Bad Things, Good People

Bad Things, Good People


This post is an experiment. During last week's atheism discussion, Roberta (bert) recommended Harold Kushner's When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It's been many years since I read "Bad Things", so at my request, Roberta provided extensive excerpts.

Roberta stresses that Rabbi Kushner never attempts to prove God's existence. Yet his book is commonly recommended as a rebuttal to skeptical challenges to belief in a God. For Roberta, Kushner "explains religion and God in such a way that it does not insult my intelligence and my understanding and knowledge of science and presents me with a loving God not the wrathful God of the religion my parents chose for me." For me, Kushner raises more questions than he answers.

To the quandary that provides the book's title, 'how could a loving, all-powerful God allow bad things to happen to good people?', Kushner offers a novel solution: God is loving, but not all-powerful.

Space permits me to cite and respond to but a selection of the extensive quotes Roberta provided. I ask her and you, the reader, to join me in the comments for an extended exchange on Kushner's points.

-tamerlane

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God's (Non-) Role in Human Misfortune

Our misfortunes are none of His doing ... there are some things God does not control.

There is no message in [natural disasters]. There is no reason for those particular people to be afflicted rather than others. These events do not reflect God's choices. They happen at random....

Here Kushner puts forth the proposition that God is not omnipotent. This is troubling. For, if "God" does not control random misfortunes, who does? A rival god? A bigger god? If so, shouldn't we worship that one instead?


(We are) sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.

I derive no comfort from that. Clearly, Kushner does, as he doesn't want his God to be the same harsh, smiting God of the Old Testament. But what sort of deity is Kushner left with, who has no influence over many "independent aspects of reality"?


Nature vs. God

Laws of nature treat everyone alike...Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people.

I don't believe that an earthquake that kills thousands of innocent victims without reason is an act of God. It is an act of nature. Nature is morally blind, without values. It churns along, following its own laws, not caring who or what gets in the way.

Kushner's statement is inconsistent with the bible's depiction of God. Does Kushner ever clarify the relation between Nature and God? Does he view Nature as a sovereign entity, perhaps a rival deity, independent of God?

Kushner's Conception of God

But God is not morally blind. I could not worship Him if I thought He was. God stands for justice, for fairness, for compassion.

Read: "I wish to worship a moral God, therefore I cannot imagine Him as morally blind," and, "I want God to stand for justice, etc., so I will arbitrarily absolve Him of all culpability for injustices, etc."

I have to believe that that the Holocaust was at least as much of an offense to God's moral order as it is to mine, or how can I respect God as a source of guidance?

How exactly does Kushner ascertain "God's moral order?" From scripture? God"s voice in his head? Kushner's own aristotelian conjecture of God's desires?


I would like to think that He is the source of my...sympathy and outrage, and that He and I are on the same side when we stand with the victim and against those who would hurt him.

I'd like to think that I'm better-looking than Brad Pitt, and that I can snag Jennifer Aniston on the rebound. Both I and Kushner are engaging in wishful thinking, and neither he nor I have one scrap of evidence to buttress our hopes.

I wonder why Kushner so badly needs the God he envisions to be the source of his sentiments, or to stand with him on moral questions. Why can't Kushner be the source of his own sentiments; why can't he stand alone in the knowledge he is right?


For me the earthquake is not an 'act of God.' The act of God is the courage of people to rebuild their lives after the earthquake, and rush to others to help them in whatever way they can.

So, God put the good stuff (helping others rebuild after earthquakes) into us, but not the bad stuff (building Treblinkas)? He gets credit for Habitat For Humanity, but no blame for the Khmer Rouge? Similarly, does He merit kudos for butterflies, but no complaints about bot flies?

It seems Kushner is defining "God" not as some external entity, but rather an internal human 'spirit.' Or as Jethro Tull's "My God" puts it: "You are the God of everything / He's inside you and me."


The Purpose of Pain and Suffering

Pain does not represent God's punishing us. It represents nature's way of warning good and bad people alike that something is wrong.

Is suffering, then, a coded message from God? Will Dan Brown write a novel on it?

What specifically is "wrong"? And how can one decipher that message from suffering?

I"m confused: is Nature or God sending the message? Again, Kushner implies that Nature has a conscience will, independent of God's.

Why, then, do bad things happen to good people? One reason is that our being human leaves us free to hurt each other, and God can't stop us without taking away the freedom that makes us human.

Pain makes some people bitter and envious. It makes others sensitive and compassionate.

Or, God could have made us different from the start. Why did He choose to make us capable of hurting each other?

To try to explain the Holocaust, or any suffering, as God's will is to side with the executioner rather than with the victim, and to claim God does the same.

Kushner claims that the holocaust was just a byproduct of the free will God grants mankind, but not His will. Yet man's free will is God's will, so any result of our free will is God's will, too. God chose to make us capable of holocausts.

Purpose of Religion

The primary purpose of religion...was not to put people in touch with God, but to put them in touch with one another...There were rituals for planting and for harvesting, for the winter solstice and for the vernal equinox. In that way, the community would be able to share the most joyous and most frightening moments of life. No one would have to face them alone.

Looking around his world, Homo faber saw things that looked created, were too big for a man to create, and therefore posited the existence of bigger humanoid creators-gods.

Religion and deities are also extremely useful in making people follow the rules when no one is looking. (Well, maybe not for Bristol and Levi.)

As the listed social purposes of religion can be-and are-achieved by means other than religion, is Kushner proposing a secularized set of rituals with an amorphous deity as a mere figurehead? The Unitarian Univeralists are already there.


Tamerlane's Excursus
To reconcile the caring, moral God that Kushner desires with the capricious, vindictive God of the Old Testament (or the one making bad things happen today), Kushner must rely on convoluted logic, special pleading and baseless suppositions. Far too many of his arguments begin with "I'd like to believe..." or "I can't imagine..." Ultimately, Kushner can only achieve his goal by stripping God of His omnipotence, thereby making Him a less-than supreme being.

A much simpler explanation for all this is that no God exists either to create or to lament random suffering. When Kushner asks, "Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe?" I reply: yes, I can. In fact, I can accept that the entire universe happened for no particular reason.

That Kushner or any other thoughtful, compassionate, and intelligent person even needs a god perplexes me. If Kushner can be at peace with the randomness and meaninglessness of suffering, what's the value-add of an higher power? In any case, Kushner's "God" - powerless over nature, helpless in the face of human suffering-is hardly worthy of the title "god". After purging Him of all involvement, Kushner is left with little more than an Harvey to keep him company.


To Roberta and other searchers of meaning, I recommend Pema Chodron's When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times. From the dust jacket of my copy:

There is only one approach to suffering that is of lasting benefit, Pema teaches, and that approach involves moving toward painful situations with friendliness and curiosity, relaxing into the essential groundlessness of our entire situation. It is there, in the midst of chaos, that we can discover the truth and love that are indestructible.

If you are wary of Buddhism, try the stoics Epicticus or Marcus Aurelius, who have a similar outlook. Neither Buddhism nor Stoicism require a god to explain things. Neither needs to expend any energy explaining God.