Inconsistencies in crediting success and suffering to God

On the inconsistency of crediting success and suffering to God:

Some people credit mainly good things to God. In his memoir, Donald Miller wrote of his immature concept of a "slot-machine God:" "If something nice happened to me, I thought it was God, and if something nice didn't, I went back to the slot machine, knelt down in prayer, and pulled the lever a few more times."

Christopher Hitchens wrote in God is not Great:

"But the human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal. In England the monarch is the hereditary head of the church as well as the hereditary head of the state: William Cobbett once pointed out that the English themselves colluded in this servile absurdity by referring to “The Royal Mint” but “The National Debt.” Religion plays the same trick, and in the same way, and before our very eyes. On my first visit to the Sacre Coeur in Montmartre, a church that was built to celebrate the deliverance of Paris from the Prussians and the Commune of 1870-1871, I saw a panel in bronze which showed the exact pattern in which a shower of Allied bombs, dropped in 1944, had missed the church and burst in the adjoining neighborhood..."


Deepak Chopra wrote: "As they surveyed the wreckage of their lives, the dazed survivors mumbled the same response: I'm alive only by the grace of God.They did not consider (nor express out loud) that the same God might have sent the storm."

Other people tend toward anger at God for their suffering. Rick Warren wrote in his bestseller The Purpose Driven Life: "People often blame God for hurts caused by others. This creates what William Backus calls 'your hidden rift with God.'" Another possibility is that a cosmic force of evil, the opposite of God, perpetrates injury. The effect, however, is the same. "The more that Satan is guilty, then the more that Adam is innocent! If the devil is the instigator of sin, then the sinner is only a dupe," wrote Vladimir Jankelevitch. In other words, blaming either God or Satan lets humans off the hook for the injuries they cause each other.

Frederic Luskin said that forgiveness is "learning to make peace when something in your life doesn't turn out the way you wanted it to. It's an inner quality not dependent on anyone else, an assertive and necessary life skill rather than a specific response to a particular life situation. People who are hurt have a narcissistic perspective that it's unusual to be hurt, but in fact it's common. When you understand how common it is, you can forgive life."

For others, neither good nor bad is credited to God. They may be atheists; they may be religious people who do not believe that God is responsible for causing personalized, specific effects in the lives of individuals; or they may claim to believe that God does this without being able to bring themselves to acknowledge any specific instance as God's handiwork. Of the last category, Carol M. Swain writes: "...even though we say we believe in God, we live like atheists. We consider God to be either nonexistent or irrelevant — and certainly not in the business of distributing rewards and punishments."

One could be clever and attribute both varieties to God. George F. Will: ”The theologically serious and mordantly witty Peter De Vries wrote in one of his novels about a Connecticut river flood to which a local pastor responded by praying 'that a kind Providence will put a speedy end to the acts of God under which we have been laboring.'”

The theologian Charles Hartshorne asked: “There is only one solution of the problem of evil 'worth writing home about.' It uses the idea of freedom, but generalizes it. Why suppose that only people make decisions?” Very well, but it should be clear that having God make decisions only transfers responsibility onto God. Positing different moral rules for God creates a new problem. H. J. Rose framed it: “...if some things were right for men and others for gods, was there any real moral difference between actions at all?”

Sources

Donald Miller. Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality. Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson Books, 2003. p. 9.

Christopher Hitchens. God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007. pp. 76-77.

Deepak Chopra. How To Know God: The Soul's Journey into the Mystery of Mysteries. New York: Harmony Books, 2000. p 58.

Rick Warren. The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For? Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2002. p. 94.

Vladimir Jankelevitch. Forgiveness. Translated by Andrew Kelley. University of Chicago Press, 2005. Originally Le Pardon, 1967. p 58.

Frederic Luskin, quoted in Rahel Musleah, "The Dance of Forgiveness," Jewish Woman, Fall 2002. p 36.

Carol M. Swain. Be the People: A Call to Reclaim America's Faith and Promise. Thomas Nelson, 2011.

George F. Will. "Leviathan in Lousiana." Newsweek. September 12, 2005. p 88.

Charles Hartshorne, Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, p 13.

H. J. Rose. Religion in Greece and Rome. New York: Harper and Row, 1959. p 91. Originally published as Ancient Greek Religion (1946) and Ancient Roman Religion (1948), London: Hutchinson and Co., Limited.

