Job's Friends; or, Excuses, Excuses!

When this meme came up in my "memories" on Facebook the other day, I clicked through idly to see what kind of reaction the original post got.  At the top of the comments was one from a Christian who asked why an unbeliever would mock someone they don't even believe in??!!  

I've seen this move before.  The first most obvious response would be that Christians and other believers arguably don't believe in other gods either, but that has never stopped them from mocking them and their worshipers.  (Historically, both Jews and Christians have accepted that other gods exist, but they're demons.  Remember that in ordinary usage, "believe in" can mean either "believe in the existence of," "have trust in," or even "agree with.")

The second obvious response is that the meme is making fun less of Jesus or his heavenly father than of the people who believe in them, who do unquestionably exist. While the meme is unkind, it's not an inaccurate representation of popular religion: God needs a million prayer warriors, thousands of Christians rallied in the streets for Christ last weekend, etc.  So what does God do while only half a million prayer warriors are on their knees?  Why doesn't Jesus heal the sick child right away? Does he really need to be informed?  What is the tipping point at which he'll (supposedly) take action?

A few months ago I saw a lot of video clips on Facebook - and no, I didn't have to watch them, but it was very educational for me - from a number of online preachers warning Christians that if they aren't constantly watchful, demons will sneak up on them and drag them down to Hell.  Why, I wondered, did God let that happen?  If a person is saved, how can demons even get near them?  If Satan can undo your salvation, what are the Christian promises worth?  That these preachers put the burden of resistance on the believer is even worse: how can a mere fleshly person fight off supernatural Evil?  One of the most basic premises of Christianity is you can't, which is why people need the intervention and protection of supernatural Good.

It happened that not long before I saw these videos, I'd also read The Case Against Satan by Ray Russell, a 1962 novel about the demonic possession and exorcism of a teenage girl, "a devout girl who attended Mass regularly."  Two Roman Catholic priests take on the job of driving the devil out of her, and much of the book is about their struggles and doubts as they perform the rite of exorcism.  I thought of writing about the book then, but at this remove I'll need to reread it.  For now, I'll just say that I had the same questions: why doesn't the Christian god protect his children against demonic harm, and why does so much depend on the efforts (weak and ineffectual by definition) of the exorcist?  The accounts of exorcism in the New Testament may be abbreviated, but there's no doubt that in that context Jesus and his followers drove out demons by the power of the Holy Spirit, not by theological disputation.  (To anticipate one possible objection, those stories were not merely symbolic.  Christian writers were bragging about the power of exorcism and healing for at least a couple of centuries after Jesus' day.  I should also concede that in one gospel exorcism story, Jesus admits that "prayer and fasting" are needed to drive out especially stubborn devils.)

The larger issue is what's known to philosophers as the Problem of Evil, though it's not just a problem to them: why, if there is a god who is both all-powerful and all-good, is there so much suffering in the world? Nowadays there's an apologetic tendency to distinguish between 'natural evil' like earthquakes and plague, and 'moral evil' committed by human beings, like the Holocaust.  I learned from Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton, 2004), that the distinction is a comparatively recent one: "evil" referred to natural disasters, also known as "acts of God," no less than to moral ones.  Sometimes evil might be the work of Satan, but it was always difficult to tell whether a given unpleasantness was Satan's mischief or God's judgment.

Not that this mattered much, because as the biblical book of Job made explicit, Satan couldn't bother a righteous person without God's permission.  In Job's case, which should be even more troublesome for simple faith, God gave that permission not because of any failing of Job's, but as a bet with Satan that Job wouldn't complain if God withdrew his protection.  Some theologians have argued that the opening prologue of the book of Job is a later addition to the main text, but I consider that apologetic invention. It wouldn't change the point of the book very much if at all, and anyway, that exit is closed to less sophisticated believers who work from the text as they find it in their Bibles.

After several decades of examining other interpretations, I still think Walter Kaufmann's discussion (The Faith of a Heretic, Doubleday, 1961) of the Problem of Evil in general, and of Job in particular, is the best.  It's ironic that the usual attempts to escape the problem are exactly those which the book of Job rejects, offered by Job's friends: You must have done something wrong, or God wouldn't have done this to you!  As Kaufmann stressed, it never occurs even to God's self-appointed defenders that God wasn't responsible for Job's misery, nor does God himself protest when he appears from the whirlwind that the Devil made him do it.

