If God demands righteousness, why does He allow the wicked to prosper while the faithful suffer?

 Thank you for the question JohnJohn. I notice you are a Christian so I will try to answer appropriately and politely.

This is only a problem with the understanding that we are created at birth or conception and live only one physically embodied life. It goes deeper than why is one person enjoying and another suffering, to why there is suffering at all.

Christians have wrestled honestly with the problem of suffering for centuries. There are no shortage of theological explanations: the Fall, human free will, spiritual testing, character formation, divine providence, and the promise of ultimate justice after death. But perhaps the problem has remained so difficult because one important premise was accepted too readily: that this life is the soul's only embodied existence.

If we question that one premise, while leaving the rest of the Christian understanding intact, the problem looks different.

The Vedic understanding is that the spirit soul is eternal, having always existed. When the soul is in the material world, he takes one birth after another, reaping what he has sown in previous lives. Then, while reaping what is due to him in this life, he sows more seeds that, in their own time, fructify and give results in future lives.

This provides something the one-life model struggles to provide: a causal history for the radically different circumstances into which people are born.

The concept of something having a beginning but then becoming eternal was introduced primarily by theologians of the Biblical traditions. Ordinarily, eternal means without beginning or end. But that definition didn't fit comfortably with the Biblical understanding of the soul, so a different category emerged: a kind of "soft eternity," in which the soul has a beginning but then exists forever.

This creates a profound problem for theodicy. It doesn't mean Christianity has no explanations for suffering. It means that those explanations address different parts of the problem without providing a complete causal history for why particular souls enter such radically different circumstances in the first place.

The problem is most acutely felt with the deaths of small children before they have any meaningful opportunity to make moral or spiritual choices.

Some say that children who die automatically go to heaven or paradise. That's comforting, but it creates a strange logical consequence. If the death of an infant guarantees salvation, then someone who accepts that he is doomed to hell could reason that killing as many children as possible would guarantee their entry into heaven. It is a repulsive conclusion, but it follows from the premise.

Others say that God, in His omniscience, knows what sort of life the person would have lived and judges them accordingly. But that raises another question: if God already knows what that person would have done, why is the earthly life necessary at all? God could immediately assign the appropriate destination without subjecting the person to a full life of struggle.

For centuries, Catholic theologians debated the fate of unbaptized infants. The idea of limbo was introduced as a state of natural happiness without the beatific vision of God. This avoided saying that all children necessarily go to heaven, while also avoiding condemning them to hell. Modern Catholic teaching has moved away from limbo and emphasizes trust in God's mercy, but it still stops short of giving an absolute guarantee.

Protestant traditions have generally been less inclined to define the matter precisely, often leaving the fate of infants in God's hands.

So what actually happens to an infant who dies?

Remember: under this doctrine there is no second chance. There is only this life.

Hebrews 9:27

The lynchpin for this doctrine - the rejection of reincarnation - can be reduced to one verse:

"It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment."
— Hebrews 9:27

There are some things worth noticing here.

The author of Hebrews is anonymous. That's a red flag when an assertion is subsequently treated as authoritative on such a fundamental metaphysical question. An anonymous statement is not necessarily false, of course, but neither does anonymity confer authority.

Then there is the context. The purpose of the passage is to establish that Christ's sacrifice was once for all. The comparison is between human beings dying once and Christ being offered once. The statement about dying once serves that argument; it isn't presented as a developed revelation about the nature of the soul or as an argument specifically against reincarnation.

Nor is it introduced with anything resembling "Thus says the Lord," or an appeal to an earlier authoritative revelation, like “For it is written that…..”

That doesn't prove that Hebrews 9:27 is wrong. But if the rejection of reincarnation is going to carry such enormous theological consequences, it is reasonable to ask whether the evidential foundation is really as authoritative as might be hoped for. Jesus reiterated many important points again and again, but not on this point, AFAIK he didn’t mention it at all.

And the issue matters because reincarnation was not some obscure idea that the early Christians had never encountered. It was widespread in the philosophical and religious environment of the ancient world. Some early Christian thinkers entertained forms of pre-existence or transmigration, while the emerging mainstream church rejected them.

The rejection helped distinguish Christianity from competing religious and philosophical traditions and reinforced the uniqueness of Christ's once-for-all sacrifice and the urgency of salvation in this life. So Hebrews 9.27 was used in part, as the basis for establishing the uniqueness and superiority of Christianity. Again that doesn’t mean the verse should be tossed, but it does give motive for readily accepting it without following the traditional authorization process.

But consider what happens if reincarnation is removed.

"Whatever a man sows, that he will also reap" is perfectly intelligible. But what has been sown to account for the enormous variation in the circumstances of birth?

If difficulties are to test us, then what exactly is being tested when a two-year-old dies of starvation?

If it is the free will of other human beings that causes children to die of starvation, why should the free will of those who inflict the suffering be allowed to override God's compassion for those who suffer?

And if suffering is sometimes necessary for character formation, what character is being formed in the child who dies before he can understand what’s happening?

These questions don't mean Christianity has no answer to suffering. They mean that its answers tend to explain particular aspects of the problem rather than providing the complete causal history of the individual who suffers.

Ultimately, the one-life model has to fall back on God's infinite wisdom: God has reasons, but those reasons are beyond our understanding.

The Vedic understanding offers another possibility.

The soul did not begin at conception. The present life is not the beginning of the story. The circumstances into which we are born are the results of a history that extends beyond this single lifetime.

That doesn't mean we can look at a suffering person and know exactly which past action produced their present circumstances. Nor does it mean we should respond to suffering with indifference. Quite the opposite: how we respond to another person's suffering becomes part of our own moral history, and that is dictated by dharma, which exhorts us to relieve suffering even philosophically understanding the cause. Much like a doctor will treat a drunk driver who crashed his car. It’s completely his fault, but that doesn’t mean a doctor won’t do his best to help him.

It also means that the radically different circumstances into which people are born are not arbitrary starting points.

The Vedic explanation is therefore not that suffering is good, or that we shouldn't care about it. It is that suffering has a cause extending beyond the present life.

That is why the ancient problem of theodicy looks different when viewed through the lens of reincarnation.

The Vedic explanation is not necessarily simpler in every respect. But it does something the one-life explanation struggles to do: it gives the soul a history which accounts for its present situation. It answers why some of the wicked appear to prosper and why some faithful people suffer. It is their karma from previous lives, and how they act in this life will determine future lives. The solution is not to endeavor for better and better lives, but to leave this material realm completely and enter the spiritual realm where God resides.

It’s a small point, but this is the version of the oldest known still-extant religious thought. All the complications came later.