“For if we believe that an all-powerful God created a ‘very good’ world, what happened to it?” Pagels wondered after she lost both her son and her husband to tragic deaths in the span of a year. “While the Buddha declared as his first noble truth that ‘all life is suffering,’ Jewish and Christian theologians speak of ‘the problem of suffering’ as if suffering and death were not intrinsic elements of nature but alien intruders on an originally perfect creation” [emphasis
