A SMIDGEN OF RELIGION
The strongest case against God is not why suffering exists (whether it be multiple sclerosis, your partner leaving you, or the death of a child from a car accident), but why good people suffer along with bad people.
“The cases I have mentioned are special. But the strongest case against God comes not from them but from the billions of normal lives that are full of apparently pointless suffering. It is not just that the suffering is not deserved; it is that it seems random and pointless, distributed according to no rhyme or reason but mere chance, and working no good, no end. For every one who becomes a hero and a saint through suffering, there are ten who seem to become dehumanized, depressed, or despairing. // And the universality of it -- there’s the rub. Your neighbor, your best friend, your doctor, your auto mechanic all have deep and hidden hurts that you don’t know about, just as you have some that they don’t know about. Everybody out there is hurting. And if you don’t know that, you’re either very naive and believe in people’s facades, or so thick-skinned that you don’t hurt yourself and don’t feel other people’s hurts either. // I don’t mean to insult anyone; we all do a lot of cover-ups. It’s our animal instinct to cover up our wounds so that they don’t get hurt more. Just as animals do this to their bodies’ wounds, we do it to our souls’ wounds. We are all involved in a universal cover-up” (9-10).
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We have the potential of learning more than others in the past if we piggy-back off their ideas.
“The medievals had a saying: ‘We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants. We see farther than the ancients not because we are taller than they but because we have their shoulders to stand on’” (20).
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It’s easier to believe that evil exists because there’s no God (without digging into it further).
“We Americans love easy, fast answers. The devil has sold as many cheap and instant answers as MacDonald’s has sold hamburgers. We are impatient with Mystery, especially with a capital M. We read a fathomless profundity like the Book of Job and we say, ‘But what’s the bottom line?’” (26).
“Our bodies may be made in the image of King Kong, but our souls are made in the image of King God” (30).
“Atheism screws down the manhole covers on the great deeps and flattens the sky to a low ceiling. Instead of a forest of spires and turrets, like the Gothic art that expressed an age of faith, we find ourselves in a ranch-style, flattened, one-story existence” (31).
“The true answer might be so mysterious and deep that we couldn’t get it all at once. It might be like a story. (Tell me the whole story of David Copperfield all at once, or at least in twenty-five words or less, please.) It might be like a person. Reduce a person to a category, to a stereotype. It can’t be done. If the answer is like a story or like a person, that would be a richness, not a problem. We would be glad it is a mystery rather than a problem” (55).
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Evil is the absence of good.
“Evil is like blindness, good is like sight. Evil is like darkness, good is like light. Evil is like death, good is like life. Evil needs good as a parasite needs its host, as a destructive power needs something good to destroy, but not vice versa. Good does not need evil. Light does not need darkness. God does not need Satan. But Satan needs God” (37).
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What makes an action “moral” vs “immoral”?
“The most popular book of the master of common sense is his book Ethics. This book, like most premodern books on ethics, asks three basic questions where modern books on ethics ask only one or at most two. C.S. Lewis likens these three questions to the three questions which the sailing orders of a fleet of ships need to answer. First, they need to know how to cooperate, how to avoid bumping into each other. This is like the ethical question of how we should treat our neighbors, or social ethics. It is the only question most modern ethics deals with. Second, the ships need to know how to stay shipshape, how each one can avoid sinking. This is like the question of individual virtues and vices, the question of character. Ancient ethics dealt even more with this question than the first question. But most modern books on ethics ignore it altogether, as in, for instance, so-called ‘values clarification,’ which is to real ethics what pop psychology is to real psychology. But the third and most important question of all for Aristotle and the ancients is the question of summum bonum, the greatest good, the highest value, the ultimate end, point, and purpose of human life. This is like sailing order telling the ships why they are at sea in the first place, what their mission is. Modern people don’t normally think of this question as an ethical question at all. But it’s the most important question in ethics” (61-62).
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In this broken world, we need lows to better appreciate the highs. Even though Heaven doesn’t have “lows”, it is supposedly still beautifully dynamic (as depicted in C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra, where David Bolt is Adam).
“It takes the frame of darkness for us to realize the light. It takes the threat of death for us to appreciate life. Remember Emily in Our Town. Only when she saw those ordinary moments of life from the perspective of death did she appreciate them. She asked the Stage Manager, ‘Do any humans ever realize life while they live it? -- every, every minute?’ And he answered, ‘No. (Pause.) The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.’ // …We appreciate things only by contrast. // …Like a television screen; it looks grey until a picture comes on, and then the contrasting white makes the grey look black” (88).