Moving from cursing others to assisting them

One stage of grief, in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's famous schema, is bargaining. One type of bargain a person may try to strike — if only in the imagination, as such bargains usually are anyway — is that someone else could have been taken in place of the one who is grieved. This is not necessarily because they relish the suffering of others. (Some people certainly do. The character of the princess Pari said in Anita Amirrezvani’s novel Equal of the Sun: “People love to dwell on the pain of others; they love to stick their fingers in it and suck on it as if it were honey. But I won’t allow them to feed at my hive.”) They may say this in the height of emotion even if, at a more lucid and sober moment, they would not claim that one life is worth more than another. A character in Sjón's novel From the Mouth of the Whale describes it this way:

Alas, why does God allow the candle of worthless old hags to flicker, year in, year out, for nine times nine years, while abruptly and without apparent mercy blowing out the newly kindled flames of one’s own children? It is an ugly thought that everyone who has ever lost anyone has entertained, demanding in their despair: Why him? Why her? Why not that one or that one, or that other? But I cannot help it. (p. 67)

Later in the novel:

Clenching my fist, I prayed:

“Dear God, take that black-hearted knave Nightwolf Pétursson and give back to me little Hákon, who was always as gentle as a girl; merciful Father, take Ari Magnússon of Ögur and return to me quick-handed Berglind, who inherited her father’s gift for carving; heavenly Creator, take that foul-tongued slanderer, Reverend Gudmundur Einarsson, and give me back the little lad Klemens, with one moss-green eye and one blue; dear Lord, take the whole legion of good-for-nothings who every day outlive their victims, sprawling in their high seats and thrones, gorging themselves on meat, dripping with grease, format he livestock that grew fat on the green grass in meadows tended with diligence by innocent, God-fearing souls; congratulating themselves on having stripped this man of his livelihood and that woman of her breadwinner — when they can speak between ill-gotten mouthfuls; enjoying to a great old age the fruits of the wicked deeds they committed during their days on Earth with the blessing of bishops, and convinced that the despicable acts that they refer to as ‘a good day’s work in the Lord’s vineyard’ will have paid for their place in Heaven; dear God, snatch them away and do with them what you will, but give back to me Sigrídur Thórólfsdóttir, a pious woman, a loving wife, and a caring mother who never asked for anything for herself but prayed for mercy and good fortune for friends and strangers alike.

These terrible curses poured in torrents from my mouth. They were so dire that when I came to my senses I hoped that the good Lord in His mercy and deep understanding of human frailty would pretend that His great all-hearing ears had been closed in that dark hour.

Another manifestation of the preference for one life over another is the tendency to treat the deaths of multiple strangers, considered together, as a statistic. Partly this is because we are able to reason that whatever happens to large numbers of people is 'just the way the world works." The theologian Nicolas Berdyaev wrote that "the problem of evil is above all the problem of death....The tragic sense of death is connected with an acute sense of personality, of personal destiny. For the life of the race there is nothing tragic in death. The life of the race always renews itself and continues, it finds compensation for itself." Meanwhile, if a precious known few are in trouble and the bargaining game appears to have been "won," it is considered to be a miracle. As John Allen Paulos wrote in Irreligion: "Why, for example, do so many in the media and elsewhere refer to the rescuing of a few children after an earthquake or a tsunami as a miracle when they attribute the death of perhaps hundreds of equally innocent children in the same disaster to a geophysical fault line? It would seem either both are the result of divine intervention or both are a consequence of the earth's plates shifting."

We are able to be more aware of individuals about whom we can form stories and feel pain (whether empathy for their pain or our own experience of the pain of losing them). As Randall Jarrell wrote: "One writer says that we only notice what hurts us — that if you went through the world without hurting anyone, nobody would even know you had been alive." Having noticed the pain of others, we are responsible for helping them. "Pain observed is journalistic pain. It's diplomatic pain. It's television pain," wrote John Le Carre in The Constant Gardener, "over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. Those who watch suffering and do nothing about it, in her book, were little better than those who inflicted it. They were the bad Samaritans."

Sources

The character of the princess Pari, in Anita Amirrezvani’s novel Equal of the Sun. New York: Scribner, 2012.

Sjón. From the Mouth of the Whale. (2008) Translated from the Icelandic by Victoria Cribb (2011). New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013. p. 67, 156-157.

Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p 96.

John Allen Paulos. Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008. pp. 85-86.

Randall Jarrell, in the introduction to The Best Short Stories of Rudyard Kipling. ed. Randall Jarrell. Garden City, New York: Hanover House, 1961. p xii.

John Le Carre. The Constant Gardener. New York: Pocket Books, 2001. p 159.

Human calamities aren't caused by an angry God

Many religious people blame God for terrorism, natural disasters and other calamities. They may interpret a disaster as God's collective punishment – usually acknowledged as eminently reasonable, since it is God's will – visited upon a large group of people for the offense of a subgroup. In the cases where such thoughts are expressed out loud, they may appear on the surface to provide an explanatory cause for the disaster, but they actually exploit and redirect the public's negative emotions surrounding the disaster, often with the intent of maligning an unpopular group.

"God works in mysterious ways... but he gets really fucking weird when it comes to poor people and dangerous places." @Gabino_Iglesias, Coyote Songs, p. 27, @broken_river. pic.twitter.com/jg2O02v67Q

— Kristen 📖 (@kristenwerefox) December 17, 2018

Jerry Falwell's comments about Sept. 11

It's been like this my whole life. I'm old enough to remember when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said NYC deserved 9/11 because it was full of gays bsky.app/profile/ac82...

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— mtsw (@mtsw.bsky.social) January 8, 2025 at 11:03 PM

Two days after the terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2011 in which militant Arab Muslims attacked New York and Washington, Rev. Jerry Falwell appeared on "The 700 Club" television show and declared:

The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say 'you helped this happen'.

The usual theological clarification of this statement is that God did not actively violently attack people, but rather lifted his usual protection (Falwell called it a "curtain") and allowed the attacks to happen; one might see the moral distinction as analogous to that between active and passive euthanasia.

Related: Anna Merlan's 2019 book Republic of Lies notes a similar distinction on a political rather than a theological level: "conspiracy theories relating to September 11" suggest "that the Bush administration either passively allowed the attacks to happen or orchestrated them for political ends. (The two branches of 9/11 conspiracism have become so entrenched that they have their own acronyms: LIHOP, for 'let it happen on purpose,' and MIHOP, 'made it happen on purpose.')"

At the time, a few prominent people agreed with Falwell. That year, on Oct. 4, the Rev. Lou Sheldon opined that relief services for victims of the terrorist attack should be meted out with a priority rating based on the victims' sexual orientations and marital status.

Most people, however, leapt to disagree with Falwell's statement. Ralph G. Neas, president of People for the American way, called Falwell's broadcast "absolutely inappropriate and irresponsible." Spencer Phillips made the pointed jab in Front Page Magazine on Sept. 17, 2001 that Falwell's type of coercive, us-and-them fundamentalism "may have been the inspiration for 9/11 because it is an opinion wholly shared by the Islamic fundamentalists behind the attack."

In 2006, David Kuo, former special assistant to President George W. Bush, wrote of Falwell's original statement:

No one doubted Falwell's ability to make outrageous statements. This wasn't outrageous. It was immoral. It was insane.

In 2011, Biblical scholar Jennifer Wright Knust debunked the late Falwell's claims as having

no parallel at all in biblical writings: the word 'pagan' does not appear; abortion is not discussed; there was no ancient 'feminist' movement; 'gays and lesbians' with a 'lifestyle' are never mentioned; 'secularism' as a concept had not yet been invented; and 'pedophilia' is not talked about, let alone defined as a crime... The American Civil Liberties Union said they 'refused to dignify' Falwell's broadcast with a response. Despite the wishes of many that Falwell's statement could be swept under the table, the words still ring powerfully in people's memories years after they were spoken.

Other attempts to link 'homosexuality' and 'terrorism' in the public perception

The idea that homosexuality draws God's wrath in the form of terrorist attacks resurfaced several months later in Israel. Jerusalem's first Gay Pride event was held on June 7, 2002 despite the mayor's refusal to finance it. One writer praised the gay activists for "beat[ing] the system by ignoring it, acting as if justice and peace were fait accompli instead of a receding fantasy." Counter-protesters accused the marchers of angering God and leaving Jerusalem prone to terrorist attacks.

