Birthday Blabber: Response to a friend's existential argument

There’s no avoiding talking about God every so often. Even with an atheist. Or maybe even especially with an atheist. I currently identify as agnostic, because my mom is Christian and my dad is an Atheist, and yet much of what I learned about what the Bible has to say, I learned from my dad, who loves a good story, and told them to me in riveting narrative even before I hit the first grade. (Well, I don’t think my dad is a dedicated atheist so much as just wary of religion.)

A friend of mine shared his opinion with me – one that I didn’t agree with, but it was worth taking the time to consider. I forget his exact opinion – which maybe he’ll repeat to me at some point or another – but it was either that God either does not exist, or is not inherently good or caring, for the following approximate logic: it is impossible for reconcile the state of the world as it stands, full of suffering and pain, with a God who is supposedly both omnipotent and compassionate, for such a God would have the power to end all misery and suffering and yet refuses to do so. I did not agree, and I felt I knew why, but it wasn’t exactly easy to put down into words. Simply put, I wasn’t quite prepared to answer the question at the time, and now that I’ve had a chance to think about it, I better understand my own position: my own personal answer isn’t brief, even if it isn’t particularly deep. I’ve been unhappy for most of my life, largely because of the way I have been treated by a great many people, and because of my own awkwardness of personality. The two fed on each other in a horribly vicious feedback loop from approximately ages 6 to 22. Unhappy or not, and agnostic or not, if pressed I would say that I do believe in God – but because of what I’ve been through, I’ve never quite been able to put my faith in a belief as simple as He Loves Me As One of His Beloved Children and If I Have Faith Then My Life Will Surely Be Filled With Blessings and Joy. Recent events have reminded me of a lot of pain, past and present. I was born with what blessings I have – and I have needed them to make it through what I’ve been through. If He’d blessed me with any less, I think I would have cracked by now.

But before I get into it, I’ll unhesitatingly offer up this disclaimer: I am no religious or Biblical scholar. I am not a philosopher, a psychologist, a theologian, or a metaphysicist and I don’t pretend to be. I haven't read Nietschze or Hobbes or Thomas Aquinas. I never heard of Kant until about two years ago. I haven't read Atlas Shrugged or Dante's Inferno. I know jack about the debate regarding free will versus determinism. Most of my education and free time was spent studying the quantifiable, the discrete, the theoretically rigorous, and not for any uppity sense of scientific supremacy over matters spiritual or emotional – it was just what I was good at, relatively speaking. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to suggest that anything I have to say here is born of anything more than my own experiences and quasi-philosophical hearsay. On some level, my understanding amounts to nothing more than, “Well, if it were me, this is how and why I would allow things to be as they are.” Also, my frequent references to “goodness” aren’t meant to imply that I see the world in terms of black and white, good and evil. It’s happened many times that two basically good people/societies/civilizations have been willing to murder each other over a difference of opinion, so while I do believe in relative good and relative evil, I’m going to refer to abstract “good” and “evil” for the sake of simplicity, or this writing is going to very quickly get entirely out of hand. So to my friend: with all that in mind, you can buy my explanation or not. Really, it matters little to me whether or not you do.

Still here? Wow, I’m surprised. Anyhow, here’s where I stand: there are things as important or more important in life than living in the absence of pain. For some people, always being happy and comfortable is all that’s important: a life free of pain and full of joy is the ultimate good, the ultimate desire, and that’s what heaven is about, and that’s what they hope to get through devotion, prayer and faith. Well, happiness is a wonderful thing, but it is not in itself good or evil. Evil people can be happy, too; in fact, a happy evil person living a life of pleasure is generally extremely bad news. So it’s not just all about happiness and pleasure. There are other people who believe that there are other things that matter more than just giddy joy and the absence of pain: justice, honor, loyalty, the greater good, etc. Although I am one of those people, I do not posit that such a stance naturally puts one on higher moral ground. The ranks of such people also include deluded martyrs, suicide bombers, fundamentalist terrorists, and various other people who believe that inflicting pain, death, and perpetrating indiscriminate oppression or murder on the innocent – or even the not-so-innocent - are all justified in the names of the things they count as being more important than happiness and a life free of pain. There is a venomously dangerous pride in assuming you know better than everyone else. I’m sure the Klansmen thought they were doing the right thing when they were lynching blacks in the South. I’m sure Eric Rudolph and James Kopp thought they were doing the right thing when they murdered doctors because they believe abortion is always wrong. So despite frequent references to “goodness,” this whole thought exercise is not about asserting any sort of moral superiority over anyone else.