I thought of all this when the philosopher Helen De Cruz, who's undergoing treatment for cancer, posted on Twitter/X in December: "As a theist, I not only am angry at my own body and it not responding enough to treatment, I am also very angry at God. So that’s been fun."  She's been posting for months about her case and treatment, and she has quite properly received plenty of support and sympathy.  But Job's 21st- century friends promptly lined up to set her straight.

"I so understand your anger, dear H, but I think your body deserves compassion," wrote one. "It's doing its best to resist the onslaughts of cancer & treatment. As to God, he's, in appearance at least, mostly absent. Moreover, his demands are higher of beautiful souls bc life is an initiation."

And: "What did [you] think about The Essence of Christianity ~Ludwig Feuerbach 'People forget that their lives will end soon. For those who remember, quarrels come to an end.' Seems you are quarreling with your own body and with God. Though Nietzsche suffered terribly and died: belle âme".  Yes, De Cruz is quarreling with God, how astute of this person to figure that out.  She's not forgetting that her life will end soon, though; that's exactly her complaint. What Nietzsche has to do with this exchange isn't clear, but everybody dies.  That's part of the Problem of Evil.

And: "Helen, I'm not a theist, but I'm not an atheist either. I don't think death is the end of our stories. (Still, I hope a longer life for you.)"  So what if death isn't the end of our stories?  As Ludwig Wittgenstein asked rhetorically a century ago, ""[I]s some riddle solved by my surviving for ever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life?" (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.3412).

A few took this tack: "To be angry is to believe you are entitled to something you did not receive. There are others that didn't receive half of what you have. It would make as much sense to be overjoyed about that. In reality, both responses have no merit."  Think of the starving children in Ethiopia who'd be glad to have your cancer!  I commented elsewhere in the thread that the callousness of Christians toward other people's suffering amazes me; this comment is a good example of that callousness.  Maybe the next time I encounter Christians complaining that infidels mock them and their god, I should respond along the same lines?

Sometimes when I've invoked the Problem of Evil by pointing to the suffering of children with cancer (for example), Christians protest, "Gee, God must have done something to make you mad." Well, yes -- that's what we're talking about right now. Such people couldn't seem to grasp that someone might object to the suffering of the innocent (but we are all miserable sinners, none is innocent) as a matter of principle. It's an interesting inability.

De Cruz had posted about the Problem of Evil in an earlier post I can't find now, and I was struck by people who tried to solve it by denying another of its premises, namely that the God of Christianity could stop the evils we see.  These people suggested that he'd like to but he just can't.  That may be, though 1) it's difficult for me to understand how a being who could create the unthinkably vast universe we inhabit is powerless to stop suffering and other evils, especially since 2) it is a pillar of Christian faith that he will do so when he establishes his kingdom on earth, which means he can do it but for some reason won't.  And to some extent this argument requires me to accept 3) that he can't prevent any of the evils infesting the world now.  Maybe Jesus' miracles (in one small region of the planet) used up all his strength, and he's resting until he gets it back?

Those who consider C. S. Lewis an authority should remember that when he engaged with, as he called it, the Problem of Pain, he took for granted that suffering comes from his god, who kneecaps the righteous in order to keep them from becoming too full of themselves.  Even after his wife died of cancer and he was in turmoil with grief, he never denied his god's responsibility for her agony or his misery: he simply assumed it.  Maybe he was wrong, but not according to traditional or biblical doctrine.  After all, if Yahweh can't prevent suffering, how can believers hope that someday he will end it altogether?

I've seen some posts and videos from a recent theology Ph.D., whom I won't name yet because I want to go into his work in some detail later; but one is relevant here.  He declares that the Bible never says that its god is omnipotent, which in a narrow sense may be true; but I think he's hair-splitting. The biblical authors weren't professional philosophers or theology Ph.D.'s, but they regarded Yahweh as almighty and expected him to conquer Evil in the end.  If this guy is right, he's cut the Gordian knot of the Problem of Evil, but he's still saying that God is impotent to stop any of the suffering in the world, in which case the entire edifice of historical Christianity comes crashing down, and there is no hope for believers or anyone else. (Samson among the Philistines might be a better analogy than Alexander the Great.)  In which case, why believe in him?

