Civil Commotion

I don’t believe that the so-called problem of evil ever rises to the level of a bona fide, intellectually serious problem, and I’ve set out my reasons in the past. It’s not a subject that actually strokes my interest nowadays.

BUT! In the midst of a global pandemic, pastors worldwide reluctant to cancel services, and actual– and dimestore-theologians meditating and pontificating on the so-called problem as the laity seek to comprehend the mind of the divine, I think it’s worth a few minutes to explain, once again, why the so-called “problem of evil” is in fact an exemplar for the reason that nobody, anywhere, should ever take seriously anything said by a theologian of any variety. This is particularly relevant because believers are dying disproportionately, thanks to pastors who summon them to communal worship.

Why does an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-loving god permit evil?

The question comprehends both natural and moral evil, the earthquake that shakes down your home and the embezzler who flees to Bimini as he bankrupts your company. The question sets out three specific premises: God is all knowing, so he knows of individual suffering; God is all-powerful, so he can relieve suffering; God is all-loving, so he wants to end suffering.

Unspoken, however, are several antecedent premises: Supernatural beings exist, the specific supernatural being so beloved by Abraham exists, that being has an interest in the affairs of men, and that being has explained via the Bible how his favor may be won.

Clearly, some of the premises rely on the truth of other premises.

• There is at least one supernatural being.

  • That supernatural being is the supernatural being that Abraham spoke with.

• That supernatural being wants to interact with us.

  • That supernatural being superintended the production of the Bible in order to facilitate pleasing him.

• That supernatural being is all-knowing.

• That supernatural being is all-powerful.

• That supernatural being is all-loving.

This is where the logical sleight-of-hand comes in: If you can’t prove that Abraham’s Invisible Friend is real, then there is no basis for making claims about his characteristics. None.

And the so-called problem, then, amounts to no more than this: The world doesn’t look as we’d expect it to look if all those unsubstantiated premises, and unsubstantiated contingent premises, were true.

As the kids say: Duhhh …

All of us, at some time or another, have heard the claim that, whether the Christian narrative is true or not, Christian teachings are good. No, they aren’t; a just-posted piece by Bruce Gerencser goes to my objections and is well worth your time.

He that loveth his life shall lose it; and he that hateth his life in this world shall keep it unto life eternal. (John 12:25)

For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? (Mark 8:36)

Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. (I John 2:15)

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

For those of us raised in Evangelical churches, these verses are quite familiar. We likely heard countless sermons about loving God and hating the world. We likely heard our pastors and teachers tell us that if we love our lives, we will lose them, and if we hate our lives, we will save them.

The goal was to cause believers to fear losing their eternal reward; to change the focus of their lives from the present to the afterlife.

There is not much direct talk nowadays about Original Sin, but it is always implicit in talk about ‘salvation’ and your need for it. All of Christian thought and teaching rests upon a simple premise: You’re no damn good; you were born no damn good, and you can never be any damn good. That’s the whole of it. All the millions of sermons preached in the last 2000-years, all the tens of thousands of books about theology written in the last 2000-years … at bottom they have no more to say than that: You’re no damn good. Christianity is innately predatory and degrading, and what it feeds upon is your confidence and dignity. You must become as a mote of dust blown this way and that and “die to self” — abandoning utterly the idea that you should set your own direction.

Bah. Bertrand Russell got it right.

We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world — its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.

The Israeli Health Minister, who recently said that coronavirus is “divine punishment against homosexuality,” has been diagnosed with coronavirus.

Last month, Yaakov Litzman, while talking about the origin of coronavirus, said: “It’s a divine punishment against homosexuality”. The health minister is also a head Agudat Yisrael — an Orthodox Israeli political party.

Israel has gone into partial-lockdown to counter the coronavirus outbreak. The country has reported more than 8,430 confirmed cases and 49 people have died from COVID-19 to date. Israel’s large, insular ultra-Orthodox community, of which Litzman is a member, has been particularly hit hard by infections. In the early phases of the outbreak, some radicals had pushed back and ignored the government-mandated movement restrictions.

What do you know? Irony is not dead. I always wonder when I encounter stories like this: How does he know? That is, how does one know that it’s divine punishment for homosexuality and not divine punishment for endless reruns of The Andy Griffith Show?

Like the previous post, this post draws attention to the role of religious ignorance in frustrating progress and making matters worse. How else could it be? The “eternal truths” of the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran were finalized long ago, long before anybody suspected the existence of viruses. The authors of those texts probably had no evil intent — but they were wrong.

Ironically, there is at least a smidgen of truth in this type of thinking. The resolute ignorance that the Abrahamic faiths demand does conduce toward a costly character failure and, in the case of coronavirus, ignorance can be deadly.

In the Middle Ages, when pestilence appeared in a country, holy men advised the population to assemble in churches and pray for deliverance; the result was that the infection spread with extraordinary rapidity among the crowded masses of supplicants.

Bertrand Russell, What I Believe, 1925

That’s not hard to believe; after all, we’ve all seen recent headlines about pastors ignoring shelter-in-place orders and summoning believers to Sunday services — where they are infected.

Go to a park Sunday mornings. Our Invisible Friend can find you there, too, if He has anything to say to you.

Dawn and I have used Wal*Mart’s grocery pickup service for about 2-years. We go online and reserve a pickup time, compile the grocery list, make the payment online, then show up at the reserved time and somebody puts the groceries in our car’s trunk. It’s easy to do and we avoid the endless walk up and down aisles, the general irritation of being in a crowd, and standing in a long line. It also saves time and, since we’re shopping from a list and avoiding impulse purchases, saves money.

But: How does Wal*Mart benefit by doing this? It took me a while to figure it out.

• Improved inventory control and ordering. The more people who shop online, the better their understanding of what they need to have in stock. That means less waste in a business with notoriously low margins.

• Shorter lines in the store, meaning fewer cashiers drawing payroll.

• Fewer people in the store means more pleasant shopping for those who come inside.

• Greater customer loyalty; why would I go to Food Lion and stand in line?

• Fewer bad checks.

Wal*Mart has benefited from social isolating; suddenly, it’s hard to reserve a time for grocery pickup, because there is a sharp increase in demand. But because they began offering the service 2-years ago, they have worked the kinks out and know how to do it; the problem they have is scale, not how.

So far as I can tell, most of the other retailers around here are totally lost and hurting. We placed an order online with Ace Hardware for pickup later in the day, and they completely blew it; I wonder if they have ever filled an online order.

So the problem confronting a lot of merchants is not merely that they’re closed or open for only sharply abbreviated hours. Because a lot of people are going to continue with online grocery shopping even after the coronavirus matter ends, it means that at least some (Food Lion, say) customers aren’t going to come back at all; they’re going to stick with the convenience of grocery pickup at Wal*Mart. The nature of grocery shopping, and a lot of other retail, is going to permanently change.

Clearly, retailers that began early and worked-out the bugs are going to enjoy a huge advantage over the next months, and those who haven’t adjusted to the new paradigm are going to be badly wounded if not killed outright.