Thirst and Suffering in Modern Western Society
Thirst and Suffering in Modern Western Society
By G. Apollo MacKenna
PREFACE - October 2006
How many times have you heard, “everything happens for a reason”? It’s normally understood to mean that some outcome, usually positive, explains why something negative occurred prior to it, a very comforting idea when faced with an otherwise inexplicable tragedy. The sufferer seeks to ameliorate pain by holding hope that he or she is not the victim of a cruel, random and meaningless universe. Whether the belief is held during the tragedy itself or in hindsight after a positive event deriving from the tragedy, when used this way, everything happening for a reason is a metaphysical concept. It implies that there is a fundamental and benevolent order to the universe wherein consequences become the reason events occur. It is a backwards causality. A rational person taking a logical, skeptical point of view won’t take as fact that there are silver linings behind every cloud, and clearly disagree that an assertion that clouds are caused by silver linings.
Taken out of it’s usual platitudinous context, everything happening for a reason becomes stating the obvious. Everything does happen for a reason; everything has a particular cause or set of causes. Our innate desire to understand the world better drives humanity to try to discover those causes. The sciences developed as tool to learn why things happen, and that causes precede events is part of the scientific order of the universe.
Consider for a moment the nature of time itself. Einstein told us that time is the 4th dimension. We experience time as a linear progression because of our limited perspective. Imagine living in a two dimensional universe, a plane, like a sheet of paper. That plane could move through a three dimensional universe and would experience the travel in a linear manner. If we could see through the 4th dimension, we would see that the future already exists. It brings into question the whole concept of one thing preceding and causing another. In a Euclidean world, point “A” on a line does not bring point “B” into existence simply because it comes before it in the particular perspective we take. Traveling on that line, it appears that “A” causes “B”. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.
In the philosophical debate between free will and determinism, the Einsteinian conception of time provides a scientific model by which a deterministic universe can be better understood. It is equally valid to say that the past determined the present as it is to say that the present determined the past because only one set of events would create the present reality as it currently exists. Furthermore, present events are occurring in order the create a future that we cannot see, but already exists.
In this essay, I endeavor to maintain a rational and logical point of view. while holding some presuppositions that I do not take the time to defend because they are not the subject of the essay. The first presupposition I have already mentioned, that we live in a deterministic universe. The second is that there is a force that created this universe. We have labeled this force “God”. This essay is not about defending a belief in God against those who would say that this belief is inconsistent with the rational and logical point of view I want to use.
Baba Ram Dass described three ways people come to believe that there is or might be a God. The first is through faith. Throughout history there have been learned beings, and they say there is a God, and by having faith that what these beings have said is true, the person believes as well. Faith can’t be defended with logic, although it easily attacked. The second way one can come to believe in God is through direct experience. Through meditation, prayer, drugs, or being thrown from a horse on a hot day, one has a transcendental experience, one experiences God first hand. The third way is through deduction. The person has a feeling that there must be more than this everyday reality and studies the words of the worlds religions, theologians, spiritualists, and concludes that they can’t all be nuts. Maybe there is a God; he or she doesn’t know for sure.
It’s for this last group that I direct any convincing I am trying to accomplish in this essay. The traditional view of God in almost every religion is that God can and does influence humanity directly. How can that be true looking at the world today? What kind of God allows the world to be how it is today? If everything happens for a reason, wouldn’t it be God determining those reasons? My essay looks for those reasons.
Main article written Winter, 1993
Revised 2006
I. The Question of Causality
Why do babies die? Why do people suffer? Why do wars continue? Why is the modern world a seemingly cruel and meaningless place offering few answers to life’s most important questions? Why is that we can travel to the moon, end diseases, connect the whole world electronically and yet still can’t overcome our tendency to fear, hate, kill and oppress one another?
These are tough questions to answer, particularly if one also holds a conviction in an all-powerful, ever-present, all-loving divine force. The question of why God allows evil to exist is not a new one. Although theologians of many religions have explained the tragedies as being caused by Satan, sin, karma, or the numerous weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity itself, only a few dare put the causality behind suffering into the hands of God. Putting the "fault" on God for modernity is challenging as it leads to the conclusion that if God created the likes of Hitler, then God cannot be truly benevolent. Even if one accepts this causality, one is then faced with the question of why. Why did God make Hitler?
