In Auschwitz the Jews asked themselves where is God, their god, was in the face of the Holocaust?, because at that time the divinity in which they placed their hope seemed to have forgotten them.

Years later, no religious expert or believer has a definitive or satisfactory answer to God’s silence. No one can explain, with theological logic, how an omnipotent god could allow such an indiscriminate massacre…

Today, in the year 2020 while we go through of the COVID-19 pandemic, I believe that this question, with the relevant historical nuances, can and must be asked again.

Why does God allow it and keep silent in the face of suffering? Is it a punishment?

I do not want to approach it from a theological point of view but to transcend the point a little further. Obviously, a pandemic is not a divine punishment. Neither for believers nor for atheists or those who are far from God.

We are, as a species, vulnerable, and a virus sooner or later does its job (Black Death, Scabies, Spanish Flu…). History has shown us this before, it shows us this now and, like it or not, it will do so again in the future.

It is part of life, it is part of our own existence. The only thing that will change, now and in the future, will be the speed of expansion since we are increasingly interconnected, and that is for better and for worse, the costs of globalization.

For their part, some believers want to experience the global quarantine as an opportunity to get closer to the divinity but, although it is true that partially stopping the world has helped in many ways (pollution has been reduced, the hectic lifestyle has slowed down, online education and the use of tools for remote communication is flourishing…) this is by no means the ideal consolation in the face of the situation either.

So, believers and non-believers alike, we ask ourselves (assuming their existence for literary purposes)

Where is God?

A difficult question to answer, for religious and for sceptics. There is no coherently loving and theological explanation that validates, in some way, the critical pandemic situation that we live in the year two thousand and twenty: the indiscriminate number of deaths and the uncontrollable spread of the disease.

The believers are in an even more interesting situation and, remembering what happened in the Black Death, we can see two groups of the faithful: those who take intense refuge in their god or those who decide to live life as if it were their last days, resorting to excesses.

But neither group gives us the answer to the question in this article: where is god?

God is nowhere.

Don’t misunderstand me if you are a believer. I am not and do not intend to override your position or belief, the theological debate is for other sites within this blog. My answer goes a bit further, appealing to the human side of humanity (worth the redundancy).

Today more than ever we are witnessing in the West something culturally rooted in the East: collective thinking. The spread of the first pandemic of the twenty-first century is potentialized when we do not take care of each other, when we do not stay at home and, being carriers perhaps without knowing it, we spread the virus because we think of our right to freedom of movement and not, of the care of our fellow men (something, by the way, very religious).

God, the Abrahamic God or any other deity, is not going to come down from heaven to solve the world’s problems. Jesus is not going to turn water into a vaccine against the coronavirus. Nor will Mohammed recite a verse to stop the pandemic.

No.

It is we, as humanity, who are responsible for us, and it is we, working together, who will succeed in defeating, as we have always done, this or other epidemics in history.

Image | Pixabay

Translated with DeepL