For me to understand the world I live in, and the life I’ve led, it’s convenient for me to assume that there are things more important to God than for us to live life completely free of pain and sadness. As long as we’re talking about God, let’s just accept for the sake of argument that there is an afterlife, there is a Heaven, and that God lets good souls into heaven. If it were me, I would care about the quality of the souls who get into Heaven – the truth and depth of their goodness, compassion, and sincerity. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, so being a good person is about more than saying the right things and reciting the right devotions. God is omniscient; he sees hearts. You can pay all the lip service you want; I wouldn’t presume to guess at what motivates God, but well, mere words wouldn’t mean much to me. If I see a person doing good things, informed by wisdom and tempered with humility, I’ll believe he or she is a good person. If I see a person walk up to me and say, “I’m a good person. I’m such a good person. Believe me, I’m pure of heart. I’m good, I’m good, I’m soooo good. Holyholyholyholy Hosannah on the highest, amenamenamen.” I probably wouldn’t buy it. I’d find it unctuous.

How would you know you’ve been a good person? Talk is cheap. I think your faith and principles are most strongly demonstrated when something that is important to you is on the line, and you're being asked to put your money where your mouth is, when it could cost you personally to do so. If you don't believe in my assumption or simply cannot accept it even as an axiom for the sake of argument, check out now. I won't try to convert you, it's not my place and it's not my desire. I think that if He cares about the quality of one's heart and soul, in terms of who is worthy of Heaven, then bad things are allowed to happen to us in life because they are opportunities for us to see for ourselves who we really are. And when you see who you really are, it’s up to you to ignore it or decide whether you want to change or improve yourself. Calling it “Testing,” I think, is too harsh a word and it implies too much interference. It's more about us rising to the occasion, to demonstrate - not just claim or state or promise - that we are good people, that we strive to exhibit compassion, courage, fortitude, faith, perseverance, self-sacrifice, altruism, humility, determination, honor, and all the other good qualities that actually take effort to maintain when the going gets tough. Anyone can act like a good person when life is easy, pleasant, and devoid of pain. But it’s when life is being bad to you that being a good person entails the hardest self-sacrifice, effort, or commitment to principles. It is easy to give to others or to do the right thing when your fortunes are abundant. It is harder to sacrifice or show compassion when your heart is full of hurt, when you feel that the world has abandoned you, or when life’s fortunes have landed tails-up for you the last eighty times in a row. It’s harder to give the last dollar out of your pocket when it’s all you have to your name, or when the thirst for vengeance shouts loudly over any motivation to be constructive.

If God never allowed anything bad to happen to us, we'd be untested, untempered. We could all blithely say we were good and innocent, but there would be no value to it. If you want to take a Creationist's view of things, the last people on Earth who could have been excused for being ignorant and innocent and held wholly unaccountable for their actions and the quality of their sincerity, were Adam and Eve - and they just frakking blew it for all of us and for all time. If the world were a sweet, nice, pretty place totally free of travail, pain, and the neglect visited on you by other people, your principles would never become informed by wisdom or tried by hardship. Your goodness would be pure, perhaps, but it would also be vapid, flaccid, and weak. The first bad thing to happen to you would be a shock, and you wouldn’t know how to face it. And if nothing bad ever happened to anyone else either, you would never be asked to take up a shield and rush to the defense of loved ones or innocents.

Is all this onerous testing necessary? I’m not sure that it is, but I would offer this: I’ve been told by many people that I’ve done a lot of good in this life, and I’m still young. I’ve taught a lot of people, stood loyally by friends and strangers in pain, and generally tried to go the distance when nobody else (or not enough other people) steps up to the task. If you think I’m being uppity or taking credit for things I shouldn’t, it’s your right to think so. I’m not saying I’m a hero or anything. If you look on me with disdain, let me tell you – you aren’t the first, you won’t be the last, and I’ve gotten pretty used to it over the years. But if my life these past fifteen years had been happier, would I have tried as hard to help other people, or sacrifice any of my time or happiness to do the right thing? I don't know that I would have. I don’t know that I'm that good a person. Maybe God means for me to be unhappy because God knows I do more good for the people around me when I'm in that emotional state. It’s mostly only through my own loneliness, my own disappointments, and my own heartbreaks that I can recognize any of what other people go through. If I have compassion, that’s where it came from. I’ve heard people arguing philosophy – arguing against Utilitarianism by positing this particularly ridiculous thought exercise: if the world could be a utopia, conditioned on the existence of one poor, miserable, wretched child locked in a closet, in loneliness, pain, and absolute suffering, would it be worth it? I’ve never liked that example because it’s a loaded question. It picks at your guilt, a lower, base emotion, in an attempt to get you to reject a philosophical proposition wholesale. Change the perspective. Would you volunteer to be that poor child, tormented, abandoned, and utterly without love, so that the rest of the world might know bliss? Would you care about everyone else, friends or strangers, that much? Or would you pass the buck and say it’s not your responsibility, because Jesus did it for you? The question is unfair either way you ask it, but one tries to tweak you by appealing to your sense of guilt, the other asks how deeply you would be willing to sacrifice of your own happiness, how strongly you would be moved by compassion.

