The most repellent part of religion—and its Achilles heel—is theodicy, the attempt to show why a wise, loving, and powerful God nevertheless permits evil and suffering. I never tire of seeing the mental contortions performed by the faithful to rationalize things like tsunamis, children with cancer, and the Holocaust. And now, after Christopher Hitchens’s recent diagnosis of esophageal cancer, the faithful are all over him like ugly on a frog.
The latest is Reverend Robert Barron, a priest of the Archdiocese of Chicago, spouting off on “Why Christians Should Pray for Christopher Hitchens” at CNN.com.
This was on my mind when word came out last week that Hitchens was suffering from esophageal cancer, a particularly aggressive and unforgiving form of the disease. I realize that certain believers couldn’t resist the temptation to see in this misfortune the avenging hand of God: the one who for so long blasphemed God was now getting his just reward.
But it’s always a very tricky business to interpret the purpose of the divine providence. After all, plenty of good, even saintly, people die prematurely from terrible diseases all the time, and lots of atheists and vile sinners live long prosperous lives before dying peacefully in their beds.
Hitchens’ disease is indeed ingredient in God’s providence, since at the very least it was permitted by the one whose wisdom “stretches from end to end mightily.”
But what it means and why it was allowed remain essentially opaque to us. Might it be an occasion for the famous atheist to reconsider his position? Perhaps. Might it be the means by which Hitchens comes to think more deeply about the ultimate meaning of things? Could be. Might it bring others to faith? Maybe. Might it have a significance that no one on the scene today could even in principle grasp? Probably. . .
. . . Christopher Hitchens is undoubtedly the enemy of Christianity—even of Christians—but he is also a child of God, loved into being and destined for eternal life. Therefore, followers of Jesus must pray for him and want what is best for him.
Now how does the good Rev. Barron know that God is provident? Or wise? Or that he let Hitchens get cancer when he could have prevented it?
Here are some alternative hypotheses that Barron, in his doubt, forgot to entertain:
- God doesn’t care so much about humanity, and doesn’t give a fig about Hitchens. So he doesn’t interfere.
- God isn’t wholly beneficent. Sometimes he’s malevolent and likes to see people suffer. This was Gloucester’s theory in King Lear:
“As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
They kill us for their sport.”
- God cares a lot, but he really can’t do anything about this stuff because he can’t stop disease.
- There isn’t a God; Hitchens’s disease is a result of uncontrolled cell growth, perhaps caused by a random mutation
Talk about dogmatic atheists! There’s nobody more dogmatic (and offensive) than someone who just knows that Hitchens’s illness is part of the plan of a loving and powerful God.
Can’t these people just shut up about this? Must they use someone’s misfortune as an excuse to bang on and on about their loving god and his Mysterious Plan?
It is funny how pray only cures things that have a % survival rate. I wish these people spent less time praying for an alleviation to suffering, and instead spent that time actually alleviating it.
Jerry, stop being such a considering-all-the-possibilities fundamentalist! If you were truly open-minded, you’d be open-minded about closed-mindedness, too.
Translation: I have no idea what it could mean, but I’m still absolutely convinced it means something, because that’s just a given.
I don’t get how these ghouls think Hitch might reconsider his position because of his cancer. What would be more comforting: to maintain that his condition is a simple biological occurrence with no intelligent force behind it? Or to decide that he’s sick because the Magic Skydaddy is trying to school him? Because if I got seriously ill, I’d rather see it as a biological matter than divine manipulation.
They are counting on Hitchens to be scared of death, and they are counting on that fear to override his rational impulses. “God is you’re only lifeline, take it!” They need Hitchens to be weak and afraid like them. Because deep down they are ashamed of themselves. They know they’re weak, and so they need to believe everyone else is just as weak as they are.
Of course, they drastically underestimate the emotional fortitude of atheists like Hitchens and drastically overestimate the appeal of the god they worship.
