In what context did you say that to err is divine and to forgive human?

Answer Podcast

Transcript

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is it in what context did you say that to air is divine and to forgive humans actually that is a that is a satirical way in which some devotees critiqued a particular school of thought which tries to explain why evil is present in the good world if God is all good then there should not be evil in this world especially if God is also all powerful if he is all good then he will want good and if he is all powerful then he has the power to remove bad so harold kushner was a jeevish rabbi and his son got some disease like pergeria by which even when he was just 10-12 years old he became like an old man and he couldn’t walk he couldn’t hear he couldn’t talk and eventually he died when he was barely a child so he had a kushner had a great faith crisis and after that he came to the conclusion which he became a best selling book called when bad things happen to good people and therein he came up with a theory that evil happens not because of God but in spite of God and he said that in essence he said that God is not all powerful there are times when God doesn’t want bad things to happen to us but he doesn’t have control over this world it is satan who has control over this world and therefore sometimes satan can do bad things even when God doesn’t want those bad things to happen so he said that God’s supreme power will be manifested at the time of judgment when he will destroy satan I am just putting broad outlines of his explanation but till then even good people may sometimes have to suffer because satan’s power may temporarily turn out to be greater than God’s power and therefore satan may afflict those who are devoted to God and at such times when those who are devoted to God suffer they need to be understanding and they need to know that they didn’t have a faith crisis in God because they know that God doesn’t want them to suffer the suffering is coming not because of God but in spite of God so by this analysis what he effectively ends up saying is that when bad things happen to us and God is not able to protect us still we should basically if you want to put it more provocatively we should tolerate God and forgive God that you couldn’t protect me but still I will not give up my relationship with you I will continue my relationship with you so basically to fail to protect us is what may happen from God’s side and to still stay devoted to him is what should happen from our side so there are some devotees who wrote articles about this in Back to Godhead and other places and that time basically they said that what Kushner’s philosophy implies is that to err is divine and to forgive is human that God may commit mistakes by failing to protect us and still we should be gracious and forgive God for his failure to protect us and still stay devoted to God so this is a satirical expose of his philosophy now the problem of evil is very difficult to explain and different theologians try to explain it in different ways but especially those religions which in their mainstream versions don’t include reincarnation they find it especially difficult to explain the problem of evil and that’s why they have to come up with such explanations which basically make God almost impotent so if God is not all good then he himself becomes the devil or Satan but if he is all good and yet he is not all powerful then he basically becomes like an impotent God he becomes like a security system that sometimes works and doesn’t work so he becomes fallible not infallible and that’s why this particular explanation even if it is creative is not accepted by Vaishnavas because it brings down the position of God so to preserve God’s goodness we compromise on his greatness, on his omnipotence but the way to understand that he is both omnipotent and benevolent is to understand that our actions that whatever situations we face in our life are also a result of what has happened to us in the previous life what we have done in the previous life so because they reject reincarnation that’s why they have to come up with such ideas and these ideas are exposed through this inverted aphorism that man to forgive is, to air is divine and to forgive is human