I'm not sure that abandoning belief in Yahweh's power or his goodness would faze all believers, since they so often deny either or both as they find it useful to do so.  I think they know that openly admitting that they do so would hinder their missionary efforts, which depend on big promises they don't have to keep.  I also want to bear down heavily on their callousness to human suffering in the crunch.  "Oh, you're dying of cancer? Big whoop" is bad PR, and all their works of charity don't make it look any better. If suffering is no big deal, if it's your god's own action, then why ameliorate it in this life?

Beat Me, Torture Me, Make Me Become a Nurse

One downside to living in a small town -- this one, anyway -- is that Christian religiosity is turned up to 11.  Though it's a small paper, copy must be hard to find, so the local newspaper fills out its columns with devotional writing, prose and verse, by local writers.  This becomes a bit hard to take after awhile, but I'm a big boy and I don't mind diversity - I just wish for more of it.

Another irritant is the convention of beginning obituaries with the claim that the deceased went to Heaven to be with his or her Heavenly Father.  It's a convention, not to be taken seriously of course.  I know some of these people, and I wouldn't be so sure of their posthumous destination, very much the opposite -- but then, what do I know?  Racism and general hatefulness may be qualifications for Heaven.  I'm afraid I upset one young librarian recently when, checking out a book after a surfeit of obituaries, I remarked on this trope and said that when I go, I want my obituary to begin by kvelling that on such and such a day, I descended into the welcoming fires of Hell to be with my Lord and Master Satan for eternity.  I'm not really going to require such a thing, because I don't believe in Hell any more than I believe in Heaven, and since I won't be around to observe people's reactions, it would be a pointless gesture.  But I'd settle for something like this (via).

If people are comforted by these fantasies, it's not for me to pick on them I suppose, and for that reason I feel bad about upsetting the young librarian.  (For all I know, though, she's a hateful Trumpian in her personal life - it's all too likely anywhere in Indiana -- and if so, I'd happily upset her more, but not while she's on duty.)

NPR's Morning Edition has been worse than usual this week, with some fatuous academics distorting history and generally dishonoring their professions.  On Fridays there's always a segment from Story Corps, the oral history organization, and they're usually inoffensive enough.  Today's featured a man who, as a 7-year-old boy, was hit by a van while riding his bike.  He spent some time in a hospital in an induced coma, but eventually recovered and is now a chef.  Most of the conversation was between his mother and one of the EMTs who brought him to the hospital.  They formed a bond and became friends for several years, then lost touch.  They met again when the EMT heard a familiar voice at a nurse's station, and lo! it was the boy's mother, who'd become a nurse.

The mother reflected:

It's interesting because when I was a little girl, my dad used to tell me, you're going to be a nurse. But when this accident happened, I said, maybe this is God's way of saying, you know, your father was right. I enrolled in nursing school ....

At that point, I exclaimed "You people are sick!"  So God sent that van to nearly kill her little boy in order to "tell" her she should be a nurse?  The amorality of popular religion, the kind of theology ordinary laypeople invent (often to the horror of clergy and academic theologians) always appalls me, and this bit was a sort of booster shot.  It's harmless enough, compared to much faith, but I'm amazed that this woman could calmly say something so heartless with a straight face.  And not about distant strangers, but about an event that directly affected her and her son.

This brings to mind what someone said, that they'd prefer a universe without gods to one with a god who sits above, watching people suffering, and does nothing about it.  This feels obviously right to me; but I especially find no comfort in a god who causes suffering to achieve some obscure and uncertain aim.  Yet many (most?) people do find comfort in that belief, and are horrified at the idea that no Supreme Being is out there, and things just happen.  This can't be something that evil priests forced on them; if there were no priests or churches, they'd invent it on their own.

