When facing the news of yet another disaster taking place in the world (a devastating earthquake, a genocide, an epidemic, the murder of schoolchildren, wrongdoers escaping justice, and so forth), who hasn’t heard a thought of this sort follow the initial horrified reaction: ‘Well, we must remember that in the end, it’s all a part of the Grand Design / God’s Plan / The Will of God…’ and so on and so forth. It’s pretty much always implied, and often said, that this means we must resign ourselves, on some level at least, to the situation. And everyone who expresses this sort of explanation seems to find it comforting.

I know I’m not the only one who finds this tendency disturbing, I can’t be the only one who’s discomfited at the idea that so many people think there must be some sort of justification, a ‘grand plan’ that makes all the suffering and death that occur in the world okay, just so they can feel better about it and move on. When someone who’s suffered such a blow themselves, the death of friends or family, the loss of their own health, the destruction of their community, I understand needing an immediate source of comfort to get through the worst of it as they try to carry on living, faced with such burdens. But for others who make such comments, I must ask: is it really a good thing to comfort yourself in this way?

I’ve never found this sort of thing helpful or good. Putting aside the weird idea of ‘choosing to believe’ something (this doesn’t square with my notion of belief as a spontaneous reaction to personal observation, or to an argument, or to scientific evidence, not something I can just adopt like a new style of dress), the very idea of trying to comfort myself in this way seems pretty selfish. I don’t want to feel better about the fact that there’s suffering in the world. I don’t want to think that death and disease and pain have some sort of ultimate moral justification. I want to feel awful about suffering because I want to keep that fire lit under me to spur me to do something about it, even if I can only help in small ways. I want to always feel that I and the rest of humanity can and should do as much about relieving suffering and correcting injustices as we can, because we’ve decided those things are bad. Trying to justify the wrongs in the world as a necessary part of ‘something greater’ can end up sabotaging the best in ourselves, the empathy and righteous anger that we need to drive us to make the world a better place.

That ‘Grand Plan / God’s Will’ excuse, in the end, sounds to me like a trite phrase, a Hallmark-card-worthy empty sentiment, a platitude, little more than a thumb to suck.