A frequent criticism of Christian belief, often uttered by children, but still for theologians a painfully difficult question to answer and retain their faith, is ‘If there is a God why does he allow atrocities like the Holocaust to happen? It is a question that can only be answered: either mysteriously, ‘God moves in strange ways’; or with the painful awareness that the benign heavenly being who protects man from his own destructiveness does not in fact exist and it is our own moral responsibility to struggle with the destructive forces that lead to these horrors rather than look for divine intervention or guidance. The