If God is ruling the world, then why is the world not perfect?
From: shweta anand kulkarni:
how is god born? if god is ruling world, why isn’t this world a perfect world without corruption,terrorism,etc?
Transcript
This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Thank you. God, of course, has no birth because He exists beyond the realm of time and He exists in the spiritual world where He is forever, eternally existing without beginning and without end. He is the beginningless beginning of everything.
So, in that sense, God in His transcendental self-existence has no birth, He is never born, He eternally exists, but when He performs pastimes in the material world and incarnates, at that time, He may choose to appear in this world through the medium of His devotees. So, as Krishna, He may appear as the son of Vasudevan Devaki or Yashodayan in the Maharaj. So, when He appears in these situations, it is like not exactly taking birth, it is more like the sun rising.
The sun came into existence when it was born, when it arose, but it just appeared to our vision. Similarly, Krishna appears to our vision, although He is eternally existing before us and He uses His devotees who want to serve Him in the Vatsaliras as His parents, and through them He appears. So, His birth doesn’t take place through the normal process of male inseminating a female, but rather it takes place directly through the Lord manifesting in the heart of the father.
Then from the heart, He goes to the womb of the mother and from there He manifests fully born. As Krishna, He was well-dressed with Shankha, Chakra, Gadha, Padma, with His beautiful hair developed already. So, His birth is Divya and in 4.9 in the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says that those who understand the divine nature of my birth and activities, they will actually no longer suffer in the cycle of birth and death, but come back to Me.
Because when they truly understand Krishna’s divinity, they will fall in love with Him and actually they will want to return back to Him. Now, regarding the second question, God has given this world as an arena for those souls who want to try to live independent of Him. And for those souls, He has given them some free will within a limited context by which they can act the way they want.
So, the evil of this world is not because of God, but it is because of us. It is we who indulge in corruption, it is we who indulge in terrorism, by we I mean human beings in general. And it is not that God forces us, nor does God recommend it, it is God who sanctions it.
God has given us free will and He tells us in the scriptures what He wants us to do. To do our prescribed duties, to become purified, develop love for Him and to turn back to Him. That’s the primary mission which God gives us in this world.
And that is the primary purpose of this world. So, that purpose is said to be rectification. Rectification means we have different imaginations of what will make us happy and after all those imaginations get exhausted, then Krishna guides us to understand that it is only by loving Him and serving Him that we can become truly and eternally happy.
So, that is the secondary purpose of the world, it is a rectification. The first purpose of the world is experimentation. When we turn away from God and seek to enjoy separate from Him, then He provides the world as a facility for all of us to experiment with different ways of enjoying.
So, some people, they think that by cheating others and engaging in corruption and earning lots of money, that will make them happy. And so Krishna allows them to do that because only when they do that and see for themselves that this doesn’t make them happy, then there is a chance that they may get rid of that desire and turn towards Him. Similarly, the same applies to terrorism.
People imagine that those who they consider to be their enemies are actually also God’s enemies and they may even use religious justification, but their terrorism is motivated simply by their own concoction of what God is and what God wants, not a true and sober understanding of what God has given in the scriptures. So, why does God sanction this? Because that is so that the souls can experiment with what they think will make them happy and when they realize that this doesn’t make me happy, then they will be returned back to Him. Now, remember, what about those who become victims of such experiments? Those who suffer because of the corruption and terrorism? Yes, Krishna’s system is quite intricate and those who suffer these injustices are actually suffering them because of their own past karma.
So, there is an elaborate lecture about karma and there are several articles if you give a search for karma on the site, you will find them. But let’s be sure that amidst the chaos in the world, ultimately nobody suffers for something which they don’t deserve to suffer. It may seem a little harsh if we see somebody suffering who has been good in this life, but scriptures tell us, the Bhagavad Gita tells us that actually the workings of karma are quite difficult to understand and therefore that person is suffering in this life for what that person has done in the previous life.
So, certainly God, although He sanctions the wrong things that people want to do, He also ensures that the people who do these wrong things get the karmic consequences of their own deeds and through that also they learn their lessons. And of course, God doesn’t want to sanction all kinds of violent and harmful activities and that’s why He also gives His scriptures and He gives His messengers of love, His devotees, His sons and His prophets and He Himself comes again and again repeatedly to this world so that we may have the opportunity to learn about what is the actual way to become happy in life and thereby give up all these violent activities. So, to summarize, the sufferings of this world are man-made, not God-made.
They are God-sanctioned and they are sanctioned by God because God wants us to play out our fantasies about what will make us happy so that we can recognize them to be just fantasies and then turn towards the reality of loving and serving Him and thereby become truly happy. Thank you.