim.
It seems to me that the only way we can hope that moral balance will be restored to the universe is if there is a destiny beyond this life, and there is a God who will make a final reckoning, and right everything in the end.
Frequently, the existence of evil is taken as a reason not to believe in God, and there is something to that. Why does He permit so much of it in this world? But, looking at it from another angle, the evil that we witness cries out for redemption (I am not using the term in the Christian sense, but in a broader sense), and becomes a motive for believing in God and immortality........ |
