The Atheist and the Problem of Evil

 

I had an interesting conversation today with a thoughtful student in China. His view is not necessarily commonly shared in China; but it is interesting to see how an atheist, without Christian influences, thinks about morality.

His initial premise is that human nature is evil. We are animals. As animals, we are only programmed for survival. The example he uses is this: there is one bottle of water. Two people want it. If necessary, in nature, one will kill the other to take the water. This is evil.

The process of education is the process of making us “good.” Or rather, we do not really become good; our hearts, or desires, are still animal. But we are taught to behave differently in order be able to cooperate with other people, to fit into society. For one thing, this is necessary in order to find a mate and reproduce. It is also necessary so that society as a whole can function, without descending into chaos. The herd them protects each member.

It all makes good sense to me.

Except for this: now by what standard do we judge any action either “good” or “evil”? Why, to begin with, is individual survival good? 

Would we agree that it is perfectly moral to steal the bottle of water, so long as nobody sees you? Would we agree that, if one person or group can indeed benefit themselves by destroying another, this is a perfectly righteous thing to do?

It all seems to require an absolute standard of good and evil; and where does that come from?

How can atheists even raise the problem of evil, without any standard for determining what is evil?

The Theology of Superman

 

Friend Xerxes has rejected monotheism in his latest column, on the grounds of that old saw about God logically not being able to create a stone too heavy for him to lift. Therefore, the concept of God as omnipotent is incoherent.

“Can God do anything?” the boy asked.

“Yes, dear,” said his mother.

“And God can make anything?”

“Yes, dear. That’s why we call him Creator.”

The boy asked, “So could God make a rock so big that even he can’t lift it?”

This is the “irresistible force meets immovable object” paradox. I remember it being the premise of a Superman comic as a child. Superman supposedly being both. It appears in China already in the 3rd century BC. 

Is it a problem for monotheism? No; there are two ancient responses.

It is a logical contradiction to posit that there can exist at the same time both an irresistible force and an immovable object. It is definitionally impossible. And the Christian response is that God is subject to logic, because logic is his own essence—the Logos. God cannot create a square circle, or a female male, or a married bachelor. So he cannot create both an irresistible force and an immovable object, existing at the same time. This is not a limit to his omnipotence, because if you abandon logic, “omnipotence” itself has no meaning.

If, on the other hand, you accept that God is not subject to logic, the problem or paradox still disappears. Then he could create a stone too heavy for him to lift, and lift it. This is only impossible if you accept the need to conform to logic, to Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.

It is actually an argument for monotheism: if there cannot be both an immovable object and an irresistible  force, there can be only one God, one entity who is both immovable and irresistible.

The Christian belief, that God creates, abides in, and follows laws, gives birth in turn to science. Science is based on the premise that there is no such thing as chance, randomness, or coincidence. Everything has an explanation if we study it closely. As Einstein crudely put it, “God does not throw dice.” God creates and follows laws.

Xerxes then, predictably, raises the problem of evil: if there is a God, and God is good, why is there evil in this world?

And this question too is older than monotheism itself. With or without a God, why is there evil in the world?

The point is, monotheism provides an answer.

To begin with, how do you define evil? How do you know that a thing is evil?

Xerxes’s example is “a logging truck … crushing your daughter’s car.”

This is evil if you define evil as something you do not want. This is obviously a thing you do not want, and something your daughter did not want. 

But does that demonstrate that it is evil? Consider a small child wanting another chocolate before supper. Is it evil that his parents refuse it?

No; to simply define “good” as “getting what we want” is puerile. It also does not work if, say, what we want is something someone else has. Good instead means something like “justice” and what is best for all concerned.

Now, while we know that our daughter does not want to be hit b a logging truck and killed, do we know that it is best for her not to die?

We do not, because we do not know what comes after death. For all we know, death releases her from bonding into a much better life.

We also know we do not want suffering, either the physical pain she might experience in the crash, or our own loneliness at her sudden absence. But do we know that suffering is evil, in the sense of not being in our best interests?

The parent who refuses the child a chocolate makes him suffer. The parent who takes his child to the dentist makes him suffer.

What about the muscle strain and bruising you feel as you win the Grey Cup, or the intense soreness after? Seriously, would the win be as sweet if you had done it without any pain or effort? Is a film fun to watch if nothing bad or scary ever happens to the heroine throughout?

