I tuned into some PBS program last night with a priest talking about god and the problem of evil and it all sounded more or less nonsensical. Or maybe it was making way too much sense: like somebody parsing a poem and draining all the life out of it although each particular was perfectly reasonable and logical. He said you might explain Auschwitz by saying that God takes the longer view and makes the apparent and timely evil into something unpredictably good in the long run. So what? Is that a comfort to anyone there but the Nazis? Another view the priest put forward is that God is an artist and like Seurat paints in little dots and humans can’t see the big picture only the dots. Again, so what? If the world is your dot, that’s what you need to pay attention to. Of course, then he had to read from the Book of Job, and don’t get me wrong, I love the grandeur of Job. It’s marvelous and moving and puts me in mind of what I loved about Terrence Malick’s “Tree of Life” particularly with its cosmic imagery and the questions that have bedeviled (begodded?) Westerners for centuries. But that cosmic view is the problem - what difference does it make? People like the priest always make it seem as if the point is to decide whether there’s a god or not, but while they work on figuring that out, life goes on and you might just as well do a crossword puzzle for entertainment. If that god has nothing to do with here and now and good and evil and such, then fine, let that god fool around with the universe and I’ll get on with whatever I’m about. The last story the priest told before I went back to watching something more entertaining was about William James, I think. How James looked around at all the things in his library and then looked at his dog and thought how the dog could see those things but never understand them. The priest’s obvious point was that we were the dog in God’s library. Well, I don’t know if James said that really, but I can imagine his dog thinking, “Poor Will, he’s too nose blind to smell the mouse trails at the corners of the room, he can’t just sit quietly, stare into the fire, and savor the moment but always has to be scratching at paper with his little stick, and when we go walking, he’s so slow and clumsy. But he tussles my ears and I love him.” This last is because the dog gets the important things about inter species relationships. I don’t pretend that this is some final word on the subject, it's just that what I tuned into seemed to ignore any particularly human reason for caring about the matter.
Gemstone: Hawk's Eye
