By Shaun S. Sukul

If God is benevolent, He/She is either not omnipotent or doesn’t exist. Our natural desire for sex brings us venereal diseases and children we either don’t want or can’t afford. We have natural impulses to hurt one another. Everyone is born into a different family with unequal amounts of warmth and wealth. Some people are born with handicaps and deformities.

The way you are, composed by your genes and experiences, determines what your decisions will be. If one were to rewind time and make a given decision over and over again, the same decision would be made. This is because you would be the same exact person every time. You would have chosen based on factors such as the knowledge you accrued to date, your personality, and past experience. Think about how many things you can’t control. Some people who pray die of cancer. Hard-working, honest people lost their life savings and some even starved to death during the Great Depression. Other people who place no importance on religion win the lottery. If God were omnipotent and benevolent, he would change our brains so that we were always happy and always did the right thing. It is true, however, that many things in nature seem to have been created by some metaphysical entity, hence the room for agnosticism.But if prayer were beneficial, the happiest and wealthiest people would also be the most spiritually accomplished. If there is any lesson to be learned, it’s that we have no purpose. There is more suffering than enjoyment in the world, primarily because we are configured to always renew our desires and increase them.

Most professional scientists are atheists or agnostics because they realize that the concept of God seems to defy logic. Hindus argue that the inequalities of society that can’t be overcome with effort are due to karma obtained from past lives. Do they mean to say that we are doomed to suffer by making the same mistakes? In any case, If God does exist, he is either a sadist and omnipotent or benevolent but powerless.