Suppose that ignorance is bliss, and beauty only comes with suffering. Would you rather have a frontal lobotomy and be ignorantly happy? To remain in a childlike or vegetative state? Or is it worthwhile to grow up into wisdom, responsibility, and creativity?

To be, with God, a co-creator?

To embrace logic, justice, and beauty?

Spirituality without Religion

 

Pan: Father Nature

I fell recently into a Zoom discussion on spirituality among avowed atheists. Their challenge was that they found themselves experiencing odd emotions, when, for example, walking through a forest or seeing a sunset. They were discussing among themselves what words to use to express such things. They called it their “spirituality.”

I was fascinated to listen, since I have never knew what people meant by “spirituality” as distinct from “religion.” I do not think they were expecting anyone else at the meeting to be religious, although I think one other participant was. He had a thick accent which I could not place. Otherwise, surely they were being impolite to discuss things in this way, as though religion were out of the question.

One asked, “can there be negative as well as positive spiritual feelings?”

I offered, innocent at this point of their ground rules, “Obviously yes. People speak both of God and the Devil; of heaven and hell.”

This was immediately rejected. “We have to avoid using religious terms.”

“But why?” I asked. “These terms have been established. Why do you need to reinvent it all from scratch? I take it that you do not want to believe in the existence of any metaphysical beings, but then you can understand it all as symbolic.”

“No, no symbols. We can’t allow any symbols.”

Another participant chimed in soon after, although not immediately after, that panic was a negative spiritual feeling. It came, he noted, from a supposed encounter with the god Pan.

And everyone seemed to accept this.

“Wait,” I inserted. “You broke the rule. Pan is a metaphysical being.”

“No no. I was only using him for explanation.”

My point about symbols exactly. Although I did not pursue it, the problem here was evidently only with the Judeo-Christian God. He who could not even be mentioned. Along with the Devil. Pagan gods were fine. An anthropomorphized and deified Nature or Earth or Ecosystem or Environment was fine.

I asked one participant what their position on religion was more specifically. Why avoid all mention? Did they believe all religion was bunk, or is it that they were not interested, or that they just had not found one that rang true for them--yet?

I got no straight response; only what seemed a deflection. He asked: “How is it that God spoke to us two thousand years ago, then stopped speaking to us; at least, to most people?”

I tried to respond: who thinks God no longer speaks to us? Certainly Pentecostals, Catholics, Mormons, think he still does. But only some of us are listening. The Bible is sufficient for salvation and complete, but that is a different issue. Eternal truth does not change.

At this point another guy cited Dawkins and brought up the problem of evil: “how can you believe in a God who allows children to be born with some genetic defect, then suffer and die young?”

I pointed out that there was thousands of years worth of learned philosophical response to this among the world’s religions; it obviously occurred to everyone. But there was far too much material to go into here in detail. I pointed first to the Christian response: we do not know that physical pain or death is evil. The one thing we know is evil is moral evil; and all moral evil is from man. Eve, meet apple. The sufferings of life, including the physical sufferings, are a result.

Then I cited the Hindu response; the theology of play. Suppose you are playing a baseball game, and the third inning is going very badly. You do not feel good about it. Even so, you win the game, and somehow, you forget the terrible griefs of the third inning, and decide it was actually fun, and you want to play again. Even when you actually lose the game, it is still fun, and you want to play again.

Now suppose you were playing a baseball game in which every pitch was a home run, and you could not lose. Fun? No.

I did not then, but I should have also cited the example of a film or novel. We actually want to see dangers and sorrows. We are not happy with a story in which nothing bad happens.

Pain exists because without it, pleasure would be meaningless to us.

I’m not sure whether anyone got this. It did not seem to provoke a response.

Another guy—I think it was about the problem of evil—started by saying that nature is actually red in tooth and claw, and without this constant strife, we would never have evolved. 

And, he concluded, if we all died tomorrow, nature would go on without us. That is the one thing we know for sure.

I’m not sure where he was going with it, but I had to challenge that last statement. It is, at a minimum, not something we know for sure. I suspect it led on to a worship of Nature as some eternal being and ground of the real.

“That is, if you reject Berkeley. And nobody has been able to disprove him.”

“What does Berkeley say?”

