Question: Part 1: Right now I don’t know if I believe in God or not. I got this feeling because of recent Tsunami devastations. I didn’t quite understand how God/nature can destroy so many innocent lives when they didn’t do any bad karma, even if there might be few people who had done bad karma. I also couldn’t understand how so many people were destined to die at the same time even though they didn’t have anything in common.
Answer by Romapada Swami:
The laws of karma are very intricate. With our limited perception, we may not be able to discern the exact cause-and-effect relationship in every situation. Both scripturally and logically, however, we can conclude that every reaction hints at past actions. Nothing in the workings of nature is haphazard or due to blind chance; if that were accepted as the alternative explanation to God, it does not explain very much either, in any case.
Truly, many have faced this difficulty in trying to understand or explain pain and suffering in the material world – how can an omnipotent, all-loving God allow such suffering? But Vedic scriptures give a very consistent explanation understanding which, having properly understood, one is not bewildered and shaken in their faith in God in the face of a tragedy.
While the living entity is indeed dependent on God for both happiness and distress, God is not responsible for either; we are. Under His sanction, our lives are orchestrated by higher beings (demigods) and each of us is awarded the fruits of our own past actions.
Karma can be individual, or it can be collective, i.e. reactions experienced by an entire community or large segments of society. Large-scale sinful activities of society such as organized slaughterhouses or undue exploitation of nature can lead an entire society to experience mass karmic reactions in the form of wars, epidemics and natural disasters.
Superficially it seems that the hundreds of victims of the tsunami had apparently nothing in common; yet by the intricacies of karma, and unseen superior orchestration, they were meant to experience the same calamity. But that is not the end; the future destinations of those souls are likely to be equally varied: those who were more pious among them will achieve better destinations and furthermore, those that took shelter of God in that calamitous hour of test were sure to have received His personal protection.
A deeper lesson for all of us to learn from this experience is that the very nature of this material world we inhabit is one of inevitable calamities. Krishna has described it as ‘duhkhalayam asasvatam’ – a temporary place full of misery. (Bg 8.15) Srimad-Bhagavatam certifies this world as “a place where there is danger at every step” (SB 10.14.58), yet there is a place beyond this material realm, free from all anxieties, and which is our real home, and our goal should be to return there.
(Please note that what we have said here is NOT to ‘explain away’ and coldly dismiss the tragic suffering of so many as “just what they deserved”. Much to the contrary, one who fully understands the laws of karma and the spiritual nature of self and is faithful to God, would naturally feel deep compassion for the magnitude of mass suffering; and in feeling thus, he/she would see the need to take deeper shelter of the Lord and encourage others to do so, knowing that to be the only real solution.)
