חדש באתר: עוזר בינה מלאכותית המבוסס על כתביו ושיעוריו של הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: Why do so many people live badly their whole lives?

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Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Why do so many people live badly their whole lives?

Question

When I was a child, I thought that all human beings were equal, that everyone had equal opportunities, that anyone could get wherever they wanted to get, and all the nice ideas.
Now that I’m almost 40, I see the world very differently.
I think a huge percentage of the world—I don’t know exactly how much—lives in enormous stupidity. Entire groups live in stupidity from the moment they come into being until after they die (and their stupidity continues to have an effect even after their death).
Aside from them, technically a huge percentage of the world lives very survival-based lives, like billions in Africa, India, China, countries in Asia, Europe, South America, and so on. And in every single country that is considered a “good country,” there is a certain percentage of people who live in poverty at varying levels, even to the point of being homeless their whole lives.
There is also a group of people with various disabilities or very severe physical or mental illnesses, whose whole lives are just suffering from their illness, and almost one hundred percent of their lives revolve around it.
Besides them, there are children with severe illnesses who die young, or who die in accidents and the like.
There are people who are born into crime families, and their whole lives revolve around that and around going in and out of prison.
There are people who become addicted to drugs or other severe addictions, and much of their lives (depending on the strength of the addiction) revolves around that.
There are many cults in the world that people are inside from the first day to the last.
There are enormous numbers of people who are born under the influence of terrorists, and their whole lives revolve around how to be as much of a terrorist as possible.
And surely there are many more examples I’m not thinking of right now.
How am I supposed to look at this from the standpoint of faith / belief?
So many people—maybe even the majority, I just don’t really know the statistics—simply live truly terrible lives, or live in total darkness / total stupidity / a desire to do as much harm as possible, sometimes from the very first second to the very last second (and even after they die, their harmful effects can continue). What kind of life is that? And how is it that there are so many like this?

Answer

I think you are mixing together two kinds of situations. A considerable portion of the people you described are to blame for their condition. They should use their heads. They were given choice and intelligence. The part that is not responsible for its actions and suffers greatly is certainly very far from being the majority. As for that, it raises the question of natural evil and human evil, which has been discussed here more than once (and also in the second book of my trilogy). Search the site for natural evil and human evil.

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