“If a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears, did it make a sound? To be is to be perceived by some conscious being. If we did not exist, and God did not exist, nothing else would exist.”

I think that one, too, sailed over their collective heads. It was ignored.

Then someone said something that made me think the real issue was the supposed need to defer to God. The problem was with worship. I cannot recall his words, but that is how I summarized them to him.

Another participant, a woman, spoke up. “If God really is omniscient and omnipotent, and made all things, he should not demand things from us. He doesn’t need anything from us.”

I chipped in: “but what if it is not something he demands, but something he deserves. Do you feel the same way about respecting your parents?”

That seemed to blindside her. 

“My parents were terrible.”

“But as a general principle. Not all parents are awful, are they?”

“I can’t answer that unless you define your terms. I don’t know what those words you’re using mean.”

I think I saw here an example of what Scott Adams calls “cognitive dissonance.”

“Which words?”

“God. Parents.”

“I’m using the dictionary definition of parents. I’m using your definition of God. You said it: omniscient, omnipotent, and made all things.”

Someone else said something here in the chat: “That’s a deflection.” 

I think they meant the woman I was speaking with, not me. 

But the woman I was speaking with disappeared from the Zoom call at this point, without saying goodbye.

I think that means I won my point. I wonder if the topic will come up again next week?

So what have we learned?

I believe there are no atheists. There are only people who do not want to acknowledge any obligations to God or to their fellow man.

The Evil God

 

Friend Xerxes has revealed himself to be a pantheist; or, more precisely, a panentheist. That is, the created universe is divine and a part of God himself. 

I pointed out to him that this leaves us with a God who is evil; or, put another way, with evil as divine.

To which he responded that “evil is a concept invented by humans.”

This does not address the problem: God is still evil. The more so since Xerxes holds that man, creator of the concept, is divine. So I assume he really means to say that evil is an arbitrary concept with no real content.

This is a common idea nowadays. This is “cultural relativism”; this is constructivism; this is postmodernism.

Kant demonstrated, though the categorical imperative, that the moral good was unconditional and absolute. The Bible shows creation itself, from beginning to end, as a struggle of good against evil. And if you accept the “morality is relative” claim, you are implicitly accepting that Hitler or Charles Manson did nothing wrong, that we only persecuted them for holding different opinions.

The Christian believes that all men have a conscience, an internal compass that tells right from wrong. This is reinforced by the often-noted fact that all major religions contain, somewhere in their scriptures, a near-identical phrase: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Friend Seiko suggests that Buddhism does not concern itself with morals. Yet Buddhism too has its five precepts, binding on all men, which correlate well with the Ten Commandments. In the legend of the historical Buddha, his ultimate enemy, Mara, is a figure of personified evil. Making the struggle of good and evil as central to Buddhism as to Judaism or Christianity.

There is an obvious reason why so many want to deny the moral good, despite it being so universal and so certain.

It is because they are conscious of having done wrong. They do not WANT there to be a good and evil.

This is, perhaps, the sin Jesus called the one unforgivable sin, the sin against the Holy Spirit. One cannot be forgiven if one refuses to admit one has sinned.

A Thought for Bad Times

 

The Bwa Kayiman

Friend Xerxes wonders why Haiti has had such a grim time of it—inspired to this thought by its latest earthquake. Why always Haiti?

Televangelist Pat Robertson had a theory. God has been punishing Haiti because the nation was actually founded on a pact with the devil. The Haitian revolution began with a voodoo ceremony, the Bwa Kayiman (Bois Caiman, Alligator Woods).

On the face of it, Robertson has a point. The Bwa Kayiman was, in Christian terms, a pact with the devil: all pagan gods are demons.

But I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to demons, and not to God, and I don't desire that you would have fellowship with demons. – 1 Corinthians 10:20

And such pacts with devils, like Moloch, are why, in the Old Testament, Yahweh destroys the Canaanites. In effect, a pact with the Devil—gross inherent immorality--is why Nazi Germany had to be taken out.

However, Robertson’s theory ultimately does not work, because the point of such destruction would be to punish individuals, but to eliminate a system that seduces people into sin. The calamities that have struck Haiti since independence have not done that, over two centuries. If this, then, were their intent, they are gratuitously cruel. 

There is another possibility: those whom God loves, he chastens. He tests them, like gold is tested in fire. Look at the prophets. Look at the Jews.