The association of homosexuality and terrorism persisted on a subconscious level. Fox News Channel talk show host Bill O'Reilly complained on "The O'Reilly Factor" on June 2, 2010 about a new advertisement that McDonald's was airing in France inviting gay people to "come as you are." O'Reilly asked, “Do they have an Al-Qaeda ad, you know, come as you are?”

The idea that God is angered by human sexual transgression is very old, going back at least as far as a Byzantine association of homosexuality with paganism. In the year 528 CE, earthquakes hit Antioch and destroyed much of the city of Soloi Pompeiopolis. Some people blamed God's anger over human sexual transgression. The next year, a bishop from Rhodes and a bishop from Thrace were tried before the city prefect of Constantinople; one was tortured and exiled, the other castrated and put on display. "Justinian then ordered a more comprehensive round-up of people engaging in pederasty....The penalties for conviction on charges of 'religious deviance' included public humiliation, flogging, and castration – sometimes inflicted with such brutality that the victims died." Basianius, a supporter of the Greens, was "dragged out of a church" on Theodora's orders, "tortured during the trial and castrated upon conviction," according to Procopius. (David Potter, Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 135-136.)

In August 2019, Ohio State rep. Candice Keller (R-Middletown) posted to Facebook saying, "Why not place the blame [for mass shootings] where it belongs?" She cited a long list of what she considers to be social ills, beginning with "the breakdown of the traditional American family (thank you, transgender, homosexual marriage, and drag queen advocates)," and then closed ominously, "the fury will continue."

In March 2020, Meir Mazuz, an Orthodox Sephardic rabbi in Israel, said that the appearance of coronavirus in Israel was God's punishment for gay pride parades. Mazuz, according to The Times of Israel, is "the former spiritual leader of the defunct ultra-nationalist and homophobic Yachad party, and is head of the Kiseh Rahamim yeshiva in Bnei Brak."

How do the injured parties give an account of the situation?

The otherwise satisfying belief that victims, however remotely, somehow deserve their suffering has a shortcoming: it is primarily reassuring when one's enemies suffer, and it is never a satisfying explanation for the suffering of oneself and one's allies.

Why was a flammable, six-story-tall Christian statue known as "Touchdown Jesus" in Monroe, Ohio struck by lightning in 2010? Perhaps God was angry at atheistic culture, so he stopped protecting Christian works of art?

When someone is personally injured, they may feel angry, and that anger may tie in with anger about unrelated subjects. There may be a tendency to conflate two issues together even though they are plainly unrelated; in this way, people may experience complex anger about victimhood. In his book "The Belief Instinct," Jesse Bering quoted Ray Nagin, the African-American mayor of New Orleans in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina, who conflated his anger about the Iraq war with his anger about the inadequate response to Hurricane Katrina when he said to reporters: "Surely God is mad at America. Surely He's not approving of us being in Iraq under false pretense. But surely He's mad at black America, too. We're not taking care of ourselves." Nagin subsequently had to apologize and backpedal.

Collective punishment

According to theologies that involve collective punishment, people don't always suffer for the contemporary sins of their neighbors; God may turn against an entire country for something that happened hundreds of years ago.

The German Evangelical Conference at Darmstadt, soon after World War II ended, "claimed that Jewish suffering in the Holocaust had been a divine visitation and called upon Jews to stop rejecting and crucifying Christ." As Bart D. Ehrman noted in God's Problem, it "was not German Christianity's finest moment." More recently, Rev. John Hagee argued that Hitler was the "hunter" referred to in Jeremiah 16 who pursued the Jews and who therefore at least indirectly fulfilled God's will by hastening the creation of the state of Israel. Sen. John McCain rejected Hagee's endorsement of his 2008 presidential bid due to these comments. (Hagee also called Hurricane Katrina "an act of God for a society that has become Sodom and Gomorrah.") Jews, for their part, have a long history of theologically interpreting ethnic and religiously based hate crimes against them. The Jewish response to the deadly 1903 pogrom in Kishinev, Russia, “reveals how fully [the idea of] God’s retribution had given way to a secularistic commitment to human responsibility," wrote Eugene B. Borowitz in his 1991 book Renewing the Covenant: A Theology for the Postmodern Jew. He said: "one would have to search hard to find a lament that Jewish sin had brought this evil upon the community. Instead...moderns knew that human freedom, not God’s retributive pedagogy, lay behind these events.” (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1996. p. 35.)

