Source: Huff Post, by Jeffrey Small.
Our individual lives are short, inconsequential in a universe that is 13.7 billion years old. We are finite. We suffer. Yet the faiths of the world also teach us that we can transcend suffering and death because we are part of something bigger than us. Behind our everyday realities lies an Ultimate Reality, what we might call God, Allah, Elohim, Nirvana, Brahman. By transcending our individual egos, our wants and desires, and connecting on a deeper and broader level with this Ultimate Reality, we can find true peace.
Each time the media reports on a tragic tale of suffering — a school shooting taking the lives of innocent children, a hurricane decimating the homes of thousands — a fundamental question that has perplexed philosophers, psychologists, and theologians for generations arises: Why do evil and suffering exist in the world?
While these incidents tear at our hearts, we realize that each of us, along with our friends and families, will also die one day; we just hope and pray that the time of our demise will be in the distant future. Over 150,000 people around the world die every day. In the time it takes to read this post, hundreds will have passed away, many of old age, but some of tragic causes. Likewise, we also suffer. Our suffering may come as sadness, frustration, anger, anxiety, hurt, pain, boredom, or dissatisfaction or in more extreme forms like torture and starvation that still occur in many areas of the globe. Suffering and death are so integrated into our lives that they seem to be inherently part of existence itself.