Too many of us have been corrupted by the errors of the “prosperity gospel.” If one has had a happy, contented, comfortable life, one ought to be worried. 

See the parable of Dives and Lazarus.

“But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony.’”

COVID and Divine Justice

 

Someone asks, “Why would a good and just God send COVID?”

It is a fair question. The moment you accept monotheism, everything is from God that is not from man.

But COVID may be from man. I think it is likely it escaped from the Wuhan Virology lab. It may even have been intended as a weapon, although its release was surely in error. It is mysterious how outbreaks seem to have been less severe in East Asian countries—almost as if there is some component sensitive to Chinese/Mongoloid and non-Chinese genetics.

But even if it is from God—it is just. We needed and deserved chastisement. Our nearly universal acceptance of abortion is about the same thing that led Yahweh in the Old Testament to wipe out the Canaanites, or the Romans to salt the ground of Carthage. They practiced child sacrifice. The collapse of the Aztecs, the Inca, might be accounted for in the same way: they practiced human sacrifice. They deserved to be taken down, and Yahweh did so, swiftly, through the Spanish. 

Aside from killing them outright, we have also ignored the welfare of the young in having women all work outside the home. We have ignored the need to pass on morals to our young. These are ample justification for destroying a culture. The entire point of a culture is to pass on moral guidance generation to generation. Our culture is therefore poisoned.

If this has not led to our own destruction—yet—it seems only because there is not some other culture ready to replace us. The Spanish, or the Hebrews, or the Romans, have not yet arrived on the scene. Who might they be?

Not the mainland Chinese, the CCP. If we are depraved, they are more depraved.

God Indicted

 

It’s time to put God in the dock. How has he allowed 2020? 

Perhaps we are just too used to having it too good. But then, how did he allow the Holocaust—the many holocausts of the 20th century? How does he allow the poverty of so many lands? How does he allow children to die of malaria and tuberculosis? Christopher Hitchens condemns God for allowing awful parasites to infect small children. Why make the innocent suffer?

Isn’t he ultimately responsible for all such evils? He could stop them. He does not. Can we overlook this?

I can accept that suffering is not itself evil. Suffering it seems to me has mysterious benefits. It builds soul. We are vaguely aware of this when we relish the pain from physical exertion. Or when we step off a roller coaster. Or go to see a horror movie. And God promises to compensate in the next life: blessed are those who mourn.

We do not want suffering, on the whole, beyond familiar limits. That does not make it evil.

More troubling to me is injustice; watching evil triumph over good. COVID itself troubles me less than the venal and self-interested reaction of so many: of the drug companies, the politicians, the “experts,” the government of China, Antifa, Black Lives Matter. Why doesn’t God intervene on behalf of his own? What message is he sending? 

Why does Anne Frank die in a concentration camp, and Stalin in his bed?

Jesus responds with the parable of the wheat and tares: the weeds will not be pulled up until the harvest, for fear good grain might be uprooted too.

The striking thing about that parable is how clearly it goes against good gardening advice. Of course one pulls up the weeds—they will stunt the growth of the grain.

It has to be that souls work differently: that weeds, suffering, improve the crop. “Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come.”

But has he left us without a sign? Without assurance that the universe itself will resolve towards the good?

In fact, the Bible, the Old Testament, insists that he has given us just such a sign: that God will intervene for his faithful on the battlefield. As he repeatedly did for the Israelites.

Perhaps he does. It does seem that the trajectory of history, as someone has said, arcs towards justice. Just not within each lifetime. Stalin may have died in his bed, but the Soviet Union eventually collapsed suddenly, as if a miracle. The Berlin Wall fell as abruptly as the walls of Jericho.

Nazi Germany collapsed in flames, and its name became infamous.

Leaving aside revisionist history, the Central Powers were the bad guys in World War I, and they lost. The North were unambiguously in the moral right in the US Civil War, and they won. The South held slaves, and the South fired the first shots. Rome, against the odds, won the Punic Wars. The Carthaginians practiced child sacrifice. The colonials, against the odds, achieved independence from the British Empire. The colonials were fighting under the banner of human equality and human rights.

Sometimes, no doubt, there is no clear moral superiority of one side over the other; but that is a rarity, for without some egregious act on one side or the other, why would things come to war?

