There is a parasite that can enter the human body through the urethra, migrate through the bloodstream, and eventually make its way to the eyes, where it destroys the delicate tissues responsible for sight, potentially leaving its host permanently blind.

Lion cubs, while learning to hunt, have been observed eating their prey alive, not out of malice, but simply because nature has yet to teach them the efficiency of killing.

There are plants, growing in ordinary urban environments, that are so poisonous that a curious child can eat a few leaves and die.

Cancer is as much a part of the natural world as the trees, the mountains, and the oceans.

So I have to ask: What exactly are you seeing in this world that you consider divine?

The beauty of nature? Of course. I've driven through the Smoky Mountains and traveled through the wilderness of Canada. I've stood before landscapes so breathtaking that they almost seem impossible. But there's a certain privilege in appreciating the beauty of nature from behind the glass of a car, traveling along a modern highway, protected from the very wilderness we're admiring.

Because beneath that beauty is a world that is indifferent to our existence. A world of parasites, disease, predation, starvation, and suffering. A world where a creature can spend its final moments being eaten alive, where a child can die from a handful of leaves, and where a perfectly healthy body can become a breeding ground for its own destruction.

I see the beauty. I really do. I just don't have the luxury of pretending it exists independently of the horror.

I see the same mountains you see, the same forests, the same extraordinary complexity of life. But I also see the child armies, the genocides, the famines, the diseases, and the seemingly endless capacity of humanity to inflict suffering upon itself. I see a universe in which suffering is not an exception, a deviation, or some unfortunate interruption of an otherwise benevolent design. It is woven into the very fabric of existence.

And perhaps that's the fundamental difference between us. You're looking at the beauty of the world and interpreting it as evidence of something divine. I'm looking at that same world, with all its beauty and brutality, and seeing no evidence of anything other than nature doing precisely what nature does.

There is no discernible benevolence behind it. No cosmic justice. No grand moral architecture ensuring that the innocent are spared or that suffering serves some greater purpose.

The universe doesn't hate us. It doesn't love us, either. It simply exists, indifferent to whether we flourish, suffer, or disappear.

And what we call beauty, horror, good, and evil are ultimately experiences filtered through the extraordinary but imperfect machinery of our own minds.

I don't find that depressing because I fail to appreciate the world. I find it sobering because I appreciate it enough to see all of it.

There is beauty in this universe. There is also unimaginable cruelty. Neither requires a divine explanation. And I see no compelling reason to pretend otherwise.