“Drama isn’t due to sin, or even necessarily due to suffering. Drama is good. There’s drama in God. Even eternity, outside all time, is drama, eternal dynamism. Eternity isn’t static or dull. If it were, heaven wouldn’t be heaven. Only after sin did drama turn into tragedy, because we turned into tragedians. Only now do we get bored and jaded with happiness and need the contrast with suffering” (89).
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Suffering gives life meaning. Most people, if given the option, would rather stay in the security of their mother’s womb their whole life instead of voluntarily accepting uncertainty of the outside. However, growth happens best outside your comfort zone.
“We want happiness more, but we need freedom more. …// The pilot show for Star Trek culminated in such a choice. Captain Pike, prematurely aged and paralyzed, is offered the choice between freedom and happy slavery in a kind of space zoo as a specimen to be studied by the great brains who rule the forbidden planet Talus IV. Their physical power is small but they wield great hypnotic mental powers and they promise to give Captain Pike nothing but happy dreams for the rest of his life. While he is in fact only an old man in a cage, he will think he has a young, healthy body and is having wonderful adventures on other worlds slaying monsters and loving a beautiful young woman (who is really a wrinkled old hag). Which shall he choose, freedom or happiness? The real world of suffering and truth or the illusory world of happy dreams? // The original plot called for him to choose freedom, but it was changed for television, and he chose happiness instead, without even any hesitation -- implying that the writer assumed that every normal viewer would find his choice as natural and necessary as the writer did. After all, who would think freedom to know the truth and live in the real world worth suffering for? // An old Twilight Zone episode took the opposite position from this writer. In the first scene, a gang of bank robbers is trapped by the police, refuses to surrender, and is shot. The protagonist falls in a pool of blood, blacks out, and wakes to find himself walking on fluffy clouds at the golden gate of a celestial city. A black-bearded, white-robed man with a kindly look takes him in and offers him whatever he desires. But he’s soon bored with the free gold, which can’t buy anything (everything is free). His partners, he is told, are in ‘the other place,’ and even the beautiful girls are boring because they only laugh when he tries to hurt them (he has a sadistic streak). He summons the St. Peter figure. ‘There must be some mistake.’ ‘No, we make no mistakes here.’ ‘Can’t you send me back to earth?’ ‘Of course not. You’re dead.’ ‘Well then, I must belong with my friends in the Other Place. Send me there.’ ‘Oh, no, we can’t do that. Rules, you know.’ ‘What is this place, anyway?’ ‘This is the place where you get everything you want.’ ‘But I thought I was supposed to like heaven.’ ‘Heaven? Who said anything about heaven? Heaven is the Other Place.’ // Again, a world without suffering appears more like hell than like heaven” (97-99).
A Happy End For Captain Christopher Pike - YouTube
Twilight Zone Lite: A Nice Place To Visit - YouTube
“Muslims have prophets too, and one of them tells this Jeremiah-like fable. A man said to Allah, ‘Grant me all the desires of my heart.’ Allah replied, ‘You know not what you ask. Therefore, to show you your heart, I grant your request.’ Immediately, the man’s neighbor’s house collapsed, for his neighbor was very rich and the man had always looked on his neighbor’s house with envy and resentment. Rushing to see what had happened, the man collided with a small child who was in the way. He looked angrily down at the child, and the child disappeared off the face of the earth. The man then understood, and begged Allah, ‘No more, please, no more!’ // Are the prophets right? Dare to look into your heart. Don’t you find hate, lust, greed, and idolatry there? Do you love your enemies? Wouldn’t you like to be seduced by the man or woman of your dreams? Don’t you want to win a million dollars? Don’t you love and long for a thousand assorted creatures more than for the creator? Be honest. Look at your heart, not your rationalizations. And judge by God’s standards. Not the world’s” (114-115).
“The point of our lives in this world is not comfort, security, or even happiness, but training; not fulfillment but preparation. It’s a lousy home, but it’s a fine gymnasium. It’s an uphill bowling alley. The point is not to knock down all the pins (people who do that are usually cheating) but to train our muscles. The ball isn’t supposed to reach the pins, the goal. ‘One step forward, one backward’ is our law here. Progress is a myth. The stronger we get, the weaker we get, the more dependent on our crutches, our machines. For we misunderstand where we are if we believe in earthly utopias. The universe is a soul-making machine, a womb, an egg. Jesus didn’t make it into a rose garden when he came, though he could have. Rather, he wore the thorns from this world’s gardens” (140).