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Do Bad Things Happen to Good people ? Part 1 of
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From the book "Endless Love"
By Ravindra Svarupa das.
Submitted by Manoj
About five years ago, when we were having an altar installed in our new temple, the overseer from the marble company would regularly bring his seven-year-old son along to watch. The boy was very handsome, with jet-black hair and pale skin and long, dark eyelashes. He was well behaved and always seemed in good humor even though he could hardly walk at all. I never saw him take more than a few steps, leaning on a wall and straining his torso with an awkward twisting motion and then swinging forward a leg clamped into a large, clumsy brace.
The boy had been born crippled. While he was cheerful despite that, his father was not. His father was an angry man. "When that boy was born I stopped going to church," he told me once as he knelt on our altar putting grout between the marble slabs. "I never did anything bad enough to deserve this. Sure I'm not a saint, but I don't deserve this. And even if I did, what could he have done?"
The aggrieved father, an unsophisticated marble contractor, was raising a problem that has long preoccupied Western religious thinkers, so much so that it has created a special discipline called theodicy - a branch of theology concerned with justifying the ways of God to man. Theodicy deals with what is usually called "the problem of evil:' St. Augustine cast it into the form of a dilemma: "Either God cannot or God will not eliminate evil from the world. If He cannot, He is not all-powerful; it He will not, He
is not all-good:' This formulation makes the logic of the problem clear: to show that the existence of a world with evil in it is
compatible with the existence of a God who is both all-powerful and all-good. To deny either one of these attributes would easily explain evil, but orthodox theologians have always considered that unacceptable.
Those who find the problem of evil intractable (obstinate, inflexible) usually deny the existence of God outright rather than settle for a God limited either in power or goodness. Would such a finite being really qualify to be called "God"? Would He be worthy of our worship?
Although philosophers and theologians have left us a huge body of technical literature on the problem of evil, it is far from a theoretical concern. It is everybody's problem, sooner or later. Suffering is universal. But oddly enough, practically as widespread is the sufferer's feeling that he has been unfairly singled out. From millions comes the outraged cry: "Why me? What did I do to deserve this?"
It is for such People that Harold S. Kushner, a Massachusetts rabbi, has written his book 'When Bad things Happen to Good people'. It is a painfully honest treatment of what the author claims is the one theological issue that reaches folks "where they really care."
Kushner's book grew out of his personal pain; his testimony commands respect. He tells how his son was afflicted from infancy with progeria, a disease that brings on rapid aging, so that Kushner saw the boy grow bald and wrinkled, stooped and frail, until he died of old age in his fourteenth year. Kushner presents the victim's point of view, and he lets us hear the real voices of people in pain. In that stark light, the standard religious justifications for our misfortunes, which Kushner lays out one by one, do indeed seem like facile (superficial) verbal shuffles that don't take people's suffering seriously but simply try, however lamely, to get God off the hook.
Kushner effectively criticizes the standard answers handed out by priests, ministers, rabbis, and he offers instead his own radically unorthodox solution. His book has been a bestseller for months, and he has attracted a large and grateful following among Jews, Catholics, and Protestants. Indeed, the popularity of his view among members of America's mainstream churches and synagogues suggests something of a grassroots theological rebellion.
The most reprehensible (at fault) device of theodicy, in Kushner's view, is to remove the blame from God by putting it onto the sufferer, to explain suffering "by assuming that we deserve what we get, that somehow our misfortunes come as punishment for our sins."
To accept that bad things happen to us as God's punishment, Kushner says, may help us make sense of the world, give us a compelling reason to be good, and sustain our belief in an all-powerful and just Deity - yet it is not "religiously adequate!'
By "religiously adequate" Kushner means "comforting." Seeing suffering as a punishment for sin is not comforting, because it teaches people to blame themselves for their misfortunes, and so creates guilt, and it also "makes people hate God, even as it
makes them hate themselves."
Kushner tells us of a couple who blamed their teenage daughter's sudden death on their own failure to observe the prescribed fast on a Jewish holy day: "They sat there feeling that their daughter's death had been their fault; had they been less selfish and less lazy about the Yom Kippur fast some six months earlier, she might still be alive They sat there angry at God for having exacted His pound of flesh so strictly, but afraid to admit their anger for fear that He would punish them again. Life had hurt them and religion could not comfort them. Religion was making them feel worse!'
It is a virtue of Kushner's work to bring up anger at God up front, to talk at length about what few believers have had the courage to admit, even to themselves. Many people must be grateful that someone has recognized their real feelings and has dealt with them openly.
But the worst thing about the belief that our misdeeds cause our misfortunes, says Kushner, is that it doesn't even fit the facts. People do suffer ills they don't deserve; bad things happen to good people all the time Kushner adamantly maintains this. To the thousands who resent life's unfair treatment, who proclaim in outrage and indignation, "I didn't do anything to deserve this!" Kushner answers, comfortingly, "That's right, you didn't."
And Kushner is not talking about saints, about people who never do wrong. Rather, he wants to know "why ordinary people, nice friendly neighbors, neither extraordinarily good nor extraordinarily bad, should suddenly have to face the agony of pain and tragedy.... They are neither much better nor very much worse than most people we know; why should their lives be so much harder?"
Here, tapping into a great psychic underground of resentment, Kushner has found his following. He has been willing to openly acknowledge a vast repressed sense of betrayal, a great silenced accusation that leaks unwillingly from the hearts of the believers and wends its way up to the divine ear as the universal unvoiced antiprayer: "You didn't hold up Your end of the bargain!"
Kushner insists that the innocent suffer, and as conclusive proof he advances that grievance which has been the bane of judeo-Christian theodicy and which occasioned his own harrowing foray into the problem of evil: the suffering and death of children.
This is what drove the marble contractor to take up atheism, the usual response of those who feel God has failed them. But atheism is the response Kushner wants to prevent with his book. To restore the faith of those who have been spiritually devastated by misfortune. Kushner offers his own story of how he and his wife "managed to go on believing in God and in the world after we had been hurt."
Kushner is indeed convinced that the existence of a God both all-good and all-powerful is incompatible with the evils of our world; yet he wants us to go on believing in God. His conclusion, then, is simple: we can go on believing in God-but not in a God who is all-powerful. God is good, but there are limits to what He can do. God does not want us to suffer; He is as angry and upset at our misfortunes as we are But He is also helpless.
This is Kushner's credo. "I believe in God," he says, but - "I recognize His limitations:' As a result, Kushner tells us in relief,", I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose much when I blame God for these things. I can worship a God who hates suffering but cannot eliminate it more easily than I can worship a God who chooses to make children suffer and die, for whatever exalted reason."
It is not hard for me to put myself in the place of Kushner or the marble contractor: I have children of my own. I can even understand why, given the kind of religion they know, Kushner can worship only a finite deity, and the marble contractor can't bear to enter a church. Nevertheless, I don't have the problem with God that they do. When bad things happen, I don't find myself calling into question either His power or His goodness.
Of course, I am a devotee of Krsna; my religious convictions are founded upon the Vedic theism revealed in the Bhagavad-gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam. To espouse those convictions has been viewed by most normal Aniericans as a radical thing to do. But now we find that many normal Americans are willing to do something that, in its way, is more radical than what I've done They are abandoning one of the most basic and universal theistic tenets: they are becoming worshipers of God-the-not-almighty.
I want to tell you how we handle the problem of evil. If you, like so many others, are unsatisfied with the standard judeo-Christian theodicy, perhaps you will consider our Krsna conscious view before following Rabbi Kashner.
(To be continued ...)
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