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Sunday, December 25, 2011
The Gift: A Christmas Rumination
My plans are no more guaranteed to withstand time and chance than any other man's. For some reason, Christmas tends to drive that home more powerfully than any other day of the year.
The Nativity story is essentially one about a great gift, a gift that no other event in history has ever approached or ever will. The nature of that gift is misunderstood in part. That's a pity, for much misunderstanding and animus against Christianity could be dispelled if it were made clear.
I'm not sure anyone -- anyone in Holy Orders, at least -- has ever tried to make it clear. There are reasons for that, as well, mainly arising from the tendency of the human Church, sometimes called the Church Temporal, to exceed its proper sphere. Even the great Clive Staples Lewis was unable to breach that particular bastion to any effect. You'd think that would serve as a warning to me...but despite all the times I've ranted about it, I still have a wee bit of trouble maintaining the proper degree of humility.
Inasmuch as I'm about to attempt something at which no theologian known to me has ever succeeded, I won't be offended if you cease to read right here and trundle off to deal with the mess your kids and Significant Other have made of your living room.
Just this morning, I confronted a plaintive request, posed as a comment to this essay:
I fancy myself an atheist, although I was raised as a Roman Catholic. I refuse to believe there could be a being of any puissance who could allow the evil that men (and women) do, and have done through the entire history of mankind, to children.I've heard the whole "Vale of Tears" theodicy and other apologias explaining away the "Creator's" culpability for permitting the violence done to children, but none of it rings true for me. It is simply easier for me, for this and other reasons, to believe a being truly loving and Supreme does not exist.
You appear well-versed in understanding the groundings of faith, especially as RC's accept faith. I don't wish to be so forward as to ask you to explain how you deal with this issue personally, but it occurred to me on reading this post that you might be able to recommend something to read that actually deals with this subject intelligently.
I don't mean Jesuit sophistry, or "you simply must accept that God loves the little children and would never _really_ let them suffer" BS, but rather something written that might actually permit a person to have G-d and the violent and filthy, depraved abuse and death of innocent children exist in the same room.
The only explanation that I have been able to come up with is that he would have to be a real bastard if he did exist. No offense intended, believe me. I prefer to think he simply doesn't exist other than as an emotional need for a large part of the human race. Like my sister-in-law was fond of saying, "I ain't perfect, I'm just forgiven.", aka: "I can be part of a nasty and basically unredeemable bunch of organisms who prey upon each other and do violence to innocents, but it's OK. If I repent, I will be saved."
See my dilemma? Any suggestions?
This is the sort of cri de coeur that I am unable to resist. A good man -- take my word for it -- has succumbed to the Problem of Pain: the inability to believe that a benevolent Deity would have created a universe that permits so much evil and suffering. I had to grapple with that one myself before I could confidently return to faith. It's a nasty one, for one giant reason: the severe difficulty we limited ones have in contemplating the nature of God and the Divine Plan.
The heart of the thing is the nature of free will under the veil of Time. We are temporal creatures. Alone among the living species, we experience the passage of time, in which we sequence the events of our lives and concoct theories about why this happened instead of that. Because our wills are free, we are capable of taking many paths forward from any point in time and circumstance. The scope of our decision making is limited only by our nature.
Our nature is defined by the laws of the universe that gave rise to us. God decreed those laws and made them self-enforcing. But they don't constrain our wills. We are free to choose what ends we will pursue: pleasure or pain; profit or loss; stasis or dynamism; good or evil. Freedom of the will is God's original gift to Mankind: the one that distinguishes us from all the lower orders...and perhaps from some of the higher ones, as well.
Much rhetoric has been wasted on whether our wills are truly free. Some of the dissension about that proposition arises from another postulate about God: that He is omniscient. How, the objectors ask, can our wills be free if God already knows what we're about to do? This, too, caused me some problems when I was contemplating a return to faith. However, a sufficient explanation exists. As I wrote in my latest (and so far, my best-reviewed) novel:
"What makes it hard for most people," Ray said, "is that we tend to think of God as just a very powerful temporal entity, like some sort of super-magician. But He's not. He created time. He looks down on it from above, the way you or I would read a map. He knows the path we follow because He knows all the paths we might follow, and what might flow from every one of them." He sat back and reflected for a moment. "So our time-dependent language about 'choosing' and 'knowing' gets us into trouble when we try to apply it to God."