In 2014, Susanne Atanus, running in a primary election to become a Republican Congressional representative for Illinois, said that God was angry about same-sex marriage and abortions and that he was punishing Americans with tornadoes and autism. The state's Republican party denied that it had ever supported her and recommended that she withdraw from the race.

The Liberian Council of Churches released a statement, as noted by Joel Baden and Candida Moss in 2014, that ebola, a contagious viral hemorrhagic fever, was evidence that "God is angry with Liberia" for "corruption and immoral acts (such as homosexualism, etc.) that continue to penetrate our society."

In 2018, Franklin Graham (the son of Billy Graham) responded to a public figure's support of same-sex marriage by saying that "God destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah because of homosexuality."

In 2018, two days in advance of the expected landfall of Hurricane Florence upon the Carolinas, South Carolina-based pastor Rick Joyner claimed that God was punishing people for the sin of abortion. Later that year, in November, David Johnson, chairman of Ohio's Columbiana County Republican Party, posted online images stating that the raging fire in California that had killed dozens of people was "God’s Punishment to Liberal California" and that it was “Hell on Earth, brought to you by the liberals in California."

Right-wing Christian activist Mary Colbert said on television in June 2019 that "earthquakes, tornadoes, storms" are caused by human sin, not by climate change, and indicate that the End Times are approaching.

Christians in Florida prayed against the approach of Hurricane Dorian in August 2019.

Christian broadcaster Rick Wiles — who in November 2019 referred to Trump's impeachment as a "Jew coup," for which Trump rewarded him with a hotel room and press credentials for his "TruNews" to cover the World Economic Forum the following January — referred to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic as punishment for the Jews. "God is spreading it in your synagogues! You’re under judgment because you oppose his son, the Lord Jesus Christ," he said.

See my Medium article, "Atheists Don't Fear Divine Punishment," for examples of collective punishment (and other such things) from Pat Robertson.

Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico

Responding to the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, media mogul Ted Turner (died 2026) said in an interview:

I'm not a real religious person, but I'm somewhat religious and I'm just wondering if God's telling us He doesn't want us to drill offshore, because He sure is setting back offshore drilling. And right before that we had that coal mine disaster in West Virginia where we lost 29 miners and...the Chinese lost 29 miners too in another mine disaster over in China...I think maybe we just oughta leave the coal in the ground and go with solar and wind power and geothermal...could be He's sending us a message.

A different Ted Turner — the Rev. Theodore Turner of Boothville, La. — said: "The oil spill is part of prophecy. The Bible prophesized hardships." At least to the extent that he was quoted in this article, he did not, however, make the extra leap of claiming that he knew why certain hardships were befalling certain people. His seems to be a more honest, humble approach.

Not just Christianity

People of religions other than Christianity may subscribe to analogous theological beliefs.

Former Israeli chief rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu blamed opposition to the state of Israel for causing the 2004 tsunami that killed hundreds of thousands of people in Asia, and, not having learned his lesson, he told an ultra-Orthodox radio station in 2007 that the Holocaust, which killed millions of Jews and non-Jews, was God's indiscriminate punishment delivered because some Jews were modifying and liberalizing religious tradition.

Iranian Muslim cleric Hojatoleslam Kazim Sadeghi said in a YouTube video in 2010 that inappropriate female dress leads to promiscuity, and "when promiscuity spreads, earthquakes increase." The reference to earthquakes was pointed, as tens of thousands of Iranians died in an earthquake in 2003.

The governor of Tokyo, Shintaro Ishihara, said that an earthquake-caused tsunami that killed thousands of people was divine punishment [tembatsu] for the sin of "egoism and populism." John Nelson, a professor of religious studies at the University of San Francisco, explained that the Japanese Buddhist idea of "the gods having an agenda was instrumental to the ideology of the prewar years, when it was said to be Japan's divine mission to conquer Asia and establish an empire."

Bigotry against anyone doesn't improve the victims' condition

Many people assume that God exists. Others add that this God is offended by certain human behaviors. But why go on to assume that God wants to make large numbers of innocent people suffer? Much of human suffering is caused by humans ourselves – and there's no need to compound our collective pain by lacing misfortune with bigotry.

