How does religion exaplin wide spread poverty and suffereing?

[Lethe]

There is only one answer: God is a troll.



The most common theistic responses I've found to this dilemma is that without suffering, there would be no compassion. This is technically true, as compassion's literal meaning is "with suffering", but if there were no suffering, compassion wouldn't be required.

As far as God's divine hand deliberately helping others, in thriving societies where poverty and famine seems so far removed from the self it's easy to fail to consider them when processing the world around oneself. So while I can understand the desire to attribute positive outcomes to a higher authority, I've had the same thoughts as well, and could never manage to ignore them. I'm actually curious as to the religious responses.