A sense of loss

It's a good thing I don't believe in God, because if I did, on days like yesterday, I'd absolutely hate Him. Seeing pictures of that Belgian coach destroyed in the accident in Switzerland, killing 22 children and 6 adults, you can only see such an occurrence as an accident, entirely without design or will behind it. Anything else is so horrible as to be beyond reason – it would be the most vicious, cruel and wanton evil imaginable if it were any kind of act behind it, or any kind of act of omission of act by something or someone, that could stop it. Surely, surely no supposedly benevolent deity would do such a thing, or allow it to happen?

I cannot begin to imagine the suffering of the parents of those kids, perhaps especially those travelling to Switzerland who still don't know the fate of their own child(ren). Seeing the face of the pastor of one of the schools were two of the dead adults and several of the children worked or attended, he looked like a man who had no idea how or why this could happen, a man struggling to reconcile his own beliefs with the reality of the event which confronted him and the others it had affected so horribly.

Friends and relatives gathered at a church, I guess as a point of shared contact for the human comfort it affords, being with others who truly understand and share your suffering, because I cannot imagine there can be any comfort drawn from the belief that those kids now sit with a God who chose to take them. It's an awful contradiction and one of the reasons I can never understand faith. Indeed, even the priest conducting the ceremony was forced to face a question which must have been in every one of those suffering minds – has God abandoned us, he asked, presumably rhetorically.

No, of course not. What I suspect is abandoning some of them, entirely reasonably given the circumstances, must be their sense of trust in God, their certainty of His existence. It's easy to say this of course, sitting here miles away, not knowing any of the victims, but the only way to rationalise this awful tragedy is as a horrible accident, the cause of which, doubtless eventually to be ascertained by investigation, had nothing to do with anyone or anything's design, celestial or otherwise. That will not, of course, help the parents with their grief, but may help them feel less angry about it later, if they're able to come to see it like that. Like I said at the start, if I thought somebody were behind this, or could have stopped it and did nothing, I'd absolutely hate them.