The Trouble with Science Is That It Has Never Been Tried

I'm not yet quite halfway through Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative Account of Philosophy (Princeton, 2004), but so far it's very impressive, though disturbing in many ways.  At the point I've reached, Neiman shows that Enlightenment philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, and David Hume were trying, not to vindicate Science and Reason as the legitimate heirs to religion, but to show that Science and Reason could not make sense of the world any more than religion does, and that the Enlightenment critique of religion was invalid in many important respects.

Hume, for example, wrote in The Natural History of Religion (1757):

Even at this day, and in EUROPE, ask any of the vulgar, why he believes in an omnipotent creator of the world; he will never mention the beauty of final causes, of which he is wholly ignorant: He will not hold out his hand, and bid you contemplate the suppleness and variety of joints in his fingers, their bending all one way, the counterpoise which they receive from the thumb, the softness and fleshy parts of the inside of his hand, with all the other circumstances, which render that member fit for the use, to which it was destined. To these he has been long accustomed; and he beholds them with listlessness and unconcern. He will tell you of the sudden and unexpected death of such a one: The fall and bruise of such another: The excessive drought of this season: The cold and rains of another. These he ascribes to the immediate cooperation of providence: And such events, as, with good reasoners, are the chief difficulties in admitting a supreme intelligence, are with him the sole arguments for it [quoted by Neiman, 153].

The Argument from Design* has filtered down to the "vulgar" in our day: people who've never studied philosophy have invoked it to me, though usually as a reason why I should believe in an omnipotent creator, not why they believe in one.  As Neiman observes, "These sorts of claims concern psychology" (154), that is, why people find religious or other claims convincing, rather than the validity of the arguments used.  Natural religion, or natural theology as it was also called, was a somewhat confused philosophical project.  It was the work of educated people, rather than the "vulgar," intended to provide rational support for belief in God, though this generally led to a God who wasn't the god of Christianity.  But it was also meant, as Neiman shows, to produce a new religion, a rational religion, free of superstition and miracles and priests, that a modern rational person could accept.

This should sound familiar. When I was criticizing the philosopher Philip Kitcher's book Living with Darwin a few years ago, I connected him to nineteenth-century liberal Christianity, which was true enough; I forgot that he is also the heir to the philosophes a century earlier, who also thought that Reason and Science could govern the world much better than religion had.  But Hume seems not to have shared that illusion; he was, Neiman tries to show, as interested in demolishing the pretenses of Reason as he was those of Revealed Religion.

He described the innocent heathen's view of the doctrine of the Real Presence to suggest that mythological reasons do less violence to intellect.  Later he attacked most any form of conventional worship by suggesting that all ascribe to God "the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause [Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion]".  But traditional dogma was an easy target in England.  The Dialogues were bolder.  They proceeded to show that the natural religion allegedly founded on common sense is in fact less reasonable than other hypotheses.  As myths go, monotheism is not only less salutary but less scientific than alternatives.  Natural inductive procedures will lead us to polytheism [Neiman, 156].

Hume, like Voltaire before him, showed that the world does not make sense, and that Reason is of limited use in dealing with its senselessness.  (That he used Reason to demonstrate that isn't self-contradictory; that a tool is only of limited use doesn't mean it's of no use whatever.  I can't build the Great Pyramid using only a hammer, but that doesn't mean I can't use it to drive a nail.)  This is the road where modern non-theist scientists and philosophers generally prefer not to follow Hume.  They're happy to applaud his demolition of revealed religion, but they mostly have great faith in reason.  So we get revivalists like Neal DeGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye arguing that science can resolve moral problems like abortion, or how to govern a society.  In a free country they're as entitled to bloviate as any minister or Pope, but they have no authority in these subjects and shouldn't be taken seriously.  G. K. Chesterton famously declared, "The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried."  But as the Christian writer Graham Shaw riposted in The Cost of Authority (SCM / Fortress, 1982) , this is "glib deceit." 

It gains its plausibility from the guilty awareness of all believers of the distance between profession and life, but if true it would be a devastating verdict on Christianity.  Few ideals have so preoccupied the imagination of men, or inspired more utter devotion.  If therefore the ideals are still untried, it may well be that they are inadequate to guide men through the complexities of life.  The same simplicity which gives them their imaginative power to haunt and obsess may also condemn them to ineffectiveness in actual life [5].