Image: Tornado in Elie, Manitoba. Image by: Justin Hobson © GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version Wikimedia Commons.

This article was originally posted to Helium Network on Feb. 21, 2011.

Miami: Here's how to help Colombia after the earthquake

What can we do with awareness of the world's unfairness?

Some say the universe is balanced and has some justice or fairness woven into it, a righting of wrongs in the end. This idea has obvious appeal to those who are suffering. But what can it mean to those who experience joy? Does it mean that their joy will eventually be taken away? Kathleen Dean Moore:

I’m one of the votes for caution, because I go through life slightly unnerved by Ralph Waldo Emerson. I half believe him when he says that Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good. For everything you gain, you lose something. Nature hates a monopoly. This makes sense to me. I think it’s at least plausible that everyone’s life finds its own equilibrium, a natural balance of joy and pain. But if happiness has to come out even with sorrow in the end, then I am in big trouble. I try to take my joy in tiny sips, hoping my sorrow will be equally shallow. But usually I end up swallowing happiness in gluttonous gulps, believing all the while in justice, and so rejoicing at little setbacks and petty unpleasantness, courting small disasters, hoping to eat away at the deficit. I know that if the universe is as reciprocal as Emerson says, I have already had more than my fair share of happiness, and in the end I will have a tremendous, bone-crushing debt to pay.

If the universe is fair in the end, then perhaps this would mean that there is no real evil, since all injuries will somehow be compensated. Many people go about their lives as if they believe this, but upon reflection, it appears obviously untrue. There are many who suffer and are never soothed. Lance Morrow, responding to the sort of Emersonian influence that Moore raised above:

Americans are Emersonians, and Henry James was right when he said of Emerson, "A ripe unconsciousness of evil is the sweetest sign by which we know him."

Once conscious of evil, or at least of unfairness, one may become, as Jennifer Finney Boylan put it, are "angry at the whole brutally unfair world, which distributes its blessings and burdens so unequally."

Confronted with awareness of unfairness, what can we do? If we are well off, it is not because we deserve it in any ultimate sense. Our fortune is mere accident. We might just as easily have been cursed. This is precisely the import of unfairness. To respond to awareness of others' deprivation with glee and possessiveness about our own gains and privileges is to be like a person in a death camp who is smug that today he has not been selected for execution. Primo Levi:

Now everyone is busy scraping the bottom of his bowl with his spoon so as not to waste the last drops of the soup; a confused, metallic clatter, signifying the end of the day. Silence slowly prevails and then, from my bunk on the top row, I see and hear old Kuhn praying aloud, with his beret on his head, swaying backwards and forwards violently. Kuhn is thanking God because he has not been chosen.

Kuhn is out of his senses. Does he not see Beppo the Greek in the bunk next to him, Beppo who is twenty years old and is going to the gas chamber the day after tomorrow and knows it and lies there looking fixedly at the light without saying anything and without even thinking any more? Can Kuhn fail to realize that next time it will be his turn? Does Kuhn not understand that what has happened today is an abomination, which no propitiatory prayer, no pardon, no expiation by the guilty, which nothing at all in the power of man can ever clean again?

If I was God, I would spit at Kuhn's prayer.

But if being pleased with our own temporary deserts is not a sufficient response, what is? Here is one potential lead: Nicolas Berdyaev wrote that "Boehme says that suffering is the source of the creation of things."

In 2023, I am looking at a poem by Destiny Hemphill, "a chronicle of scrying in five parts," in motherworld: a devotional for the alter-life. The first question future generations should ask about us is "how / we survived," and perhaps then they'll be equipped to ask "why did we not / survive better?", but probably there's no need to ask "why did it take / the world as we knew it / to collapse / before we were able to live?" because obviously "it / had to / collapse, / it was built / on our suffering".

Sources

Kathleen Dean Moore. Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water. New York: Harvest, 1995. pp. 17-18.

Lance Morrow. Evil: An Investigation. New York: Basic Books, 2003. p 8.

Jennifer Finney Boylan. She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders. New York: Broadway Books, 2003. p 298.

Primo Levi. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated from the Italian Se questo e un uomo (1958) by Stuart Woolf. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. pp. 129-130.

Nicolas Berdyaev. The Divine and the Human. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p 66.

Image

Long-exposure photo by 'Gphoto', 2006. GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2. Wikimedia Commons.