Free Will

I was very sad when I read about Dr Muhammad Taufiq Al Sattar, the gentleman who lost his entire family - his wife and three children - to a house fire in Leicester which appears to have been started deliberately.

Eight people have now been charged with murder in relation to these events, all quite young,  and it's very difficult to understand why anyone would do such a thing to a perfectly innocent family - though perhaps that will come out in the subsequent court trial. 

Dr Al Sattar bore his terrible loss with a calm and dignified grief yet I was still taken aback by his words that - "It was God's plan to take the life". 

I'm not at all sure where a religious belief that that comes from - if it helps Dr Al Sattar to cope with his terrible loss, then that's fine by me on a personal level because I've no idea how I would cope.

But at the same time I feel compelled to say something about an all powerful God - a Supreme Being - who apparently knows and controls everything.

Because if that really is the case then not only did God want this terrible tragedy to happen - God must also have caused this tragedy to happen. 

If so, then all I can say is that I want no part of such a God - because the same God must have caused an innocent woman in India to be gang raped and subsequently die from her injuries .

In which case the very same God must have intended Mick Philpott to be the way he was - which led to his six children being burned to death in another deliberate house fire.

I'm not a fan of any religion, but by and large I think it's a case of live and let live - why should I care what other people believe in or don't believe in, so long as religion remains essentially a private matter.

What I do find some difficulty with, however, is the notion that human beings lack free will - the ability to make decisions about good and bad or right and wrong - and that a Supreme Being is ultimately responsible for everything that happens in the world.

To my mind that is nonsense.