Reason and Science may not have been as widely popular as Christianity, but they have inspired many, and certainly their devotees would also claim that they have not failed but found difficult and left untried.  But that, to the extent it was true, would also be an indictment of those who claim to speak in the name of Science and Reason, but unscientifically and irrationally; even dishonestly.

Scientists will concede, a bit uncomfortably I think, that science has not been an unmitigated source of Good in the world.  True, Science has given us vaccines and rockets to the moon; it has also given us atomic bombs and eugenic sterilization.  Like Christian apologists, they will protest that it's not their fault or the fault of Science, it's because Men have misused Science to their evil ends.  (That's the Problem of Evil: Why do Men do bad things, and why does Science let them?  Because we don't have free will!) No True Scotsman comes in handy: those who did these bad things were not True Scientists or Christians.  To the extent that this is true, it undercuts the claim that Science (or Christianity) is basically Good; at best they should be judged neutral, without inherent moral content or consequences.  Since Neil DeGrasse Tyson appears to be the big celebrity scientist nowadays, I'm going to focus on his well-intentioned but blundering attempts to deal with this problem.

Tyson told NPR:

You will never find people who truly grasp the cosmic perspective ... leading nations into battle. No, that doesn't happen. When you have a cosmic perspective there's this little speck called Earth and you say, "You're going to what? You're on this side of a line in the sand and you want to kill people for what? Oh, to pull oil out of the ground, what? WHAT?" ... Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Here he is saying that "the cosmic perspective" would direct us better than whatever its opposite would be.  Of course, any religious believer could also claim to possess or have access to "the cosmic perspective."  The cosmic perspective on war can be found in the Bhagavad-Gita, and was summed up by whoever said "Kill them all, God will know His own."  Tyson, however, was talking about a perspective that he presumably associates with science.

But he also told a Scientific American blogger,

Lastly, you speak as though all War is bad. I tend to agree with you on a personal level. But I know as a matter of political awareness that not all wars are unjust and some wars are, in fact, worth fighting. Many scientists who serve military interests do so because they believe deeply in the value of their work to the security of our country

So maybe you will find someone with the cosmic perspective leading, or at any rate following, nations into battle.  I think as a description of reality, whether religious or scientific, that's more accurate than Tyson's fantasy about the moral effects of the cosmic perspective.  But the real problem is how we mere laypersons are supposed to tell who truly grasps the cosmic perspective and who doesn't.

This is a more serious problem.  On the one hand Tyson has denounced attempts by religious believers (whom he represents as "a few," though they probably greatly outnumber scientists in the US) to "control the behavior of everyone else." "That's no longer a free democracy," he says, though I wonder if we've ever had one by that criterion.  On the other, Tyson believes that "astrophysicists should be under no obligation to poll the public. I don't care how deeply affectionate you felt for these objects [the former planet Pluto, in this case] that we had talked about."

Still, alas, in America scientists are at the mercy of the dang sheeple.  In theory, at least.  So Tyson told Scientific American, "I can scream at lawmakers without limit, but their duty is to serve their constituents. And so it’s the electorate that I, as a scientist and educator, will always target for my messages."  I've pointed out before how doubtful it is that the lawmakers' constituents are the electorate, but at the moment I'm more interested in how Tyson feels as a scientist about public input into the science budget.  Scientists tend to view any restrictions on funding for their research as an intolerable infringement of their freedom to pursue knowledge wherever it may lead them, no matter how far, and have greatly lamented the decline in government spending on science since the end of the Cold War.  Tyson admits that he directs his persuasive efforts to the electorate, but his successes appear to have been through patronage from our elites. Contrary to liberal Democrats' view of George W. Bush and the Republican Party as anti-science, Tyson told the Daily Beast,

People can say and think what they want, but what matters is whether or not it becomes policy or legislation, and I don’t remember any legislation that restricted science. In fact, the budget for the National Science Foundation went up. What matters is money in Congress. What does Congress do? Allocate money. That’s really what they do. So the science budget of the country went up during the Bush administration, and the budget for NASA went up 3 percent—and it had actually dropped 25 percent in real spending dollars under the eight years of President Clinton. I don’t care what you say or think. I care about legislation, and policy.

