The sad unbeliever: God doesn't bring suffering, He shows us the way to cope, excel as people

I got the following reader response from a poor soul living in Atlanta.

He has such a misunderstanding of God's role in people's lives for the better.

Are you saying that individuals suffering from the recession, or the country as a whole perhaps, deserve to suffer because they don't believe in [your] God? Perhaps we should work to make the times less desperate rather than clinging to antique fairytales.

Another godless American,
Brian King
Atlanta

God doesn't bring suffering. He provides us the choices to deal with it, like when I got leukemia, lost my career job, lost my mother and lost my marriage in just three years.

But it is just that America suffers, because it has turned its back on these choices, which would lead to living lives closer to His will and closer to the values that lead away from greed and self.

What ails this nation is beyond man's wisdom, or woman's. We as a nation got so far away from God's will and discipline and simple honesty. We now suffer from our excess.

For instance with housing, a lot of Americans believed they deserved very nice new homes when their income did not support it. A lot of banks found a new quick way to make big profits. And then Wall Street packaged all these bad loans outside of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae tougher standards into securities to make even more money.

This house of cards finally collapsed, and rightly so. Home values could not keep rising to cover for all this fraud. No commodity can.

The poor non-believer puts his or her faith in humans to resolve what is really a spiritual issue that affects how we act and live responsibly.

Resolution is in God and our own conduct, not in Washington and lawmakers and a president bent on socialism.