If that possibility hadn't occurred to you before this, don't let it trouble you. It took me a lot of determination and very hard thought to crack through to it. The possibility of a Being that stands above time doesn't come easily to creatures embedded in time and unable, this side of the grave, to escape it.
"God made the angels to show Him splendor, as He made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind." [Robert Bolt, A Man For All Seasons]
The mind of Man is itself a mighty wonder. Unlike any other species we know, it grasps and uses abstractions: "things that are not things," but are nonetheless of enormous importance. Indeed, it is quite possible that abstractions are the only realities -- that were it not for a thought in the Mind of God, a mere possibility He has chosen to entertain, our universe would not exist at all. Whatever the case, our ability to form conceptual groupings, to theorize about and experiment with cause and effect, and to plan on the basis of our abstract understanding, is the key to the human experience.
But we are not infallible. We are capable of error: errors of conception; errors of implication, errors of judgment, and errors of morality and ethics. Indeed, were it not for our capacity for error, we could not learn. Yet our errors cost us, and others around us, pain and loss. Sometimes the cost exceeds anything we might have imagined.
In that sense, every human life is an ongoing examination. Potentially a final exam, at that, from which a "permanent grade" will be derived and recorded indelibly.
The nature of the test flows from our natures: our individual wills and desires balanced against our social needs. We might not be "all connected," as the old commercial claimed, but vanishingly few of us are wholly independent of all others -- and those few aren't necessarily better off for their separation.
Suffering arises from a small (conceptually) number of sources:
- Natural causes (i.e., disease and accidents);
- Actions taken from insufficient knowledge or incorrect beliefs;
- Evil deeds.
The first of these would seem to be "under God's control." It's possible to take that attitude only if one demands that God intervene continuously in the mechanics of the universe, repeatedly suspending or rewriting natural law to avert developments unpleasant to men. For disease and accidents are themselves mere consequences of the workings-out of the laws of nature under the veil of time.
An old principle of bio-ecology holds that every niche in nature will eventually be occupied by one or more organisms for which that niche optimizes those organisms' survival and flourishing. The discovery of the Radiodurens bacillus, which thrives in the cores of nuclear reactors, is a striking illustration of that principle. But the human body is itself a natural habitat for lesser organisms -- and some such will operate to the individual host's detriment, even as the organism itself reaches a climax state and awaits propagation to another host. Hence, disease is a logical consequence of natural law.
Similarly, an accident is merely the operation of one or more laws of nature at a time and in a fashion when someone will be inconvenienced. For example: Cliffs don't fall because God wills them to do so; they fall at a particular time, because the forces acting on them have become unbalanced in favor of gravity. We call such an event an "accident" solely because someone was in an unfortunate proximity to it, and was damaged or killed as a result.
Concerning our limited knowledge and capacity for error, very little need be said. We are within Time, and thus denied the ability to look into the future with total accuracy and confidence. So mistakenly pursuing some course of action which ultimately costs us body parts or a prison sentence is a possibility for all of us, including the brightest and most upright, simply because we are limited, fallible beings.
That brings us to the part that costs most persons the most agony: Man's capacity for evil as we understand it. It's from this aspect of our natures that the greatest amounts of doubt of God's benevolence arise.
Man's will is truly free. He's not merely free to pursue his desires in whatever way he chooses; he's also free to choose his desires. Some of our desires are innate and therefore innately innocent; even so, it's possible to adopt evil means in their pursuit. There are also desires that are inherently evil -- desires whose pursuit is inherently wrong, regardless of the means chosen for their fulfillment.
Given that God refrains from coercing us -- that's the meaning of free will, after all -- those who choose evil means or evil ends will cause others to suffer. Indeed, the suffering of innocent others might well be the result for which they strive. Once again, the problem, if we insist on seeing it as such, is that Man's will is free. God made Man free and will not retract the gift:
Schliemann sighed. "Theologians have regretted the use of the word 'omnipotence' since the founding of the Church. A much better term would be 'control over natural law.' That's reasonable, since natural law is only a thought in the mind of God, as is all the rest of the natural world it governs. But it has no relevance to supernatural law, which binds both God and man."
Louis raised an eyebrow. "Supernatural law?"
"Yes, Louis, the supreme law, the law that transcends law. The law that says that a statement cannot be both true and false. The law that says that each thing is what it is, and nothing else. Man is free, because God made him so. It is Man's nature to be free. The Almighty Himself could not impose faith upon you, not with all His force. Not without making you something less than a man."
