The Allegory of the Orphanage

A father once had many children. Immediately after birth, the children were sent to an orphanage where they were alternately beaten and caressed, made sick and healed, starved and feasted. With the father’s consent, some of the children were allowed to die, so that those who remained would be more grateful for their lives.

The children were not allowed to have any direct contact with their father. The workers in the orphanage would often assure the children that their father was alive and that he loved them. When the children asked why their father never came to them in person, the workers insisted that the father wanted to teach his children to trust him. The workers also presented the children with some very old papers containing stories about their father, supposedly written by people who knew him. However, different workers gave the children different documents, many of which contradicted the others. Although every worker insisted that his own documents were genuine, all but one set were forgeries.

At the end of a number of years, a few children, who read and believed the genuine papers and who believed, in spite of their misery, that their father was alive and loved them, were allowed to go home to him, where they were showered with love and affection. All the rest of the children were transferred to another orphanage, much worse than the first, where they were tortured continually for the rest of their lives.

 Would you call this man a kind and loving father?

Plumpes Denken 1: the Sartorial Savior

The expression "Plumpes Denken" was used by Bertolt Brecht to describe a type of "crude thinking" that has no patience with obfuscation. I've been having fun lately applying such thinking to the Bible.

Reading Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary the other day, I came upon the following passage under "ghost":

"There is one insuperable obstacle to a belief in ghosts. A ghost never comes naked: he appears either in a winding-sheet or 'in his habit as he lived.' To believe in him, then, is to believe that not only have the dead the power to make themselves visible after there is nothing left of them, but that the same power inheres in textile fabrics."

That started a whole chain of thoughts related to religion. The first was this: was Jesus naked when he appeared to his disciples after his resurrection? The gospels are careful to emphasize that, when he rose again, he left behind the grave clothes.

At some point, he must've acquired an outfit because, when the disciples met him on the road to Emmaus, they didn't see anything out of the ordinary in his appearance. Perhaps he killed someone for his clothes, like the Terminator? Or perhaps his Heavenly Father made him a spiritual garment. After all, they couldn't have been normal clothes because Jesus was able to appear magically within locked rooms. Even if Jesus himself could teleport through the walls, it seems as if ordinary clothes would snag on something.

God and the Japanese Earthquake (Theodicy Shmeodicy Again)

I received an email from one of our church’s missionaries in Japan. She asked our church to pray that God would use the earthquake and tsunami to save the Japanese people.  I had heard such statements before, but for the first time it struck me how distasteful such a request is—especially for what it says about the missionary’s conception of God. I see at least three disturbing implications in the email concerning the nature of God:

1.       The Divine Rube Goldberg: God is apparently unable to simply communicate with individuals, offering them proof of His existence. Instead, like the elaborate contraptions envisioned by Rube Goldberg, tectonic plates and tsunamis are the best methods God has to get people’s attention. (Anytime you hear someone claim that “God works in mysterious ways,” they are referring to this kind of God.)

Of course, our missionary wouldn’t claim that God caused the earthquake to save people. (At least, I hope she wouldn’t), which brings us to the next conception of God implied by her request.

2.       The Divine FEMA: God doesn’t cause natural disasters; He just shows up afterward to help people get through them.  I don’t even think the missionary is aware that this conception of God is very different from that of the omnipotent creator God who controls the universe.  The dilemma seems unavoidable: either God can control earthquakes, and He chose to unleash one on Japan; or God cannot control earthquakes, and is therefore not omnipotent. (The latter is Harold Kushner’s view of God, as expressed in When Bad Things Happen to Good People.)

But the missionary didn’t just ask us to pray that God would comfort the suffering Japanese people; she asked that God would use the disaster to save them, which leads to the final conception of God.

3.       The Divine Ambulance Chaser: God takes advantage of people’s suffering, catching them in a moment of weakness to manipulate them into converting to His religion. This implication is what disturbed me most about the missionary’s email. It is the same as the preacher who uses a funeral to preach about salvation to the survivors. (I’m sorry to say that I have sat through such funerals.)

Whether or not our missionary believed that God was somehow involved in what happened in Japan, she revealed astonishing insensitivity by thinking about such a tragedy in terms of furthering her own religious agenda.