Earlier this year, I commented on a movie, God on Trial.  Today, I return to it, as a recent conversation I had about the Holocaust brought it to mind.  Towards the end of the movie, one of the actors, all of whom are inmates at the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz, contends that God is not good, but merely "on our side."  In other words, the only reason a Jew might say that God is good is because he has made them his covenant people and is therefore "for" them.  If God wasn't on their side, then perhaps he would not be good.
     If this is true, are those who do not believe in God simply doomed to be born and die, eternally separated from their creator?  What is the point of their lives?
     On the other hand, if there is no God, if there is really just you and me in a vast and insouciant universe, how can we assert that anything is good or, for that matter, bad?  How can we know?  In an accidental and indifferent universe, we have no way to determine such things.  We can insist that certain things are good, but we do so in a moral vacuum:  there's no reason why we cannot just as easily say that these things are bad.  It's an exercise in epistemological futility.
     Yet if God is there--even if we cannot physically, apart from the person of Jesus, see him--upholding moral fabric and order in the cosmos, then, and only then, can we know what is genuinely good.
     And that God is not simply on our side.