(I am occasionally appalled by how much more incisive and eloquent my characters are than I am. But I'm shameless enough to steal their best lines for my own purposes!)
So the suffering we deplore in our world is an inevitable feature thereof. Worse, it derives directly from the nature of time, human free will, and invariant natural law. No alternative set of natural laws could exclude it.
It's possible to rail against free will itself, of course. I don't, but I'm willing to believe that some persons have done or are doing so. But free will within a scheme of natural law is what makes the human experience what it is. Without free will, we would be mere animals; without natural law, we could not exist at all.
I can't sugarcoat the phenomena of evil and suffering, nor will I try. Neither will I argue that, because temporal life is short and the life of the soul unbounded, that we ought to dismiss it as trivial. Nothing is trivial in God's eyes. We will be judged, in part, according to how we cope with our sufferings, and how we treat others in their times of sorrow.
All a finite human intellect can do with the Problem of Pain is to say: That's the way time must work. We are not angels. (The angels have other problems.) We have bodies that can be hurt, and that inevitably will be if we live long enough. We have emotions that can be manipulated and affinities that can be betrayed, and these things will happen to most of us as well.
And so I return to the Christmas gift. Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind, became flesh and walked among us to proclaim the Kingdom of God and the conditions for admission:
Now a man came up to him and said, "Teacher, what good thing must I do to gain eternal life?" He said to him, "Why do you ask me about what is good? There is only one who is good. But if you want to enter into life, keep the commandments." "Which ones?" he asked. Jesus replied, "You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal, you shall not give false witness, honor your father and mother and love your neighbor as yourself." [The Gospel According To Matthew, 19:16-19]
He abrogated the Mosaic Covenant of the Book of Leviticus and replaced it with the Commandments above, which depend in whole on two other, even higher principles:
"'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.' This is the first and greatest commandment. And a second is like it: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself.' On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." [Matthew 22:37-40]
His Passion and Resurrection were, among other things, an unimpeachable way of saying, You can take that to the bank.
May God bless and keep you all. May the joy of His Nativity be yours this Christmas season, and throughout the coming year.
Comments
Francis,
Thank you for taking the time to write that. I am capable of grasping the notion that G-d could set something into motion and then stand back and permit it to be what it will be, as _we_ make the choices that pleasure or pain us, if I am reading what you wrote correctly. I think I understand that G-d would not wish to micromanage our choices, and simply provides the means for us to know and do what is right without pushing us in that direction.Perhaps I was not clear, though. I spoke not of _our_ choices as adults, but the suffering of children through no choice of their own. _Their_ free will is not in play here, in fact it is thwarted. Yes, it is an artifact of the choices of mankind, subsequent to their will, as set in motion by G-d. But that leaves the children as chattel, with no choice of their own, forced to suffer the choices of others.
In a larger sense that is true of many of us (Obamacare comes to mind), but we still may choose to accept the consequences of refusing to go along with the choices others have made for us, up to and including our incarceration or death.
I can understand G-d not wishing to intervene in our test of the usage of free will. But - as presumptuous as it is - were I able to affect the outcome myself, there is no way I would permit children to suffer so heavily the bad choices and/or evil of us adults.
I could send my child across the street to walk to school mere blocks away, but certainly could not stand there and let the child be struck and maimed or killed by the vehicle I see bearing down upon him or her. I could let a child play in the park, but not sit there as she was grabbed and abducted by a pervert intent upon gratifying his own urges upon her innocent body.
Perhaps in some way I simply cannot grasp, it is necessary for children to suffer rape, sodomy, torture, beatings, burnings, scaldings, being locked into closets to starve to death. That “necessity”, even as an adjunct to permitting the free will of mankind, would not recommend its author to me.
I hope for your sake, and the sake of others, that I am simply without the means to understand what you know to be true. But for me, I remain unable to accept - not that anyone besides myself will be troubled by this - that a being of love and compassion for those he has created could permit the evil men do to children. To each other, you bet! But not the innocent children who cannot exercise that promised free will.
Thank you for trying, though. It means a lot to me that you would make the attempt to penetrate my thick skull.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/25/2011 at 03:52 PMAs the resident and laconic agnostic hereabouts, I must needs pose the unanswerable question: If there were no evil in the world, by what measure could we judge virtue?
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 12/25/2011 at 09:03 PMLeonidas - would you even _need_ to judge virtue if there was no evil?