Also, he appointed me! There may have been some science that he hadn’t learned yet or didn’t know fully, but he’s not creating legislation based on it. Speeches are politics, so you can’t fault a politician for saying something political.

What the voters want, then, doesn't matter much, nor does Tyson think it should.  I can understand his position, but it hardly bespeaks a devotion to either Reason or "free democracy."

Education, including science education, is also accountable to the voters, so it may not be surprising that the general population doesn't accept Science as much as Tyson and other scientists would like.  Large numbers of people, not just the few of whom Tyson speaks, don't believe in non-theistic Darwinian evolution.  That's mostly because of resistance to teaching it in schools below the university level, I know, but I can't help wondering whether part of the problem might also be that science isn't taught all that well.  Rather like history.  Remember that students' ignorance about historical facts has remained the same since the first research into the topic a century ago.  In history class students mostly are forcefed propaganda; in science class they dissect frogs and do basic experiments of the kind that physicists did before Galileo.  Under those circumstances, is it surprising that they don't understand the neo-Darwinian synthesis?  One thing I feel pretty sure of, though: you won't teach evolution or persuade people to accept it by the vitriolic abuse that constitutes so much public discourse on science education by liberal and progressive writers.  Whatever else you can say about it, that rhetoric does not model rationality.  Neither do Neil DeGrasse Tyson's less than coherent ramblings about science and society.

It might be argued that the trouble is scientists' and secularists' failure to be rational; if they were, their counsel would be faithful and true, and we could look to them to lead us infallibly into the future.  Maybe so, but they claim to be rational already, and again I wonder how I am supposed to tell whom to believe and follow.  The same dilemma is presented by religion, even if you limit it to one religion.  There is wide disagreement about what Christianity, for example, teaches about specific issues, a disagreement that goes back to the earliest days of the cult.  There are no authorities on whom we can rely without question.

We might start by teaching critical thinking from elementary school onward, but that course would meet fierce opposition from the religious and the non-religious alike.  Besides, it doesn't seem that reason and science now have the knowledge needed to make decisions, any more than religion does.  Rationalists have faith that someday all will be understood, and all manner of thing will be well; I think that's Pie in the Sky, and it doesn't help us in the meantime anyway.  For now we must recognize the limits of both science and reason.  That doesn't mean abandoning them for religion -- which religion? which minister or pope or mullah or lama?  That Darwinian evolutionary theory has serious problems doesn't mean that Genesis or some other creation myth of your choice is true.  Refusing to admit the limits of one's wisdom and knowledge is a common fault of both religion and science, despite the lip service both pay to that admission in principle.  Reason won't save us, nor will religion; we must make our own decisions and judgments, knowing that we make them from incomplete and inadequate knowledge.

This, I think, is the point of Sartre's existentialism, not the blank-slate vacuousness Mary Midgley ascribes to him.  But I'll go with something like Walter Kaufmann's version, as he developed it in Without Guilt and Justice: we must decide; no one else can do it for us; we must think hard about our choices but in the end we must act (even refusing to act is an act). If we turn out to be wrong we must take responsibility for our action and do our best to repair or ameliorate the damage.  If you have a better idea, let's discuss it.

Which brings me back to Evil in Modern Thought. Modern philosophy emerged, Neiman argues, from attempts to resolve the Problem of Evil.  Christianity can't do it; indeed, the Problem of Evil is a particular stumbling block for conventional Jewish and Christian monotheism, and the rationalist project showed this forcefully.  But that was a negative result; rationalists couldn't prove how we ought positively to deal with the painful finitude of human existence.  I'm looking forward to seeing how Neiman's account proceeds.

*Antony Flew argued, I think correctly, that it would better be called the Argument to Design rather than the Argument from Design, since  involves arguing from the regularities we see in the world to claim that they must be the result of design rather than happenstance; the move from there to a Designer is less of a leap.