A temporal perspective explains historic or personal tragedies in the context of our physical, empirical reality. One knows why babies die; the science of medicine attributes a cause of death. This scientific perspective is not restricted to the hard sciences; sociologists have explored at length the crisis of meaning in modernity, and use terms like anomie, disenchantment or differentiation to explain social and historical dynamics. The political scientist uses game theory and benefit analysis to explain why war has always been a part of human history. All these scientific answers are true and valid on a certain level, but for the individual who asks why, on a metaphysical level, life has been so full of tragedy for our species in this era, these scientific explanations offer little.
Answering these questions purely on the basis of their scientific causality is like answering the question of why we eat by saying that we eat because we put food in our mouths, chew, and swallow. We eat because we are hungry. Yet, if one looks at the act of eating alone, one would not know about hunger. It is the same with science. It can teach us all about the dynamics of how evil operates in the world, but it has not been able to answer the question of why evil exists in the first place.
II. God’s Plan
A disciple once asked his master, "How can l know if something is part of God's plan?" The master replied, "If it were not, it would not exist, not even for an instant."
Reconciling reality with an omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent God troubles many socially conscious . There are those who advise, "Fret not, it is part of the Divine Will, and God works in mysterious ways." For some, this simply not enough. Even if God's essence is unknowable, his ways are all around us. His ways are our ways, and through thoughtful examination, they can become known. It does not require a revelation, only insight and imagination. A sociological analysis of human history can reveal God’s plan within our troubled past and present.
On the surface, this kind of an examination might lead the objective analyst to conclude that God is a cruel, violent, and unjust force, handing out death and suffering to those who have prayed for help. By looking at world history over the last hundred years, it's easy to see how this could be the interpretation one would make. This is a short sighted way to look at the world. It's like saying, to return to the eating analogy, that teeth are violent and cruel because of what they do to food. No one would say this.
Teeth have their function, Without them, hunger could never be satisfied. Violence and human suffering serve a similar function as teeth: breaking things down.
A self-loving individual who puts himself through suffering can only be called irrational when the purpose of that suffering remains unknown. Think of the runner. The athlete experiences a great deal of pain, and does so in an act which, on the surface, reaps no reward. No one is observably more healthy after a single run; the benefits only show up over time. It is only because the runner knows the health benefits of their activity that she continues in the face of pain. Of course, some run for the sheer joy of running, but would they have found that joy if they hadn't been motivated by that initial desire to keep fit? Human existence is very much the same way, but we have yet to understand the benefits of our pain
III: Capitalism Science and Technology
I have been painting a picture that focuses on modernity's problems and not its advantages. This is an unfair portrait, for in modernity's advantages we can find the key to understanding the metaphysical purpose behind its problems. The modern age's greatest contribution to human development is science and technology. That frequently maligned church of our age, science, has awoken in us the awareness that we are God. Perhaps this isn't so readily apparent. Science has changed the whole way we look at the world; it has changed our mentality and eliminated boundaries. The belief that human capabilities are limited has been replaced by the idea that through science, anything can be accomplished. Science is miracles manifest. We have gone beyond manipulating our environment; we now actually create, control, and destroy it. Beyond just coexisting with the other life on this planet, genetics has allowed us to actually create life and alter it. The impact of our increased awareness of our own power has not yet, for the most part, transferred to a greater awareness of our oneness with Divinity, but it has eliminated the inferiority complex humanity suffered under for thousands of years. In previous ages, humanity was separated from the Gods by the incredible powers those gods were seen to hold. Now, similar powers are at our own disposal.
Technology is the handmaiden of science. Technology, like science, has become increasingly criticized for its negative societal impacts. Despite these valid criticisms, who can deny all the benefits that technology has brought us. Without it, you would not be reading these words right now. It is technology that has given us the tools to put our thoughts into words more easily read the words of others readily and inexpensively. More communication leads to greater intellectual stimulation and greater understanding of our world. Right now, each of us has the ability to pick up a telephone, instantly reach around the world, and find out what's going on from Bermuda to Bangladesh (2006 note: initial version written pre-internet). This is a good thing. Just as the advent of agriculture freed man's attention from survival and allowed him to build civilizations, technology has freed us from the boundaries of our own civilizations and allowed the free exchange of ideas on a global scale. Technology has brought about the Global Village; cultural exchange between peoples now happens at the speed of light. So then, if technology and science are such wonders, why did God cause them to develop first in only one part of the world? The west used these scientific and technological gifts to dominate and oppress the rest of the world and is the root of many conflicts to this day. Moreover, the west's own advancement in these fields led them to feel superior over the other cultures of the world, which in turn became a further justification for the many tragedies of imperialism. God planned it this way.