The world might be pretty boring without evil to strive against, but I might choose boredom nonetheless. I don’t feel like I have anything to prove. Working on my ignorance is challenge enough.
“Water’s wet, the sky is blue, and ol’ Satan Claus is out there, waiting for us. Be prepared, son. Be prepared.”
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/25/2011 at 11:29 PMRegt:
You would not be the first to ask any of these questions, of yourself or of others.
You would by no means be the first to be incapable of comprehending the motives of the Creator. By definition, a being capable of authoring the whole of Creation would be so alien to us we could never comprehend. The Creator tells us hmself, in Isaiah: ““As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts”
If the Creator knocked on your door tonight, and gave you the ability to comprehend His creation, and explained to you all the reasons for the things you find so puzzling, would it change anything? It would not.
I would never try to dissuade you from your agnosticism; rather, I would remind you that you are a human, and as a human, you have limitations but also amazing possibilities. All of those evils you attribute to a “Bastard” G-d or, given godlessness, to insensate fate are there, within the reach of your arm. What are you doing about them?
Is the evil you discuss your test? Is it easier to think of there being no god because he doesn’t “Fix” this, and that absolves you of your mandate to “fix” it?
One way or another, things are what they are. You can worry endlessly about if there is a god why does he let this happen, or you can do something yourself. Believer or non believer, that’s still your job. The world cannot be like that within the reach of the arms of just men.
Meanwhile, (at least in my extremely humble opinion) I wouldn’t sweat Agnosticism. People like Mr Porretto, people like myself, people like the millions around us all day every day, We have enough Faith for you too. And if you choose to try to change the things you see, and do so with an open heart and without rancor or jaundice, I would be very much surprised if that faith didn’t visit itself upon you as well.
By the way: That Faith does not come neatly packaged with understanding. In this world, I doubt you’ll get that. I don’t have it, at least not very much of it.
A few years back I was in a mission in Africa. I saw Catholics, Methodists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Baptists, all working side by side. A very new missionary I was working with wondered aloud how the Pentecostals could mingle with the clearly evil Papists- one of the nuns put a package of bandages and sandwiches in his hand, and said “We’ll discuss dogma when more of them live than are dying”. Putting youself voluntarily on the path of righting the wrongs you see does a remarkable job of allowing you to ignore that whole “Does G-d exist” concern. You’ll be too busy.
Leonidas: I sort of see what you mean, but Evil is not the opposite of virtue, it is its absence. I expect to assign a value to evil that can be placed on a scale opposite good, you must therefore assume an anti G-d who is equally powerful to G-d.
just my .02
Posted by og on 12/25/2011 at 11:34 PMOg,
Thanks for the thought. I did what I could as an EMT, in ambulances and the E.R., as a young man. Then as a police officer for over thirteen years. Then as a registered nurse, working at a VA hospital, with vets broken in mind from what they were required to do, from what they saw. I am not a stranger to trying to make the world better.
Ever heard of the Augean stables? Does the expression, “Shoveling shit against the tide” ring a bell? Sure, we continue to try in spite of the apparent hopelessness (for some of us) of ever making a dent in the hurt or in fighting the evil, because the ones we help are worth the effort. I can occasionally comfort myself with the “saves” I managed, physical and mental.
Being human, flawed, ignorant and incapable of understanding the uber-being who is believed to have created all of this, I simply cannot - perhaps it’s more a matter of “will not” - accept the vile harm to children that occurs. A being of such puissance should be able to create - knowing the possibilities inherent in that creation - a universe that does not require or permit children to be used as such a lesson, their suffering to be the result of our bad choices or inherently evil nature.
So, maybe all I have determined is that G-d is not like me. If he exists, he is not anything I wish to worship. I suppose that is my bottom line. That is certainly not an issue for a Supreme Being, as there are enough others willing to worship him. I’ll choose a different route to wherever I end up, if this life is not all that there is..
I thank you for the attempt to “enlighten” me, but I still haven’t heard anything that will help me accept the necessity for the suffering of innocent children.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/26/2011 at 12:33 PM“I thank you for the attempt to “enlighten” me, but I still haven’t heard anything that will help me accept the necessity for the suffering of innocent children. “
I haven’t tried to help you accept anything. Nobody should accept the suffering of innocent children, that’s why everyone in my family works with programs to help prevent it. God does not cause the suffering of children, Men do. He also does not “Allow” the suffering of children, Men do.