I mean, when you smoke and you get cancer, can you really even blame God? Its pretty self evident where it came from.
Ah. But who hooked him on the fags in the first place?
Barron is pathetic. No matter how angry it may make you, it is important that he yaps his nonsense enabling a beautifully reasoned rebuttal as you have done here so adroitly.
Barron, along with the Pope ™, are their own worst enemies. The times have changed, and they just don’t get it that their inanity is now recognized for what it is.
Growing up Catholic, I met jerks like Barron–egoistic, conceited, blinkered, cold, and generally the kind of person the rest of us have to drag on our backs so he does not starve.
Well said! You have a way with words.
“Must they have to use someone’s misfortune as an excuse to bang on and on about their loving god and his Mysterious Plan?”
Yes. This is what they do. “God does” [insert a bunch of horrible things here] “because he loves you.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MeSSwKffj9o]
30 to 75 seconds
Thanks for this George Carlin sketch. It’s great! A good antidote to the freaks who are exploiting Christopher Hitchens.
Ah, the humility of the religious. This could equally be an occasion for Reverend Robert Barron to reconsider his position.
Apparently it’s a tricky business “divining” gods purpose and his ways are opaque to us, except when we are crowing about the misfortune of someone who had the temerity to publicly point out how ridiculous and abhorrent our ideas actually are.
One might hope that the Almighty might bless the good reverend with a similar cause for reflection?
(This has become my standard answer to these pricks who assert that God makes people suffer for their supposed good.)
First off, where’s the fainting couch? I’m feeling kind of light headed because of this totally unexpected bit of vileness.
I am shocked, SHOCKED, I tell you. How could you of all people say something so viciously mean about any poor cute little frogs? My children will be crushed by this. They love all frogs and find your frog especially cute.
Good catch. “Ugly on a frog”: sir, how could you say such a thing!
It is time to organize a boycott of the book WEIT!!!!
No, no, don’t do that. I was MERELY using a phrase I once heard in Texas.
I HEART FROGS!
🙂
Ribbit ribbit!
I was going to say! Poison arrow frogs, ugly??!
that’s a relief – I heart Frogs too!
They hearth you right back, with all 3 chambers.
“atheists and vile sinners” – subtle conflation there
You beat me to it. Love the way he put those two together.
I wonder if a priest getting esophagal cancer would be the opportunity to repent for buggering kids, or a sign to aid prosecutions.
Nahhhh, they all ready believe in God and are saved by the Sacraments. No need to worry about little details such as behavior.
Pray for Christopher. In the dark, in private, where he can’t hear you.
I think the best theodicy can do, ultimately, is say: “We think God knows what he’s doing, but he doesn’t let us in on his plans”. Which has the advantage of being unfalsifiable, but the disadvantage that it isn’t really very satisfying to thoughtful people. If you can’t discern God’s purposes, then you can no longer place yourself inside the grand teleological narrative — at which point, a lot of the appeal of religion disappears.
I’m reminded of how Francis Collins wrote in The Language of God that he thinks God allowed his daughter to be raped so that Francis could learn from that experience.
“In my case I can see, albeit dimly, that my daughter’s rape was a challenge for me to try to learn the real meaning of forgiveness in a terribly wrenching circumstance.”
OK, I get how people try to salvage some good from a shitty situation, but that’s just sick. No, Francis, it wasn’t about you.
And no, Reverend, cancer is not God trying to reach an unbeliever. The universe doesn’t work like that.
The rapist goes to prison. Where does forgiveness enter the picture? If Collins needs emotional/psychological support, he needs to go to a therapist.
Christians are obsessive love/forgiveness junkies– constantly focusing on those two angles. This approach allows them to meddle as much as they can. They have no idea how disgusting they appear.
I can’t bear to see Collins’ glazed, Jesus-junkie-eyes and have to turn off TV interviews with him. Despicable person.
