Humans seem to have an innate need for the universe to be fair when quite clearly it isn't.The good die young. The wicked prosper. Children get incurable diseases and the elderly lose their marbles and their dignity.
At least, as an atheist, I can reconcile this lack of fairness as being just a function of the lottery of life, the interplay of competing organisms and the general decay of a system in stress.
When enough stuff is happening, stuff happens.
The religious I know, and it is a dwindling group, have on occasions tried to tell me that a seemingly senseless death, such as the death of a grandson to influenza, is God's way of testing their faith.
Some God. Some test.
The whole nonsense that is the idea of Hell is build on the idea that if the bad seem to get away with their despotic life, they will get caught in the final net and be slow roasted for eternity as a balancing of the ledger. That way the religious flock are kept from rebellion against the despots in the smug but unlikely belief that 'they will get theirs' in the next life. The flaw in this is that someone who lead a blameless life but didn't join a religious tribe will suffer the same fate on the sulphurous spitroast of Satan.
Hardly seems fair, does it?
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And what prompted this reflection? The news that a young lass in our office, 30, engaged to be married next May, has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
Now, that's not fair.
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