Believing in Lieu of Hardship

The discussion that I am about to issue forth has been presented in many forums throughout the past. In fact, I have even touched on it before myself. It is an age old issue, and even devout believers catch themselves raising this issue from time to time. The issue I'm talking about is believing in religion and a personal god in spite of life's many hardships. The reason I'm writing about this topic at the moment is because I recently read a comment on Youtube that made me think of this. The person who wrote this comment mentioned that he was an atheist in a nursing program wherein most of his fellow students were devout Christians. As I read this comment and considered it, I began to think about people who retain belief while they are confronted with things that blantantly run counter to a universe governed by an all-powerful, all-loving god.

Back during the summer of 2006, just before I started graduate school, I was busy weighing my options and working out what I really believed to be true about the world I lived in. It had been almost two years since I had been a regular churchgoer, though I was still prone to labeling myself a "Christian" on occasion. During this summer, I was working at a camp for disabled children and adults. As I worked at this camp, and interacted with the campers and formed some short-term friendships with the other people at the camp, I secretly thought about spirituality, particularly what I should accept to be true and what I should dismiss. While interacting with the campers, I took special notice of the rather hard hands that many of them had been dealt during their lives. Some of these campers lived with various mental disorders. Some examples include various types of autism, mental retardation, and fetal alcohol syndrome. Others had numerous physical handicaps. Some were even burdened with both physical and mental shortcomings. A few were so disabled that they weren't able to move from their wheelchairs or even speak. While I worked in this environment, I thought to myself: Gee, this place sure could be a good argument against a personal god.

To get back to the Youtube comment that I alluded to earlier, I thought about this once again as I read this comment. I thought about people who everday work with disease, disabilities, and other such things, yet still follow religion and believe in a personal, loving god. In a way, I find it interesting that they believe in spite of what they see everyday. However, I'm not all that surprised. I'm also not particularly confused about why they believe in spite of what they see. If I were to question any of them, I'm sure that many of them would give at least one of the three following rationalizations for why they retain their beliefs.

1. Disease, disabilities, etc. were brought into the world by human sin.
2. God allows those things to exist in order to test our faith.
3. I, personally, don't know why God allows these things to happen. All I know is that I have experienced God personally, and therefore, I know he exists.

Even though many people probably don't believe me when I say this, there actually was a time when I found all three of these answers well suited to the issue raised above. However, now that I'm on the outside looking in, I see them as nothing more than excuses for extraordinary claims. Nonetheless, that doesn't stop people from believing them. In fact, I have found that for many people who believe in a personal god, the existence of disease and disabilities is almost a non-issue. In other words, it is not seen as a contradiction to what they believe. In fact, many of them see it as an enhancement to what they believe. How many times has a really sick person gotten better only to have those around him say, "God healed him!" (despite the fact that many other people get sick and die from their ailments)?