If God is omnipotent, why is evil there?

So many people ask this question that when God alone does everything, then why do the bad people exist in the world, or for that matter, why is anger, jealousy arrogance etc there in all of us. If even a leaf doesn’t move without his wish, then why doesn’t he remove all these thorns from the minds and hearts of people, and make this world a beautiful one to live in.

Whoever has such questions in their mind, they all need to go deeper into their own understanding of what they mean by God. The problem lies there alone. What they react to is not about the truth of God, but to 'their understanding' of what God is. First, they entertain some baseless and childish understanding about God, and then keep wondering why ‘this God’ has done this or that.

Let’s take our own example. Many a times we ourselves are arrogant, angry or jealous, do we really think that all our arrogance etc was given to us by some extraneous power, or was it just the consequence of our erroneous perception. As we become wiser and more mature, then such negativities drop, so it was all our doing, and to blame God about our wrong understanding is not fair.

Let’s understand this using the example of a computer. The creative power of God just provides us an amazing hardware and its perfect OS. All software’s are a later installation, and we can just install anything, including a highly destructive virus. Don’t blame the creator of this amazing machine for what 'you' install at a later stage. Anyways even if we did inadvertently install some negative thoughts, then we can always run some anti-virus s/w and clean ourselves.

God is that creative power who has given us this amazing capacity and opportunity to install and run just anything. Think! That is the role of God and having freely and lovingly given to us this amazing portable, ever-charged, always on, shoulder-top, with all its astounding processing, memory and multimedia capabilities, including its extremely fast connectivity - God then just lets us free, he is indeed someone who truly believes in you.

Thereafter we can indeed make or mar our lives, and he still doesn’t interfere, he continues to believe in us and hopes that all our happiness and sorrows themselves will facilitate our better understanding and enlightenment. Let us not expect him to be like the proverbial mother-in-law who interferes in everything the others do. Good teaching is not about interfering and correcting others all the time, but in soft facilitation to help a person to realize and awake; so, rest assured God will never interfere, whatever be the intensity of pains and problems of the people of world.

God is a magnanimous creator who not only creates this astounding and amazing creation with all its beautiful sun, moon etc, but then also believes in you fully. No one in the world believes and loves you as much as God does, and therefore he never interferes. He does not control the mind of anyone, he just gives this amazing ‘mind’ with all its equally amazing powers to us - freely, lovingly, without any obligations.

Guruji Sri Swami Atmananda