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?

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.

The Problem of Pain

The great singer Merry Clayton was seriously hurt in a car accident a week ago, and her friend and fellow-singer Darlene Love wrote this on her Facebook page:

I'm just hearing about this now and in tears. We all need to pray for Merry. Dear Lord, please place your hands upon Merry and heal her body and soul. Please bring her to a full recovery - AMEN! Love you! xoxoxo

I also hope Clayton recovers, of course, but this is the sort of thing that turns me off to popular religion.  I say "popular" and not "mainstream" or "institutional" religion, because the respectable leaders of respectable religion tend to be careful to caution the laity not to expect any real results from prayer, even as they encourage them to pray.  We shouldn't try to pressure God, to make him do what we want, all that matters is what He wants.  The lively, vivid faith of the Common People tends to be a lot less cautious, though no less wrong for that.

Very seriously: the accident must, according to orthodox Christian theology both popular and respectable, have been the result of the Dear Lord placing his hands upon Merry and bringing someone else's car together with hers, in order to humble her and teach her Who is in charge around here.  That's a harsh way of putting it, but it's essentially what the popular Christian writer C. S. Lewis said about "the problem of pain" seventy years ago.

We are perplexed to see misfortune falling on decent, inoffensive, worthy people -- on capable, hard-working mothers of families or diligent, thrifty little trades-people, on those who have worked so hard, and so honestly, for their modest stock of happiness and now seem to be entering on the enjoyment of it with the fullest right. How can I say with sufficient tenderness what here needs to be said? ... Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God who made these deserving people, may really be right when He says that their modest prosperity has not made them blessed; that all this must fall from them in the end, and that if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands before them and recognition of this need; He makes that life less sweet to them. ... The creature's illusion of self-sufficiency must, for the creature's sake, be shattered. ... And this illusion ... may be at its strongest in some very honest, kindly, and temperate people, on on such people, therefore, misfortune must fall [The Problem of Pain, Macmillan, 1940, 96-98].

On second thought, I'm not sure I was being harsher than Lewis.  I hope I'm less smug and complacent -- as he admitted he'd been, after his wife died of cancer twenty years later; but in the end he retreated to an exhausted and weary submission to his lord's will.

And then a little while ago, just after the Mexican soccer team beat the Croatian team 3-1, a Mexican acquaintance posted to Facebook:

Gracias Diosss pude ver los 3 golazos aunque aki mi raza no me crelleron soy vidente

Roughly: Thank you Goddd that I could see the 3 goals although my people didn't believe me I'm a prophet

So it's presumptuous to expect Yahweh to place his hands on Merry Clayton when he had more important matters like the World Cup to handle.  (As I've pointed out many times, this attitude is widespread among sports fans and athletes alike: His eye is on my team, or on Me Me Me.)

The victim-Christianist writer Rod Dreher kvelled yesterday about a "miracle in Philadelphia" (yes, I know, he's alluding to another "miracle") in which a Ukrainian Orthodox church in the City of Brotherly Love "burned to the ground -- but its icons were unharmed."  Well, "a few of the icons," anyway; or maybe "a lot of" them, or maybe "Not one of those pictures caught on fire" -- the firefighter quoted isn't very consistent.  It would be a nice coincidence if none of the icons was damaged, but I'm not sure what it would prove, since of course Yahweh could just as easily have spared the church altogether.  Maybe it's like the man who was blind from birth in the gospel of John: Jesus explained to his disciples that the blindness wasn't due to any sin by the man or by his parents, but "so that the works of God might be displayed in him" (9:3).  So Yahweh set the church afire, but spared the icons to show his power and glorify himself.  Just the kind of god people like, apparently -- at any rate, very few Christians seem to stumble over a doctrine like this.

Last week another writer at The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs, asked, "What Does Atheism Do for Atheists?" in reply to an article by Susan Jacoby on the blessings of atheism.  I haven't read Jacoby's article yet, though I know I should; she's not the sharpest pencil in the box.  But I do want to try to answer Jacobs's question sometime.  My first thought, though, is to counter: What does religion do for the religious?  It seems to me, from what I've observed, that its comforts are not very reliable, and require the cultivation of doublethink to work at all: to remember Yahweh's omnipotence selectively, so that you beg him to repair an injury while forgetting that, according to your own doctrines, he himself inflicted it.  I can't believe that the strain of leaving that contradiction unresolved doesn't take a toll of some kind.

Atheists in general don't do any better with such questions.  That whatever answers we come up with are not satisfactory doesn't mean that theists' answers are correct, of course.  More soon, I hope.

What Is God's Last Name Again?

There's a person on Facebook who has the account named "God."  His or her postings consist of snark aimed mainly at conservative and fundamentalist Christians, who are excellent but easy targets.  The assumption underlying the account appears to be that this God is preferable to the God of the Bible thumpers; I don't agree, and I have my fun by posting my own snark at the Facebook God, with a good deal more hostility than I usually express in that venue.

I don't really have any idea who Amanda Bynes is.  But when did God, any God, help those millions of starving people out there?  He could help them and Amanda Bynes.  I'm constantly surprised at how shallow the critics of conservative religion are.  And yet, when they put on their God masks, they can't imagine anything but a lazy do-nothing slacker god at best, and a cosmic sadist at worst.  ("Yahweh, how many times I have told you to clean up your planet?"  "Aw, Mom, let me alone, I'm busy playing Grand Theft Auto!")