Do You Believe In God?

A high school girl, aged 16, was crying on a bench the other night while waiting for the subway train. When I asked her why, she showed me the book she was reading. It was Dante’s “Divina Comedia”. Then I said “so what? Hell is bad, but you are too young to worry about that and it’s a great book, but just a book”. The conversation then turned rather philosophical. She said that she didn’t believe in God after reading that book. Her whole short life she has been lied to by adults trying to prove themselves that they had a meaning on Earth, when in fact Heaven and Hell are made up stories meant to control people, to make them do “the right thing”, and that right thing is already within us, for we have a conscience. I thought that was outrageously clever for a 16 year old girl, cute too; she should think about boys or fashion or something, not the meaning of life and whether there is a God. But she kept going, saying that she was an orphan since she was 5, her parents died in car accident and her life was too messed up for boys or other things beside school. Of course everyone told her that her mom and dad went to heaven. Then she remembered her dad had molested her and her mom was a drunk, and by reading the book actually considered they might be in hell. Since we were going in the same train, she told me more. There was one question that maybe every one of us should consider (whether we are Christians, Jews, Muslims, or whatever…) what kind of god allows such things as child molestation, war, disasters, disease and so on, and so on. Isn’t God supposed to watch us? Isn’t God good, merciful, forgiving, and all other stuff that makes someone perfect? He was supposed to be perfect, wasn’t he? I tried to calm her down telling her that that’s no reason to cry for, that if she figured that out on her own maybe she won’t need religion to blame or thank for the good or bad things happening in her life, she will overcome those things by believing in herself for a change. But I wondered after she got of that train, if I should have given her the reasons many people use for their daily praying that God is all-knowing, that God works in mysterious ways, that God has a reason that we are not supposed to know. For 2000 years Christians told the world God walked on Earth to save us all. Muslims believe that God (Arabic: الله‎, Allāh) revealed the Qur'an to Muhammad, God's final prophet, through the angel Gabriel, and regard the Qur'an and the Sunnah (words and deeds of Muhammad) as the fundamental sources of Islam. Islamic tradition holds that Jews and Christians distorted the revelations God gave to these prophets by either altering the text, introducing a false interpretation, or both. That girl and I, and maybe some of you after reading this text, we’re actually asking the same questions, and all the questions lead to one: if there is a God, where is He? Because it all comes down to one God, or whatever you may call Him, the entity that created Earth…