The movie "God on Trial" (based on an Eli Wiesel book, The Trial of God) 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, whether God had broken his covenant with the Jewish people.  Does he really care about them?  An unbeliever who in his former life had been a judge agreed to preside over a trial that would address this question.

    At the trial, most of the inmates are critical of God for ignoring the suffering of the Jewish people.  If we are God's chosen people, they ask, why must we suffer so much?  Moreover, as one perceptive inmate points out, it seems that God, whom he calls Adonai, is not really good; he is simply on the Jews' side.

    This is a difficult argument to refute.  Do we, Jew or not, only view God as good because he seems to help us, because he seems to be on our side?  Are we really the most important people on the planet?

    At the close of the trial, the "judge" offers a measured 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 this mystery 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.

    Quite true.  In the end, regardless of what is going with us or the world, we can either choose to believe in God or we can choose to not 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.  Nothing more, nothing less.  But the latter means that, whatever we think life may be, it, and we, have no purpose at all.

    Which do you prefer?