Is there any clear example in history of an immoral society subjugating a clearly more moral one?

One can respond, of course, that “the winners get to write the history,” but that is not actually true. Historians almost by definition come by to do their work long after either side to a conflict has passed on. They may have their prejudices, but these will not be consistent historian to historian, and much of the point of history as a discipline is spotting and countering such biases when they appear.

No doubt there is a limit to divine intervention. God cannot be too obvious about it: he cannot intervene immediately to defend Jews from the Nazis, or the Irish from the British Empire, or the Jews from the Roman Empire. If he did, he would eliminate the opportunity to be moral. One would simply be moral out of immediate self-interest.

In other words, the spiritual grain needs weeds nearby in order to reach maturity.

On Being Born Again

A Jewish friend explains that, according to her brand of Judaism, the sufferings and injustices we encounter in life are “chosen just for us, to help our souls grow.” She asks if this is compatible with Christianity.

It is not.

It is a possible explanation for her because her form of Judaism believes in reincarnation. Without reincarnation, the formula does not always work: innocent children often suffer, while obviously vicious people often do not. Stalin died in his bed of natural causes. With reincarnation, when bad things happen to good people, we can suppose it is for something they did in a past life. This is the familiar doctrine of karma.

One obvious criticism is that it leads to passivity and acceptance in the face of evil; there is now no sense of need to try to make things better in the world. Indeed, to do so might seem impertinent, or impossible. This is not merely a Christian criticism; it is a common secularist one.

Worse, the doctrine of karma leads to blaming the unfortunate for their own misfortune. If he’s a blind beggar, it must be somehow his own damned fault. He is to be despised, not helped.

Reincarnation would be convenient for Christian theology; besides accounting for the suffering of the innocent, it could resolve the problem of “limbo.” That is, what happens to children who die before baptism, or before the age of reason? They have not merited either heaven or hell; they have not been morally tested. It is obviously unfair if they are now denied forever the possibility of heaven. Where else can they go, then, if not to another life for a second chance?

Reincarnation could also neatly reconcile Christian with Buddhist or Hindu cosmology. It might be that any soul keeps being reincarnated until born into a Christian cultural context, so that they get an equal opportunity to hear the full Christian message and either accept or reject it. Buddhist or Hindu lifetimes, then, are indeed necessarily reincarnations; Christian lifetimes are for keeps.

But this comes up against Paul’s pronouncement in Hebrews 9: “It is given to man once to die, and then the judgement.” Reincarnation was a familiar belief in the Hellenic world of the time; Plato and Socrates believed in it. The fact that Jesus and the Gospel writers do not refer to the possibility is also illustrative. It was an option they ignored, or did not consider.

Accordingly, suffering, for Christians, is not a matter of making up for some personal deficit. Suffering builds soul: suffering brings you closer to God. But you do not suffer because you deserve it.

“Now there were some present at the same time who told him about the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. 2 Jesus answered them, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered such things? 3 I tell you, no, but unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way. 4 Or those eighteen, on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them; do you think that they were worse offenders than all the men who dwell in Jerusalem? 5 I tell you, no, but, unless you repent, you will all perish in the same way.” (Luke 13)

Besides bringing us closer to God, suffering can be redemptive for others: the great model being the suffering and death of Jesus himself. He died for our sins. In the same way, in Catholic understanding, we can consecrate our own sufferings to help others, such as the souls in purgatory.

Those who suffer now are also to be compensated for this in the next life.

“Now there was a certain rich man, and he was clothed in purple and fine linen, living in luxury every day. 20 A certain beggar, named Lazarus, was taken to his gate, full of sores, 21 and desiring to be fed with the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. Yes, even the dogs came and licked his sores. 22 The beggar died, and he was carried away by the angels to Abraham’s bosom. The rich man also died, and was buried. 23 In Hades, he lifted up his eyes, being in torment, and saw Abraham far off, and Lazarus at his bosom. 24 He cried and said, ‘Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus, that he may dip the tip of his finger in water, and cool my tongue! For I am in anguish in this flame.’

25 “But Abraham said, ‘Son, remember that you, in your lifetime, received your good things, and Lazarus, in the same way, bad things. But here he is now comforted, and you are in anguish.’” (Luke 16).

Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount says “blessed are the poor in spirit”; “blessed are those who mourn”; and blessed are the persecuted. In the Gospel of Luke, he immediately follows these Beatitudes with a parallel set of curses, or warnings:

“But woe to you who are rich!
For you have received your consolation.
25 Woe to you, you who are full now,
for you will be hungry.
Woe to you who laugh now,
for you will mourn and weep.
26 Woe, when men speak well of you,
for their fathers did the same thing to the false prophets.”

Suffering in a bad world is warrant that one is a good person. Being happy in a bad world is alarming.

Being Dead is Not So Bad

Sodom fries.

Friend Xerxes raises anew the problem of evil: how can a just God be responsible for earthquakes and tsunamis?

This is not a real issue. It does not matter how one dies. The real issue is that we die. How is it that a good God kills us all?

The answer is simple. Given that God is omnipotent and good and merciful, we have a logical guarantee that, in fact, death is a good thing. It leads to a better, not a worse nor an equivalent, existence. There could be no other reason for it to exist.

Tower of Siloam falling on the just and the unjust.

Without positing the existence of God, we still have no reason to suppose death is a bad thing. Without positing the existence of God, we just don’t know.

Since it is itself morally neutral, there is no necessary significance to where and when a natural disaster happens. It cannot be because these people are morally worse than those. It might as well be because they are morally better. As I said, we all die. Jesus makes this clear, too, in his mention of the tower of Siloam in the Gospel.

It is equally clear in the Bible, though, that God can and does use natural disasters to change or obliterate a corrupt society. Two words: Sodom and Gomorrah. This probably happens rarely: natural disasters simply follow the laws of physics, like a vast clockwork, and happen mechanically. Why not, since they are morally neutral?

Lisbon rocks! 1755

But every now and then, it might be worthwhile for God to suspend the usual laws, to perform a miracle, in order to destroy or alter a corrupt system, in order to save us from its corruption. This, in the Bible, is what happens to the cities of the plain: they are destroyed as a corrupt society, and by miracle, not an ordinary natural disaster: a rain of sulphur.

Has such a thing ever happened outside the Bible? Maybe.

Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson took a lot of heat for saying at the time of 9/11 it might have been caused by America’s embrace of “the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians.” But this outrage is silly. God does not even need to enter into it. The radical Islamists did it, and they were quite clear: it was caused by America’s embrace of the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians.

Tangshan the morning after.

Another possible example from history is the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. This had direct effects on the thinking of the time. It tended to kill the optimism of the Enlightenment over the powers of reason, and inspired the Romantic movement. Voltaire, Rousseau, and Kant were all influenced. Rousseau concluded that cities were a bad idea. It may have led to Kant’s conclusion that reason had definite limits in what it could know.

This feels reminiscent of the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible. Folks had gotten too confident in the powers of human reason and human effort. God was reminding us that he was also in the equation, and beyond our ken. That is the lesson that was taken.

Another candidate is the earthquake in Tangshan, China, in 1976. The message was reinforced by a traditional Chinese idea that natural disasters expressed heaven’s dissatisfaction with the current government. It led more or less directly to the end of the Cultural Revolution, the fall of the Gang of Four, and the rise of Deng Xiao-ping and his open door policy.

Nearer, my God, to Thee.

The sinking of the Titanic is another. Instinctively, ever since, we have taken the lesson as that of the Tower of Babel: it was human pride, supposing we could build something unsinkable. Perhaps so. Was it the sinking of the Titanic, and not the Great War that followed, that ended Victorian confidence in human progress?

And then there is spontaneous human combu--

Immorality in the Bible: The Conquest of Canaan

Continuing our theme from yesterday, here are the next “immoral passages” cited at

http://www.religioustolerance.org/imm_bibl.htm

They describe the Hebrew invasion and conquest of Canaan.

Deuteronomy 7:1-2:

"... the seven nations greater and mightier than thou; and when the LORD thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them."

Joshua 6:21:

"And they utterly destroyed all that was in the city, both man and woman, young and old, and ox, and sheep, and ass, with the edge of the sword."

The Canaanite goddess Astarte standing on a heap of skulls.

As mentioned before, so long as Joshua and the Hebrews were operating under God’s direct command, there was no immorality to this. God has the right to kill as and when he sees fit.

Did all the Canaanites individually really deserve such punishment? It is not punishment, given an afterlife.