Christianity: ineffectively solving non-existent problems since time immemorial and expecting immense kudos for doing so.
That is so typical of religious ideas about women, they are just possessions of their men so if something bad happens to them it must be about the men. I wonder how his daughter feels about the idea that she got raped for her father’s benefit!
Second off.
That reveals Barron to be one of the particularly sick religious fucks. He conceeds that his God is responsible for cruelty and suffering.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people can allow themselves to be deluded for so long, and try so hard to maintain the delusion for themselves. The only “evidence” that christians have of there god is the bible and a few ancillary scraps of text. After examining that limited “evidence” what need is there to try and come up with any other reasons for why their god allows or causes so much suffering? It is clearly laid out in their bible that their god is a vindictive, jealous, cruel, barbaric, sadistic and completely unreasonable asshole. What more reason does he need to allow or cause suffering?
Theodicy is very much like turd polishing. As the Mythbusters have shown, you can polish a turd if you put enough thought and effort into it, and you can even get it to gleam. But, after all that effort you are still left with just a smelly old turd.
Cancer is clear example of how evolution works. Cells with genetic changes (aided by smoking, viruses, etc) that allow them to escape regulations on cell division outgrow and outnumber the normal cells, and invade and destroy healthy tissue. Of note, often more than one mutation is needed, which means neoplasia does not start until you rich a tipping point in accumulated mutations. This happens due to genetic drift in cell populations, as known to everyone with a basic familiarity with population genetics. It is no more “directed” mutating than the mutations powering the notorious bacterial flagellum.
As such, Rev Ghoul is pulling any “meaning” or “purpose” behind Hitch’s unfortunate illness out of his ass, in a most contemptible way.
“Might it be the means by which Hitchens comes to think more deeply about the ultimate meaning of things?”
Seriously: how smug, arrogant and patronising can one human be?
So the archbishop is saying “He hasn’t thought deeply about ‘the ultimate meaning of things’ because he’s come to different conclusions than I have?”
Thank you dear archbishop for gracing us with this travesty of humility! I’ll dedicate my next bowel movement to you!
Er, he’s only a priest, I guess. Same stupid clothing, different stupid title.
“But it’s always a very tricky business to interpret the purpose of the divine providence. After all, plenty of good, even saintly, people die prematurely from terrible diseases all the time, and lots of atheists and vile sinners live long prosperous lives before dying peacefully in their beds.”
The most honest part of the whole thing and the Right Rev. should have put a sock in it at that point.
As a survivor of a horrible accident, I can concur that there is nothing more offensive than people telling me that God’s purpose was involved and that I should be thankful that “He” saved me for whatever that purpose was…
ha! they would probably say the same for me – the accident that helped catapult me from Faith. Since I write about it and leaving Christianity … it is probably God allowing Satan to use me as a tool to hurry along the end times with all my blasphemy and honesty.
After all, plenty of good, even saintly, people die prematurely from terrible diseases all the time, and lots of atheists and vile sinners live long prosperous lives before dying peacefully in their beds.
Fuck you!
Such impoliteness!
Now, now. Considering this man’s profession, should we really have a problem with being associated with what he thinks of as “vile sinners?” I’d rather be compared to such people than those he considers good or “saintly.”
“After all, plenty of smart, even brilliant, people die prematurely from terrible diseases all the time, and lots of priests and vile pedophiles live long prosperous lives before dying peacefully in their beds.”
FIFH
Ditto from me.
Just goes to show how some people will use their religion to justify their vile hatefulness.
I may a unbeliever, but i would not wish cancer on my worst enemy. How dare he wish this kind of thing on us atheists, consider himself a good person and sleep at night. I don’t get it.
“Might it have a significance that no one on the scene today could even in principle grasp? Probably…”
Alright then, so shut up already!
Theodicy is religion at its silliest. The Francis Collins quote above is unreal.
Gore Vidal is almost 85.
