By Daphne Chen

I’ve been asking people a lot about their religion lately.

I’ve had this hunger, this need to find out who believes what – and why.

From my former church-attending middle school days to my current indecision, I have floundered from hesitant Christian to atheist to agnostic to looking up the definitions of deism and theism. And I still don’t know.

Ultimately, what strikes me most deeply as I think about this question is the fact that I wish I was Christian myself. Having something to believe in, to hope in, is a precious gift, and I can see its powerful effects especially here in Texas, part of the “Bible Belt”. I would never want to take the power of pure faith away from someone else.

Even I, when I’m feeling especially low, pray sometimes – to whom, I don’t usually know, but I clasp my hands together and bow my head and whisper for anybody, anything, to help me. And sometimes, I pray directly to God. I describe my beliefs as having faith – but not religion.

But lately, I haven’t been able to shake off my fundamental problem with Christianity, which is the only monotheistic religion I have since considered: I can’t believe in a god because I don’t want to believe that anyone who created this world can let so many awful things happen to it.

Murder. Rape. Famine. War. Suicide. Genocide. Infanticide. Natural disasters. Discrimination.

In a sense, it seems that believing in God can make me even more depressed: is it worse to know that there is no god protecting and loving you from above – or is that there is a god, and that he created a world and a human race that feels hurt and pain as deeply as we do, only to watch ourselves kill and rape and tear each other apart? Does it seem right to me that someone could let good people suffer at the hands of bad people just to teach a lesson? Why not just have bad people hurt bad people?

For some reason, my mind always wanders to the story of a Japanese girl named Junko Furuta, who was kidnapped in 1988 by four boys. She died after 44 days of continuous torture. I advise you not to Google her any further, because her story tore a little chunk of humanity out of my heart.

I brought Junko up in a discussion about religion once with some friends. What did she ever do, I asked, to deserve it? The answers: God works in mysterious ways, he was testing her, it was evil, the absence of God, and therefore not really God’s work.

What I still couldn’t understand? Even if all these things were true, God – any God, not just the Christian one – could have allowed the torture continue for 43 days instead of 44.

So why didn’t he? Why didn’t He?

GotQuestions.org, which a friend directed me to, described the question of why God allows bad things to happen to good people as “one of the most difficult questions in all of theology.” For me, it has been the most difficult. So today, I am asking a sincere question, not as a challenge to Christianity, but as someone simply seeking an answer.

Tell me, God. Why not 43?