These things happen Ex P. God does not command them too happen although he does let them happen. Natural disasters arent evil per se. They dont discriminate as too who they maim or kill. As for evil in the world, Simone Weil answers this in terms of afflicition.
Weil's concept of affliction goes beyond simple suffering, though it certainly includes it. Only some souls are capable of truly experiencing affliction; these are precisely those souls which are least deserving of it—that are most prone or open to spiritual realization. Affliction is a sort of suffering plus, which transcends both body and mind; such physical and mental anguish scourges the very soul.
War and oppression were the most intense cases of affliction within her reach; to experience it she turned to the life of a factory worker, while to understand it she turned to Homer's Iliad. (Her essay The Iliad or the Poem of Force, first translated by Mary McCarthy, is a uniquely powerful piece of Homeric literary criticism, and of persistent interest to students of ancient literature.) Affliction was associated both with necessity and with chance--it was fraught with necessity because it was hard-wired into existence itself, and thus imposed itself upon the sufferer with the full force of the inescapable, but it was also subject to chance inasmuch as chance, too, is an inescapable part of the nature of existence. The element of chance was essential to the unjust character of affliction; in other words, my affliction should not usually—let alone always—follow from my sin, as per traditional Christian theodicy, but should be visited upon me for no special reason.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Doozer
