Is God on trial?  Is God on trial for the ills of the world?  To many people, he is.  In his God on Trial, award winning author and critic Eli Weisel speaks to this point, profoundly.  Although I read the book many years ago, I recently watched a movie version of it which, because it presents Weisel's words with pictures, struck me more powerfully than did the book.
     Weisel's depicts a conversation that a group of inmates at Auschwitz, the infamous Nazi concentration camp, had about, in light of the suffering and pain they were experiencing, the goodness of God.  It is of course an ageless dilemma:  if God is good and all powerful (omnipotent), why do people suffer?  As anyone who has studied this issue in some depth knows, there are no easy answers.
     At the trial, most of the inmates are critical of God for ignoring human suffering.  Though some speak up for God, their voices are drowned out by the dissenters.  At the close of the trial, however, one of the chief critics, who served as judge at the trial, offered a measured, and conclusive, response.  It is faith, he argues, it is the Jew's faith in God that is all on which they can draw in the face of suffering.  Nobody else, he says, has this resource.  Everyone else suffers, and even though the Jews do, too, they, he says, have faith in God, a faith that, despite everything else, provides, in some way, explanation.
     We may disagree with the judge's point, but we cannot deny the validity of his position:  in the end, regardless of what is going with us or the world, we can either believe in God or we cannot believe in God.  To do the former means we believe that, somehow, some way, the world has purpose, and that somehow, some way, whatever happens does, too. precisely because God is there--and nothing more.  The latter means that, whatever we think life may be, it, and we, have none.
     Which do you prefer?