Why does God allow suffering?

Pain is one of the oldest facts of human life, and the question it forces — why would a good God permit this? — may be the most urgent question religion has ever tried to answer. These traditions do not flinch from it. What emerges is not one answer but a constellation: suffering as medicine, suffering as harvest, suffering as illusion mistaken for reality, and suffering as the cost willingly borne by the holy on behalf of the rest of us. Each angle illuminates something the others cannot reach alone.

Drawn from 27 passages across Baha'i, Sikh, Judaism, Buddhist

Is suffering a test, a remedy, or both?

Suffering, in these passages, is not the enemy — it is the medicine. Where comfort breeds forgetfulness of God, pain burns away the dross and turns the soul back toward what matters.

Baha'i

Suffering on God's path transforms into remedy and exaltation.

Regard suffering when endured in the path of the Omnipotent as comfort itself. Endured in His path, every pain is a mighty remedy, every bitterness, sweetness itself and every abasement an exaltation.

Baha'i

Divinely ordained suffering borne with patience brings divine reward.

Blessed are ye the people of Nayriz in that you are patient in your suffering and afflictions in these times ordained by God.

Baha'i

Suffering in pursuit of the Kingdom is erased by its joy.

All the sufferings you pass through in gaining the Kingdom of God will be obliterated when you attain its perfect happiness. It is as a man who has been ill and helpless for two or three years and afterwards becomes well.

Sikh

Pleasure breeds complacency; suffering restores longing for God.

Suffering is the medicine, and pleasure the disease, because where there is pleasure, there is no desire for God.

Judaism

Unexplained suffering may be a sign of divine love.

If he did not find his suffering due to dereliction in Torah study, he may be confident that these are afflictions of love, as it is stated: For whom the Lord loves, He rebukes.

Sikh

Suffering becomes the fuel that keeps the soul's light burning.

The One Name is my lamp; I have put the oil of suffering into it.

What role does human choice play in causing suffering?

Only one tradition is directly represented here on this point — the Sikh teaching that bad company ruins the soul as surely as thorns ruin a banana plant. The harvest is always your own planting.

Sikh

Human association choices corrupt and destroy the soul.

Kabeer, I have been ruined and destroyed by bad company, like the banana plant near the thorn bush.

Is suffering rooted in a misperception of reality?

Maya — the world's enchanting illusion — is named as the architect of spiritual suffering. What bewilders us is not ultimately real; and yet, remarkably, one voice says the Creator Himself staged this very play.

Sikh

Illusion's fire is universal; God is its playwright.

The fire of Maya is one and the same; the Creator has staged this play.

Sikh

The Creator authored the very illusion that ensnares souls.

This fascinating Maya was created by the One who has administered this potion.

Buddhist

Sorrow exists and has a traceable cause — the Buddha saw both.

The Enlightened One saw the four noble truths which point out the path that leads to Nirvana or the extinction of self: the first noble truth is the existence of sorrow, the second noble truth is the cause of suffering.

Sikh

God Himself stages the illusion that causes spiritual suffering.

Emotional attachment to Maya is created by my God; He Himself misleads us through illusion and doubt.

Buddhist

Suffering is the emptiness beneath pleasures only the wise perceive.

Dukkha means feeling of emptiness. Average men are only surface-seers. An Ariya sees that material happiness is merely the gratification of some desire.

Does past action shape the measure of present suffering?

The body is a field, and the harvest does not lie. What you sow in action, you eat in consequence — a principle stated here with the calm plainness of a natural law.

Sikh

Present suffering is the harvest of past actions sown in the body.

The body is the field of karma in this age; whatever you plant, you shall harvest.

Sikh

Action determines consequence; virtue determines whether life has meaning.

As you plant, so shall you harvest. Without virtue, this human life passes away in vain.

Sikh

Separation from the divine Name perpetuates the cycle of suffering.

Without the Naam, the Name of the Lord, O Nanak, there is misery and suffering. The mortal wanders in reincarnation day and night.

Can suffering borne for others become a source of healing?

A righteous figure carries grief that is not his own, and his wounds become the medicine of others. This is one of the most astonishing ideas in the history of human thought about pain.

Judaism

The righteous one carries others' grief, mistaken for divine punishment.

Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted.

Judaism

Another's wounds become the instrument of communal healing.

He was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.

Baha'i

God accepts tribulation so humanity may be freed from its chains.

Would it be fitting for He who is the Ruler of all the nations and the Lord of all creation to accept tribulations in order that mankind might be freed from the fetters of prejudice, liberated from attachments to this mortal world?

Where does evil itself come from — and does it truly exist?

Evil, in this Bahá'í account, has no positive substance — it is simply the absence of good, as blindness is the absence of sight. This reframes the entire question: we are not asking where evil came from, but where good ran out.

Baha'i

Evil has no independent being — it is only the absence of good.

All evil is mere non-existence. Good has a positive existence; evil is merely its absence.

Baha'i

Everything God created is inherently good; evil is relational, not absolute.

One thing may be evil in relation to another but not evil within the limits of its own being. It follows therefore that there is no evil in existence: Whatsoever God has created, He has created good.

Baha'i

Evil is a privation — ignorance, error, and blindness lack positive being.

Intelligible realities such as the praiseworthy attributes and perfections of man are purely good and have a positive existence. Evil is simply their non-existence. So ignorance is the want of knowledge, error is the want of guidance.