Jerry: “There isn’t a God; Hitchens’s disease is a result of uncontrolled cell growth, perhaps caused by a random mutation”
Here’s how I understand it.
Hitchen’s disease is a result of uncontrolled cell growth, perhaps caused by a random mutation. And by that I mean, there is no God.
…And what surprise must we feel, when we find [God] a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out; much labour lost, many fruitless trials made; and a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages in the art of world-making. In such subjects, who can determine, where the truth; nay, who can conjecture where the probability lies, amidst a great number of hypotheses which may be proposed, and a still greater which may be imagined?
— Hume, of course.
(And if you think that was entertaining, you should really read the whole thing.)
This church employee is both sick and, in a sane world, liable for prosecution, making death threats like that (atheists and sinners are threatened to live a shorter life)!
I’ve never heard that one before. But in retrospect it is obvious how a religious person could be led to think like a psychopath. And once again we are shown how religion has neither logic nor morals to offer.
Theodicy is to modern religious thought what the four humors–black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood–are to contemporary medicine.
This is one reason many of the religious, including contemporary Christians are becoming non-theists, the latest being John Shelby Spong, former Episcopal Bishop of Newark.
Fortunately, no one person speaks for Christianity or any other religion theist, non-theist or otherwise.
Obviously, because each christian has a different god. You should also notice that each christian frames their delusion so that It is intended to have power over everyone.
Your comment is nothing more than an excuse.
Barron’s take on it is essentially rehashing this other jerk’s vile ramblings: http://blog.nj.com/njv_george_berkin/2010/07/god_is_great_to_christopher_hi.html
Rev. Barron sums up all the worst aspects of the faithful – his write-up makes me feel ill. I mentioned Hitchen’s illness to a few family members who are religious and I got similar in response or another angle; that his illness is the result of his smoking and drinking which results from his emptiness inside without God.
Simply because I care about these people, I bit my tongue when I replied.
It’s all doublethink… Only through faith is one able to balance to things that just don’t balance (reminiscent of Monty Python’s Holy Grail where they balanced a women with a duck).
It is also typical that atheists and sinners are grouped together in the Rev.s write-up and yet he goes on to label Hitchens (which could be spread out to all atheists) as an enemy, not only of Christianity, but also on a personal level to all those who follow Christ. Hmmm… fighting words for an apparently moral bunch hey? If their beliefs could stand-up against the most casual of debaters, fair enough… but such defence does nothing but prove that the good Rev. Barron is aware that his beliefs amount to no foundation.
Man cannot live on bread alone – so the nutters have to force feed him the bible… sigh…
Christians, please excuse your gods for being such pricks.
“I confess I began to wonder whether, despite his brassy atheism, Mr. Hitchens didn’t have a good deal of sensitivity to things religious.”
That sounds awfully close to the oft-repeated Christian statement that “deep down in their hearts atheists know that there is a god.”
Jerry is just too much of a gentleman. In my opinion, people like Barron deserve the strong arm of atheism:
“Barron, go fuck yourself!”
… Hitchens’ disease is indeed ingredient in God’s providence, since at the very least it was permitted by the one whose wisdom “stretches from end to end mightily.”
But what it means and why it was allowed remain essentially opaque to us. Might it be …
It must be really horrible to believe in a god. You can live your life as morally as a human possibly can trying to appease him, yet you never know what kind of shit the bastard’s going to pull on you. And you can never hope even to understand it.
But understand only the barest fundamentals of the element of chance and its effects on events, and suddenly there’s no longer a malevolent trickster out to get you. You can live freely, consciously, rationally minimizing the chances of bad things happening to you.
Atheism is free adulthood.
More divine providence BS – must be nice to have such an easy out? Whoever came up with that one should be proud. Anyway, god approves of someone’s contracting cancer because it’s all part of “His plan”. Miserable shit.
What’s all over him is the thing he knows quite a bit about — nature. But that doesn’t disprove the existence of God.