If Krishna loves us unconditionally, why has he created bad things such as alcohol?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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But shouldn’t time only be love? Hare Krishna.
If Krishna’s love for us is unconditional, why did he create bad things such as alcohol, drugs, cigarettes, etc.? Answer. Now, these two are not necessarily related. Krishna’s love is unconditional means that irrespective of whether we love him or not, still he loves us.
That is his unconditionality. His unconditionality, the unconditionality of his love doesn’t mean that he takes away our freedom to choose. Love itself can be unilateral.
But a loving relationship cannot be unilateral. Now, a mother may love a child, but if the child becomes a rebellious teenager and the child just rebuffs every single expression of affection that the mother is offering, then they cannot have much of a relationship. So similarly, Krishna’s love for us is unconditional.
So he always loves us irrespective of whether we care for him or not. And he expresses love by providing us heat, light, air, water, food. All these things are provided by Krishna through nature’s arrangement for us.
Now, beyond that, we also see that Krishna, through Guru Sadhu Shastra, gives us spiritual knowledge by which we can understand him and attain him. And that is also his mercy. Through all these things, he expresses his love for us.
At the same time, along with that, Krishna also gives us an opportunity to experiment. So we need to choose to love him. We need to reject the alternatives that the world is offering and focus on choosing Krishna and sticking to that choice of Krishna.
And that requires being tested. Just as in an exam, the teacher may give a multiple choice paper. Now, the wrong options are also given by the teacher.
But the wrong options are not given because the teacher wants the student to fail, because the teacher doesn’t care for the student, because the teacher is benevolent towards the student. No. The teacher is benevolent, but the student also has to be diligent.
And the diligence of the student is expressed through studying what the teacher has taught. And when the student studies what the teacher has taught, then the student makes the right choice. And by making the right choice, the student gets marks and gets promoted to a higher standard.
Similarly, the bad things that are there in this world, they are there as parts of a multiple choice exam. The world offers us various choices. And if we observe and introspect and learn from Guru Sadhu Shastra, then we know what the right choice is.
And then the wrong choices that are there in this world, we see them not as something which is there to drag us down. We see them that even by rejecting them, we are coming closer to the right choice. And by making the right choice, we are moving closer to Krishna.
We are becoming spiritually promoted to a higher level of devotion. So Krishna’s love for us is expressed through his giving us the needs of life, his giving us the spiritual knowledge to make the right choices, and his being there to guide us for making the right choices. And the wrong choices are there.
They also indicate Krishna’s respect for our free will. Krishna said that I’ll give you free will, but there’s nothing wrong that you can do. Then what is the meaning of free will? If a boy holds a gun in front of a girl and says, I give you freedom to love me, but you can’t do anything except love me.
That’s not free will. Free will means there’s a capacity to choose freely. And sometimes one may choose something which is not what the other person wants one to choose.
So Krishna has given the wrong options, not because he wants us to make those options, wants us to choose those options, but because he wants us to learn and grow in our life. And to learn what are the right choices and making those right choices grow in our life. So even the presence of the bad things in the world demonstrates Krishna’s love for us.