I’m completely aware of the issue of the Augean stables. Hercules solved the problem pretty handily, don’t you think? and everyone downstream benefited from the fertilizer.
Think of it this way. For grins, let’s assume at the end of your days, you meet the Creator. Angry and annoyed, you ask him “Why don’t/didn’t you DO something about this heinous evil?”
What if he answers “I did. I sent you.”
Posted by og on 12/26/2011 at 01:29 PMHow about some heresy and perhaps some marginal blasphemy? I am what you might call a fundamentalist Christian - I base my beliefs on the reported words of Yeshua. The rest of the Bible and subsequent musings of theologians are historically interesting but the provenance is not sufficient to make them definitive.
An early heresy in the church was Gnosticism. G-d, the demiurge in charge of day to day operations, was not believed to be either omnipotent or omniscient. This view seems to me to more closely conform to what we know of the world and the universe.
The principle of free will, as Mr. Porretto so eloquently observes, certainly explains the nature of man in all his manifestations.
Now for the blasphemy, as personal speculation is often characterized. G-d created man in His own image - a thinking, curious being. An omniscient being can not be curious. Man was created from G-d’s rib, an intrinsic yet independent part of him to be both company and partner in pondering the great mysteries of the universe. Our corporeal existence is a kindergarten, a preparation, for our true immortal existence.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/26/2011 at 08:08 PMAt first, the world WAS a good place. But humans said “We’d rather do it ourselves.”
And made a mess of things.
So did the next generation.
And the next, and the next….usw.
What’s that definition of insanity again?Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/27/2011 at 07:08 PMRe:#6
Og,
I’d tell him, “Too little and too late, pardner. That shows a lack of concern, to send a blunted tool incapable of doing the job.” Yes, I did manage to save a few children during my working career, but if you’ve read any Joseph Wambaugh, you’ll have an idea how badly many of us cops felt about the children we couldn’t protect.
Had I been a super-cop, working Crimes Against Persons again, specializing in cases involving children and solving every case I took in hand, the children would still have to suffer first. The best I could do would be to remove the scum responsible, possibly saving a few children in the future. Pretty small potatoes, wouldn’t you say?
Again, nice thought, but too little, too late. Nope, I still cannot countenance a universe where it is necessary for the children to suffer. Doesn’t matter if men are the agents of that suffering. Either he has the ability to order the universe in such a way as to protect the innocent and chooses not to do so, or he does not.
To create us knowing the likelihood - if not the certainty, given our nature - that innocent children will suffer the horrors that so many do, without safeguarding them does not recommend him to me. If we were made in his image, it doesn’t say much to me about his nature, either. Although, come to think of it, if he is anything like us, perhaps it doesn’t bother Him all that much.
If I choose to believe he is like the best of us rather than the worst of us, then we should prepare for another flood or fire, because there are far too many humans (think of the millions of muslims alone who abuse and/or kill their women and female children, and who abuse and copulate with “beardless boys”, or at the very least condone it) who simply are too evil to deserve to live.
Sorry to be so negative and judgmental, but that it how it seems to me.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/28/2011 at 02:41 AM“too little, too late”
Ah. So rather than accept that it is the responsibility of humans to do the job of protecting other humans from harm, especially those humans incapable of protecting themselves, it’s G-d’s Fault. Or there can be no G-d.
Now I see exactly where you’re coming from.
I’ll pray that you someday understand, But I doubt that you ever will. You could continue to blame G-d for the children you personally have chosen to leave to their fate, or you could be out there doing something. If you really cared, you’d be doing that now, instead of reading this. You don’t really care, as is now obvious, it’s just a convenient hammer to try to beat down the faithful. You don’t really have any interest at all in developing faith, you only want to denigrate the concept of G-d. Good luck with that. Hint: it won’t work.
Posted by og on 12/28/2011 at 12:23 PMOg,
Save your prayers, sir. Obviously your comprehension of the English language suffers from the filter of your own preconceptions and bias. You missed the point of everything I tried in all honesty to convey, so I’ll cease responding to your failure to do anything but decide your perception is the only perception. Good luck with that.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/28/2011 at 12:43 PMGentlemen, play nice. You’re both better than your behavior here. I don’t want to have to paddle anyone during the Christmas Octave, but I will if it appears to be required. Have I made myself clear?
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 12/28/2011 at 12:52 PM
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