Old Bible illustration: An offering to Moloch.

Was it fair of God to favour the Hebrews over the Canaanite nations in battle? Not automatically; but according to the Bible, God had a reason. The Bible says that the Canaanites were dispossessed not because God preferred the Hebrews, but as a punishment for their own transgressions. They were a depraved culture. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah?

The Canaanites are to be destroyed “that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20.18).

What abominable practices? First and foremost, child sacrifice, which is, according to the Bible, “an abomination in God’s sight.”

Buzzard Roost, Georgia, in the wake of Sherman's March.

It might well, therefore, be in the best interests of all concerned if such a doctrine and social structure were anathematized and even wiped out by violence—just as the culture of slavery was wiped out by war in the US South, just as the doctrine of Nazism was wiped out in Germany, just as the Thuggi were wiped out by the British in India. And extirpating the culture might have necessitated and justified a scorched earth policy, like Hiroshima or Sherman’s March.

The bad news is that we again tolerate and even celebrate child sacrifice again today. As abortion.

Uh oh…

The First Noble Truth

“I raise my glass to the awful truth
That must be kept from the ears of youth
Except to say it isn't worth a damn.” - Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”

The gesture shows this is an image of the historical Buddha (Sakyamuni) delivering the Deer Park Sermon, enumerating the Four Noble Truths on the fingers of one hand.

The First Noble Truth, the essence of Buddhism, is that all existence is suffering, “dukkha,” “ill-being.”

This truth has not been entirely lost, either, on the rest of the world. The Greeks used to say, “count no man fortunate until he is dead.” Thoreau observed, “the majority of men live lives of quiet desperation.”

In the Christian world, the Gospel says that the “God of this world,” or “Lord of this world” is Satan. The “Hail, Holy Queen,” a classic Catholic prayer, refers to life as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

Obviously, not everyone agrees with this. In fact, it is officially heresy. Just say this out loud consistently, and you are liable to be labelled “clinically depressed,” i.e., not entirely in your right mind. You will be ostracized and set upon.

One can see that this is not helpful, to those with this appreciation of things, and a “cure” seems unlikely. After all, if the deepest thinkers of most times are right, the “depressed” are simply seeing things as they are, and the psychiatrists are out of touch with reality. You cannot easily unlearn what you know.

Society, people in groups, do not want to hear these things; all the more so because they are true. Most men, as Julius Caesar observed, will believe to be true whatever they want to believe.

Hence this construct called “mental illness.” Why is it so scary to most of us? It would not be frightening if it were just a matter of the “ill” getting things wrong. The danger is that they are right. Calling it an “illness” gives us, if we are sufficiently self-delusory, a license not to listen or deal with it intellectually. Lock 'em up—they are “unclean.” (That's the literal meaning of “insane.”)

If you think this view of life is too grim, I urge you to study history, or travel to the Third World. I think you are forced to conclude that the great majority of men have lived difficult lives, and at the majority of times and in the majority of places, injustice was (and is) the usual experience.

There is, it is true, a tendency for truth and justice to win out over time in this world. The world is not wholly depraved. But the amount of time is the problem. Consider the case of the Soviet Union—a regime guilty of mass murder and general repression, as well as preventing its citizens from living in the material prosperity experienced in the West at the same time. It lasted roughly seventy years—the threescore and ten allotted to the average man, though the Russian life expectancy at the time was really much shorter. So, even though justice in some sense was ultimately done--the regime collapsed-- it took longer than a human lifetime for it to happen, so that those who suffered most were not those who were compensated, and those who offended most were not those who were punished.

Some people, it is true, live fortunate lives. As a former girlfriend once said of Leonard Cohen, "What does he have to complain about? He's rich and famous." But that doesn't matter, does it, so long as you have much human empathy? One cannot really be happy while aware of the suffering of so many others, can one?

That is a big reason why that particular girlfriend is former. It is also a big reason why depression turns out to run in families pretty consistently--by marriage.

Jesus delivering the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with the Beatitudes

Now, those who are going to be most depressed are going to be those who are smarter than average, who can therefore see things the way they really are; those who think more, and think for themselves more; those who are most honest with the world and themselves; and those who spontaneously care for other people. So Jesus said in the Beatitudes: “blessed are they that mourn.” Theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

And that's the good news: the kingdom of heaven.