A Brief for the Prosecution

An old friend, a poet herself, linked today to this poem.  Just the part of it that showed in the preview pressed certain buttons in me.  After acknowledging "Sorrow everywhere.  Slaughter everywhere", the poet declared "But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants."  No no no, I thought.  Not today, not this week, not this year, not this century, I will not let this one pass unchallenged.  So I took a deep breath and commented: "'Defense' of what? I'm sorry, but that thing is vile."

(And that was before I'd read the lines "If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down / we should give thanks that the end had magnitude", which confirmed my contempt for the performance: if the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, there's no magnitude in our end, we're just one more caterpillar on the tracks.) 

The person who'd posted the poem on his tumblr (not the poet himself, who died in 2012), replied in a few minutes:

The poem isn't a defense but a kind of preparation. I don't think it is vile. It admits the world is filled with horrors but says we cannot give ourselves over that entirely, that we have to live and love despite ourselves, despite the awfulness in the world.

I'm not sure what "a kind of preparation" is supposed to mean, but his response strikes me as the lowest kind of apologetics.  (Where, after all, does "the awfulness in the world" come from?  Who fills the world with horrors?  That's why I object to the bit about "the locomotive of the Lord" -- it appears that the poet accepted exactly the kind of theodicy I have no use for.)  I also think he's misreading the poem in terms of his own preconceptions -- what Walter Kaufmann called the exegetical fallacy, reading your beliefs into a text and getting them back endowed with its authority.  I replied:

If it's not a defense, it needs a different title. But what struck me as vile was the line "we enjoy ourselves because that's what God wants." Which god? According to every orthodox theology I know of, and most non-orthodox ones besides, suffering is something that God wants, either because we've brought it on ourselves or because God wants to test us, or because God works in mysterious ways, or other such nonsense. If I want to read good poetry about human suffering, I'll read the Book of Job. Or Marge Piercy, who's written some good poetry on this subject over the years.

To which he replied,

Okay, be angry and carry on. Jack Gilbert is one of the great poets of the 20th Century, and this poem is one of his most beloved. But no one is forcing anyone to read it. --- shared it as many people have today.

Great poets have been known to write great garbage.  They are not above criticism, and indeed it's all the more important to criticize them when they say something stupid or evil.

I confess I'd never heard of Jack Gilbert before today. According to his obituary in the New York Times, "Brief for the Defense" (quoted in its entirety there) is one of his best-known poems.  Because I haven't read anything else by him, and I'm not going to start now, I have no context for the statements in this poem, though I find it hard to imagine what context could make them anything but malignant.

Then my poet friend chimed in:

My only comment is to note that the word "risk" is in this poem for a reason.

That's exactly the kind of use of words like "risk" I object to.  (It reminds me of "intervention," which also sets off alarms for me.)  Of course the word is in the poem for a reason; I just don't think it's a good reason.  I think it's posturing, preaching to the choir: like Marilynne Robinson daringly declaring herself a liberal and a Christian, like Greg Louganis telling gay audiences that he knows It's not a choice, like Barack Obama telling his fans that if Wall Street wants a fight, that's a fight he's willing to have, like black conservatives denouncing the Civil Rights Movement in front of white Republican audiences.  Risk without cost, risk without risk.

And what kind of "risk" is involved in "delight"?  I speculate it's the "risk" that it won't last forever but will pass.  Maybe that really does deter some people.  But that delight will pass is not a risk, it's a certainty.  I see the wish to escape transience as one of the main impulses (and errors) behind much religion, born of a wish to achieve bliss that will never end.  I understand that wish -- how could I not? -- but it's never going to be fulfilled.

I'm not surprised that the poem is well-loved by the kind of people who sentimentalize the smiles and laughter of the destitute from a safe distance, admiring and praising the big smile of your ragged shoeshine boy before you go back to your comfortable hotel room and, ultimately, to your suburb.

I was amused by her friend's dismissive "be angry and carry on" -- as if anger were a bad thing.  But then a lot of people think it is.  (At least, other people's anger is a bad thing; their own is worn with pride.)

Of course I wasn't forced to read the poem.  But I respect my friend, which means I take what she puts on Facebook more seriously than I do what many other people I know post.  (Except for the cat-related material.)  I'm not saying she should not have posted the poem, but having seen it and read it, I won't be told I should not respond to it.  (And to be fair to her, let me stress that it was not she but her friend who got all spitty about my reaction.)

