Guest Blogger

Today's guest blogger is Raymond Chandler:

Once I asked a Dominican why, if God were all-knowing and all-powerful, he allowed so much suffering and cruelty, so many abominations to the innocent, so much of the jungle in His world. The Father said: 'He wanted to create man free to mould his own destiny.' I said: 'Well, man has had at least ten thousand years to work at it, and he doesn't seem to have made much progress, if Belsen and Dachau and Buchenwald are still possible, if the Russians can destroy a nation as a political move, if ordinary decent people can be tortured until they lose their minds or 'brain-washed' until they become semi-idiots. And apart from man, what about animals? I suppose God made them too. The very existence of animal life in the wild depends on the killing of the weak by the strong. Is that the sort of world God wanted?'

The Dominican said: 'I don't know. But I must believe.' He wasn't very pleased with me, nor I with him.