Survivors

This subject can be very touchy and it's important to be sensitive and understanding when approaching it. One of the things that makes me believe in a higher, positive being is the fact that people survive horrible, terrible experiences. One argument I hear constantly against why there is no God, is the Holocaust. How could their be a God when such a horrible thing happened? Over 6 million innocent people died. Men, women, husbands and wives, sweethearts, grandmas and grandpas, children and babies, brutally murdered.

I believe that there is some truth to the idea that if such a "God" exists, the creator gave us free will. If life is about loving and learning, then what would be the point of intervening in our free will? What lessons would there be to learn from? Why would be live a life that was easy and truly appreciate the good experiences we have if we had no idea what was bad? The world would have no heroes, and there would never be anything to gain. I can never truly say why such terrible things like divorce, genocide, and heartbreak happen except for that we are here on this Earth to live through it and experience it. I could never compare my life to those of Holocaust survivors, but I do know based on my own personal nightmares of family divorce and being heartbroken that I believe there is a God because I survived. 6 million people died in the Holocaust, but the Jewish race and its faith survived. How could anyone survive such a brutal, unjust, and evil event? Who would want to continue living once surviving it? Yet people did.

"How could the world go back to the way it was, when so much bad had happened? But in the end, its only a passing thing, this shadow. A new day will come, and when the Sun shines it will shine out the clearer," says Tolkien. We don't live to get what we want, we live and fight to survive to protect what's good in this world. And there is some good in it.

I believe because I didn't die when I thought my world was coming to and end and all I wanted was to cease to exist. I believe because I survived. And I believe because through the greatest evil and hatreds the world has ever seen, people survived and found a way to keep living, to keep finding meaning and goodness in their lives. Evil does not rule this world. It will not win and there will always be someone somewhere who will stand against it. In this fact, I truly believe.