That's always a difficult question in a place like Facebook.  On one hand, you've got people who have conniptions at seeing anything they dislike.  On the other, you've got people who think that freedom of expression means no one is entitled to disagree with anything they post.  My friend is a librarian as well as a poet, and committed as most librarians are to freedom of expression, even when it's offensive or disturbing or unpleasant.  Most of what I disagree with on Facebook I don't respond to.  When I do comment, I do so carefully and I hope thoughtfully.  Often I decide not to comment after all, and cancel what I began to write; sometimes I bring my complaints here.

According to my friend's friend, it would seem that "Brief for the Defense" is being used to express the feelings of a lot of people lately; perhaps because of Robin Williams's suicide, because of the summary execution by police of a young black man in St. Louis and the subsequent repression of community objections to the slaying, perhaps because of the latest Israeli blitzkrieg in Gaza, perhaps because of the renewed civil war in Iraq, perhaps the combination of all these things and so much more.  It was because of all these things and more that I found the poem a wrong-headed statement, and chose to say so.

I suspect that my reaction to this poem and all that it represents is a matter of temperament.  I would prefer that there's no god, No One out there, rather than Someone watching the world and doing nothing about it except shedding great salt tears.  I know that there are many who'd disagree with me, and I suppose "Brief for the Defense" speaks to them.

It's probably not out of place to add that I agree with part of the poem, the idea that people somehow find reasons to go on living and celebrating their lives in the face of the horrors they suffer.  Where I differ is in the poet's declaration that God wants them to do so.  I don't believe in gods, but if they exist, their wishes don't determine what I think or do.  If we "risk delight," it's not because of the gods, but despite them.  (The "risk," if any, in most theologies would be that the gods don't want us to be happy, and will punish us for daring to be so.  Compare C. S. Lewis's very orthodox claim that Yahweh makes people suffer because they've had it too easy, and "The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered.")  It would be altogether right to go on living in flat defiance of their wishes, and to curse them and the locomotive they rode in on.

A Gift from God of Biblical Proportions

Really, someone ought to ask Richard Mourdock about this.  (And President Obama, who over the past few years apparently been struggling with Christianity and losing.)  A comment was posted on a blog post today referring humorously to Hurricane Sandy as "Mother Nature decid[ing] to punish Barack Obama and Mitt Romney for failing to mention climate change in the debates."  I chided the commenter for his pagan rhetoric: it was not Mother Nature but God the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit who'd sent Sandy as a divine gift, like an unwanted pregnancy.  And it would be wrong to abort a gift from God.  Maybe we shouldn't even be resisting it: evacuation is an attempt to escape from His judgment, and a true believer knows there's no hiding place from Him.

Evolution Helps Those Who Help Themselves

One of my obnoxious friends on Facebook passed along the above motto today. My comment: "That's exactly what I'm worried about." That is, I'm worried that there's Someone up there stirring up the earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions; inventing new and more lethal plagues; and guiding the predator drones to their young targets, and that's "how it's meant to be."

This is, as I've said before, a matter of temperament. I would prefer that no one and nothing is in charge of the universe, rather than that Someone is in charge, doing all these things. The more optimistic possibility is that They are sitting up there, watching everything that happens, and doing nothing; the more pessimistic option is that They are actively involved. But either way, as Terry Pratchett put it while in his cups, we are in the hands of a madman, and being an atheist is no help at all. If a fly could say "I don't believe in you!" to the kid pulling its wings off, what difference would it make?

But then, neither is being a religious believer, whether a fundamentalist Christian, a Wiccan, a Roman Catholic, a Hindu, a Muslim, a Jew, a Buddhist, or a processor of New Age / therapeutic sludge. It may well be that the Supreme Being, whatever it is, has a reason for letting you die slowly and in agony of cancer, diabetes, or emphysema, that your helpless writhing is "how it's meant to be." So was the Final Solution. As a human being and a moral agent, however, I don't see any reason why I'm bound to assent to it, or why I should trust people who do.