Bad Things Happen To Good People example essay topic

A phrase I often hear is, "It's not fair". It's common among children when a sibling gets something, or is allowed to do something, that they themselves are denied. But it can also be heard here at work from employees. It could be they didn't feel they got fair treatment about a job assignment, award or promotion. Whenever you have a group of people, it's a challenge to convince them all that they " re being treated fairly. When life is not fair, sometime it's to your advantage.

Michael Dorris' "The Myth of Justice", he concludes bitterly that justice is a matter of chance, as it does not quite exist. "When Bad Things Happen to Good People", Harold Kushner faces the essentially unbearable task of watching his son die, and from that experience, he analyzes Job. In the Book of Job, Michael Dorris and Harold S. Kushner offer different views of fairness and justice. "The Myth of Justice", Michael Dorris declares that mankind's concept of justice is unmerited. "Do I need examples from real life to prove my point?" asks Dorris, "Read the newspaper.

Look at world history. Examine your own family. People got what they deserved right?" (Dorris 466). Justice, in Dorris's mind, is simply an attempt by humans to organize a naturally unorganized world. All men and women have struggles, and they create justice in their minds and then hope it will be served. So justice is unrelated to God; it simply comes from within man.

Dorris never says that justice is completely absent from the world, but says that justice is inconsistent in rewarding the good and punishing the bad. Many like Dorris may see justice as a myth, and it usually seems that the world is naturally an unordered place, as Dorris says. Lives are taken randomly, and pain is inflicted on the innocent. In Dorris' mind, man's suffering disproves the existence of a just God. Perhaps there is a different way of looking at suffering. Perhaps it is biggest hidden blessing that man can experience.

"When Bad Things Happen to Good People", Rabbi Kushner was forced to face the issue of suffering head on when his son was diagnosed with a disease that would cause him to age rapidly and die young. In dealing with his family's struggles and his son's premature death, Kushner was driven to question God's justice and search for some new answers. Kushner's conclusion about God is an untraditional one. He states that God is not responsible for inflicting or even allowing suffering; rather, God cannot stop all the cruelty and evil in the world from hurting the innocent.

A young rabbi at the time, Kushner was devastated. As a man of God, paid to console others in their time of misfortune, he faced misfortune himself and discovered that there is no easy consolation; that God lets good people suffer with bad, that the moral order he had assumed existed in the universe was an illusion. Kushner also assumes Job has uttered the same platitudes about piety to others that have suffered. Only when he suffers himself does he realize that the advice, "God punishes the wicked and helps the innocent", (Kushner 456) implies that the sufferer has somehow deserved his suffering. Job knows he is innocent and has no sins sufficient to explain his children being killed, his wealth stolen, and his health wrecked. Kushner also explains in his preface how his child's illness and death pushed him to come to face with the existence of unfairness in life (Kushner 457).

Kushner's interpretation of God's speech from the whirlwind is that the Joan poet rejects the first proposition, that God is all-powerful. God wants to help, but cannot control chaos and evil in the way we have imagined. God wants good things to happen to good people, but sometimes God cannot keep bad things from happening. God is an all-powerful ruler who cannot be compelled to be just by humans.

The "sense of relief" comes from concluding that God is not causing us to suffer but, rather, suffering happens. When bad things happen, God is sympathetic; we can turn to this God in time of need for help. Justice then, in Kushner's view, is the result of God's efforts to make the world the place he intends for it to be. On the other hand, Kushner denies that God is capable of consistently making sure that justice is served. Ever since the beginning of time it seems as if only bad things happen to good people. Even though, logically speaking, that does not make the utmost of sense but this trend exists and occurs over and over again.

The argument being pursued is that bad things happen to good people to teach them some kind of life long lesson. To recapitulate, good people are those who are kind, honest and unselfish and not to mention a pleasure to interact with, and a bad thing is considered as an event or occurrence that inflicts pain or discomfort to those involved. Sometimes, people are angry with God for causing them or their relatives to have a disease and for causing them to die. It was a great help to us to learn that God does not cause tragedy, and that he is just as frustrated and angry as we are. It also helped to learn that God knows our sorrow and it was comforting to know that He is a good and loving God and He is here to help us through our sorrow and that we were not being punished. Here are two currents outside examples that analyze fairness and justice.

An example of life's unfairness in our environment is high-grade promotions. Some people get them, while others will remain at the same level. While this may not be fair, it's just not realistic to make every position a high grade. When a high-grade position is open, a certificate is produced with the names of all people in Resumix who are rated as highly qualified (sometimes in the hundreds). Of those, the selecting official interviews those few deemed to be the top candidates. It may also be unfair that only a few get interviewed, but interviewing hundreds of people is just not practical.

(People who get married don't interview every qualified candidate either.) And like a sports competition, only one person comes in first. Another example of life is not fair that my friend graduated from UCLA with a 3.98, and had a B.S. degree of Engineer Computer. Also, she was a member of the National Honor Society, did numerous activities within her school, volunteered her time to the community, and participated in student government. Finally, she could not find a job. But another friend of mine graduated from Cal State Pomona, she did not join any program.

She got hiring in the big company. It is not fair for someone who goes to the best University but not having the job. We could easily think of many other ways that life is not fair: where you were born; whether you are problems; if you are well to do or struggling economically; and so on. And we could all think of instances in which life was unfair in our direction and life was unfair against us. Consequently, fairness is the process of focusing our attention on perceptions that do not fit our expectations. Justice lies in whatever it is that justifies them, that squares what we perceive with what we expect, or with what we should expect.

But justice is often in the eye of the beholder, and justice is not always possible, especially for sins of the past. However, absolute justice is not always possible in dealing with imperfect conditions. Therefore, Kushner's analysis leads him to a difficult choice between a God, which is not fair or a God, which is not all-powerful. Also, he reluctantly concludes that God is just, but not all-powerful. On the other hand, Dorris says suffering proves that there is no justice in the world. To sum up, God, who man prefers to think of as a benevolent, kindhearted, father figure, usually appears to be anything.

But it seems that for every human experience that restores faith in a kind and loving God, there is an experience that would indicate really the opposite, like Michael Dorris and Harold Kushner " stories. Tragedies like these cause men to wonder how a loving, just God could permit these things to happen.