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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books Imam Khomeini, Ethics and Politics The Philosophy behind Suffering One of the issues engaging the mind of man since the distant past is the existence of suffering, which is apparently pointless and futile. The presence of evil and suffering in our world is undeniable. Everyone has encountered and experienced them in their various forms in his life. Life without anguish or pain, and happiness without grief exist only in the imagination.

But the reality is a mixture of the two (happiness and loneliness). Concerning suffering there are mainly two fundamental questions. The first is, what is the origin of suffering and from where does it emerge? The other is whether agony and pain are concordant with the justice and mercy of God. All the religious people of the world should answer these two questions. If God is the Lone Creator of the world and the Manifestation of goodness, then where have all these miseries come from?

Can the God of Goodness be the agent of misery and just as He creates, can also destroy? Acknowledgment of the fact that the One God is the sole origin of all creations—even those events that are seemingly evil—was enigmatic for many. Thus, most of them would follow the path of polytheism and, like the Manuians,[228] believed in at least two deities.

As narrated by Paulo Cuello, the great soothsayer who believed in various gods, when he heard the claim of Prophet Ilyās ( ‘a ) that God is One, he asked in mockery: “Do you want to say that according to your belief, the same God that sends the storm also makes the wheat grow even though these two things are poles apart?”[229] The other point is that in the teachings of all religions, God has been described as the Absolute Power, Absolute Authority, Most Gracious, and Most Merciful.

These attributes are apparently discordant with the existence of miseries. Various philosophical and ethical answers to these queries have already been given.