Suffering Before the Gods
For several months now, excessive suffering and evil have gripped Iran and Iranians, pinned them against a wall, and held them down under a rain of blows. Whether from the bullets that scattered our compatriots like autumn leaves on the ground, or the missiles that took the pure lives of our children from the sky. Perhaps the sheer scale of the injustice and futility of this situation, which doesn’t even seem to have achieved anything (and even if it had, it still wouldn’t have been worth the loss of innocent children), has thrown us into crises of feeling abandoned in the universe, or feeling rage at the transcendent forces that some of us believe in. Perhaps some believers, during this time, have felt they had put their faith in a powerless God, while others among us may have soothed their psyche with the thought that there must be some wisdom behind it. Likely some of us who are non-believers have, out of the sheer intensity of the suffering, felt a pull toward believing in a God who could pull us out of this hellish situation. ...