"And what's the good of it?" I said, "What reasons made you call from formless void this earth we tread . . . Yea, Sire, why shaped you us, 'who in this tabernacle groan'--if ever a joy be found herein, such joy no man had wished to win if he had never known!"
     So said an imaginary person, perhaps one through Thomas Hardy himself was voicing his thoughts, to God, in his poem "New Years Eve."  Why did God make and "shape" us? Why do we need to be, to live?
     Because God loves us, is the oft used Christian response.  Though I do not dispute the fact of God's love, the sentiments of Hardy's poem do cause one to wonder why, even if at the end of all space and time God will redeem all things and restore all that has been lost, humanity must endure such pain and tragedy to experience such bliss?
     Because of humanity's sin, is the oft used Christian response.  Again, I do not dispute the fact of sin, but to an outsider looking in, one might wonder why it happened, why Adam and Eve made the fateful decision, why the world was plunged into moral darkness.
     The fact of human choice is a frightfully difficult one to grasp, a notion I do not pretend to understand fully.  But I will offer that without choice people are deterministic robots, bereft of any point, captives of a nothingness of destiny.  Why do we live?  Why do we choose? Frustratingly, we cannot meaningfully do one without the other.
     In this is the puzzle and conundrum of humanness.