Enter free will. Sure, God is omniscient. He knows whether we're bad or good. If He were not omniscient, I would be tempted to say that He wouldn’t be qualified to pass Judgment. He gave us free will so that we could prove ourselves, so that we could choose to change our destinies - to become bad people from good, or become good people from bad. That free will is a gift to us, but it is also His way of ensuring that people who are actually good - not just people who pay lip-service to goodness - are deemed worthy. It is shown in the choices we make, in the actions we take, of the good and the harm that we do, in the judgments we pass on each other and the sincerity or hypocrisy of the ethical, moral, and human principles each of us professes to hold dear in the face of opposition, adversity, or reason. Without both free will and the existence of challenges and injustice in our environment, those of us who unknowingly hold misguided principles would never have the opportunity to be shown wrong, to have occasion to reevaluate our principles, or to change who we are. We evolve, mature, and adapt when life challenges us, when we are hurt, when we are forced to fight for the innocent, or whether and when the sight of our fellows' suffering moves us to heal or protect. And the way we react in these situations shows the truth in our hearts more brightly, more starkly, than any set of intellectualized or moralized debates or rationalizations. It is when we are in pain or under attack that we cower or rise, fight or flee. Only when tested can we know who we are, or change who we are. If life were only good, who would feel the need to change anything at all, let alone re-examine the core of who he or she is?

In that respect, most of the evil that exists in the world is caused by the free will of other human beings, many simply by being who they are and indulging their baser or more selfish desires at the cost of others. God allows them to be who they are, because they must be allowed to choose whether they wish to be in Heaven or not, whether they care about it or not. From those who either aren't worthy yet or don't care to become worthy, the consequences of their free will spill out onto other people, incidentally providing the harsh circumstances and provoking the reactions and precipitating the painful experiences that cause others to reflect upon who they truly are inside. In other words, the free will of bad people provides adversity by circumstance. They provide the struggles that move other people to demonstrate and discover who they are in the face of hostility and adversity. God doesn't have to go to any trouble to provide more testing. And as for those people who choose evil or amorality over goodness, their continued free will is necessary to allow any of them a chance at self-redemption.

But isn’t this an unnecessarily hard way to do things? As much as I’m loath to think it, I’d have to say no. If God just used his omnipotence to make all of that unnecessary and just force people to be good from the very beginning, then none of us would ever have the chance to prove ourselves, to improve ourselves, to temper ourselves into becoming wiser, more virtuous, more understanding beings. It's good to have a good heart - but what use is a nice coward? A sweet pushover? A moral nobody? A principled lethargic? How much use are any of these? These are good people. But useless people, who may be driven before a storm like so many hapless refugees scarcely capable of saving themselves, let alone each other. These are not navigators who will brave life's maelstroms on missions of compassion or expeditions for truth. These are not laborers who will build levees to hold back the tide. These are not healers who will seek out the wounded, the weary, nor teachers who will lead by example. I believe people usually become these things after seeing wrongs in the world and choosing to change them. If there were no wrongs, there would be no need for such people, which on the one hand would be pleasant, but it would offer fewer opportunities for individual growth. (Some people seem to like the sheep and shepherd metaphors a lot. If someone totally buys the supposition that God really wants us to be happy sheep, then I doubt my line of thinking would be very convincing to him or her.) If God is like a stern but loving parent, as many have suggested to me, He may be most pleased in the knowledge that his creations have potential - have the ability to make more of themselves and improve themselves. Why not? A parent may love his or her child unconditionally, but a parent’s pride comes from the child’s growth, doesn’t it? Maybe I wouldn’t know, I’m not a parent (and the way things are going, perhaps never will be). God could have created us fully formed as beings of goodness and strength - he could have made us all angels from the start. An act of perfect, static, and unchanging creation. But could it be that the greater feat of creation is to create something small, weak, and humble that is nonetheless, in itself, capable of creation? If God helps those who help themselves, then I would think that there is more dignity, grace, and honor in a soul that chooses to do the right thing, despite temptation, hardship, fatigue, or thanklessness than in one that does good only because it knows nothing else.

So to recapitulate in brief: I think the world is imperfect and that suffering exists because God gave us free will, and that was given to us because His concern is as much with the strength and goodness we choose to grow in our hearts as with our simple happiness in life. It is through the consequences of free will – our own and that of others – that we see our own true colors and have the opportunity to change them for better or worse. God can be omnipotent and compassionate at the same time if His desires go beyond merely providing us with a happy and painless life. It is only if one assumes that God’s compassion outweighs His valuation of other virtues that an omnipotent, compassionate God seems internally contradictory.


Well, whatever. I’m sure someone has said it all before, somewhere else. I just haven’t read it.


Also: this is for a limited time only. I generally prefer to write about secular things. Nothing seems to bring out the judgmental side in people as talking about spiritual matters, and the longer I leave this up here, the more likely it is that someone is going to want to tell me I’m wrong about something or other. Can I deal with it? Sure, but I wrote this as a birthday present to myself, mostly, and if it wasn’t clear yet, I’ve been through plenty of personal attacks already in life and there are probably more on the way. If someone wants to pick a fight with me, that’s fine… but I’d rather not do it over my birthday present to myself.