Dang you Jack. Dang you all to heck.
OK serious theological answer instead, then, with parables and metaphors and stuff…
Let’s imagine a great message board, a truly divine message board in fact, the Supernatural Divinity Message Board or some such thing. Oddly, this message board does not have clearly posted official rules, at all, anywhere; instead, there are various opinionated threads created by folks who think they have discerned the rules by abstracting out, from observation, what happens to posters under various situations. Some of these people style themselves “Administrators” or “Moderators” but unlike ordinary mortal boards on which such folks really do possess board-powers that ordinary members do not have, it appears that the “Administrators” and “Moderators” on the Supe Divine only have whatever powers are informally conceded to them by the ordinary members who believe in the veracity of these folks’ version of The Rules. I say “appears” because some of them have claimed otherwise, but there’s no evidence for it.
Most of them have posited a Board Owner of sorts, the Grand Overseer of the Divine, aka G.O.D. or in this periodless-acronym era simply GOD. Depending on who you ask, GOD is either a real person (or personage) who wrote the rules; or is an abstraction representing “the source of the rules”; or really exists but is so far beyond our comprehension that we can’t really say anything about GOD aside from GOD is the source of the rules. Well, OK, there are also those who openly say that the self-styled “Administrators” and “Moderators” are a bunch of charlatans and fakes and that there is no freaking GOD. Oddly enough, many of them, also, believe that observations can be made about behavior and its consequences on the Supe Divine, and generalizations made, although they carefully steer away from using the terminology “The Rules” to refer to them, lest someone get the mistaken impression that they believe there is some GOD who wrote them.
Anyway, with all that as backdrop, if you will…
A poster, Jeannie D’Arc, on the Supe Divine posted in a fashion that was upsetting to many people but ultimately was drawing attention to some unresolved issues that had been causing a lot of grief, and in bringing this stuff out into the open could be seen to be doing good-citizenship kinds of things on the board. But the reaction of a lot of folks was very very nasty; Jeannie got <ahem> pitted, was Google-stalked and all kinds of personal secrets posted in public, off-board attacks were known to occur, some Mods and Admins joined in on the attack and branded Jeannie a troll, and someone finally ran a password-cracker that guessed her password and went in and changed it, thereby effectively deleting her account.
Now you ask why GOD did not step in and PUT A STOP to this nastiness.
Let’s ask around…
a) Some of the self-appointed Mods and Admins at Supe are mumbling and dissembling about how we cannot know GOD’s plan or how in an alleged invisible Eternal Board that operates behind this one she is still posting and is held in high esteem for what she did on the Divine.
b) Among some of those who believe in GOD, as well as some who dismiss all that stuff as fakery and crap, are quite a few who say that The Rules (or the generalizations from observations if you hate the ‘GODism’ implications of that phrase) appear to support a kind of anything-goes / laissez-faire environment as far as behavior being prevented — no behavior really gets prevented if it is possible behavior at all — but that all behavior has consequences. The ones who dismiss the whole ‘GOD’ thing say this is part of why they do not go along with the ‘GOD’ and ‘Rules’ crowd — that it’s all just natural law of actions having results, period, end of story. The similarly-minded who do believe in GOD, even if only as an abstraction, say that the point is that when you look at the effect of those patterns of behavior and consequences, there’s something endearingly compassionate and also kind of deliberate-looking about how it all works. This may seem an odd interpretation when bad things can still happen to good folks like Jeannie D’Arc but they say you have to look beyond what does and does not happen to individual posters and instead look more at the long-term outcome of behavior on the board as it affects the board as a whole.
c) Certainly some of the cynical ones say that insofar as there is no freaking ‘GOD’, and that the only ‘Rules’ are “hit before you get hit and get away with what you can”, say that the laws of cause and effect support the strong and selfish and Jeanne D’Arc took a lot of risks for very little likely gain in personal power and prestige and that this is the kind of thing that happens when you do not look out for yourself. Like, duh!
d) There are some differently cynical ones who believe neither in ‘GOD’ nor anything particularly nice or emergently compassionate in the workings of cause and effect, who say simply that everything that happens is mostly random and that nothing has any meaning or purpose aside from that attributed to it by other posters who attribute various meanings to events for their own reasons as part of their own agenda. “We can’t even really know what did happen. It was to a large extent behind the scenes and below the observable surface. That’s how everything is. Nothing is knowable. What do you WANT it to mean? What meaning can you attribute to it that will further your interests or serve your purposes? That’s what you should focus on”
Dunno if this sheds any light on anything for you or not.