In order for science and technology to impact a society on a major level, the social organization of that society needs to be keyed to promoting economic development. The Caliphs of Islam held science in high regard during their many centuries of rule, but the way of life of the common people did not change much during that time. It is not science itself that creates technological progress. Only when science exists within social structures that promote its development does social change accompany scientific change. Capitalism is one such social system. Technology has always given its possessors a market advantage, but only under capitalism has the concept of gaining a market advantage been deemed so important. Without capitalism, the English landlords might have never driven the peasants off their lands, the wool industry might have never exploded, and the Industrial Revolution would have never happened.
Even with the premise that God is omnipotent, we can start looking for God’s influence on history by looking at religion’s impact on society. Both science and capitalism emerged from somewhat religious sources. Pre-modern scientists like Newton and Copernicus were deeply religious men who believed that understanding the universe meant understanding God. Capitalism emerged as the dominant economic system in the west in large part because of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and divine grace. They believed that you were one of God’s chosen or you weren’t, and there was no way to know for sure. Accumulation of personal wealth was seen as sure sign of God’s favor, and hence the medieval antipathy for avarice was set aside. A three century marriage between science and capitalism has brought us to where we are today, a world where what once seemed miraculous has become commonplace. This has not been achieved this without paying a penalty. Western society itself has become mechanized and we have lost a communal sense of meaning in life
IV: Calloused Hands
When a westerner really comes to know and appreciate the culture of one of the so-called non-developed nations, there comes a moment when he realizes that the peoples of these nations are, for the most part, much happier than the people in the west. Anomie is another of the invention of the west. The unceasing urge for personal validation through commercial success that has allowed the west to create incredible scientific and technological advancements has also left us wanting. There is never a sense of enough in western culture. The hunter-gatherers, rice farmers, shepherds, and fishermen of the Third World do not have the amenities of "comfortable" living the westerners deem as so important to happiness, yet, they are happy. Provided, of course, they are not starving. It's hard to be happy on an empty stomach.
Let us compare the human race to a single human body, If a body was faced with a task that would cause the part of the body that did the actual work to become sick, callused, and rough, would one wish that upon the whole body? Do the work with one part, and share the benefits upon completion. The rest of the body would then work to heal the damaged area. This is what has happened. Western culture has been humanity's "hands". It has built things and learned skills, and in the process, became callused and hard. Much of the rest of the world has remained technologically "backward". We can see an exchange occurring. The west brings its advanced technology to the rice farmer, increasing his yield and decreasing the risk of starvation. The east influences our culture through its philosophy and religion. Never before has the wisdom of Asia, Africa, and the Native Americans attracted as much attention in the West as it does today. They have something the West has lost in its rationalistic pursuits of wealth and scientific facts. Our culture senses this. We long for their sense of community, their sense of personal meaning in their lives, the ability to experience the joy of life itself. Each culture on this planet serves not only the needs of its individual members, but also fulfills a role in a greater planetary organism.
God has given the west science, and also giving us capitalism, brought the gifts of technology to the world. Inextricably linked to these gifts is the maladaisical, meaningless, desperate, cultural phenomenon we experience as the crises of modernity. To achieve these modem miracles of technology, the west needed to put aside its happiness for a while. Religion stayed with us, but as science became the dominant version of "truth", it put religion at a different, lower level. We broke God's first commandment to the Hebrews. We put the God of rationalism ahead of the theological God, Without empirical evidence, the very existence of God became questioned, God became an option, not an assumption,
This may sound like a condemnation of the rationally dominated mind set, To a certain extent, it is. However, in no way was their way of looking at the world "bad" or "wrong". Western culture's deviance from the comforting oneness of God was an absolutely essential part of the development of technology. It has been part of God's plan that the west should "sleep" for a while as it built the tools of humanity's great future. The time of sleeping is over. The twentieth century was about waking up,
V: Making the West Thirsty
The tum of the previous century was a time of great hope in western culture. The typical western man at that time believed in the God his church interpreted for him. There was very little direct experience of God of the eastern variety. This man had total faith in capitalism and science, The market and the scientist would cure all of the world's ails. To him, God obviously held the West in a special light. The technological, and what he saw as intellectual, artistic and cultural superiority of western society stood as proofs of this. This ethnocentric self-image needed to be torn down to wake the west up from its slumber and see the big holes in its own culture, To do this, God tore big holes in the fields of Europe.
World War One cast the first shadows of doubt over the West’s self-image of superiority. Western culture saw itself as above the “savages” of the rest of the world it had conquered, but the millions who died in the trenches of the most horrific war humanity had yet suffered showed the entire world that the West could be more savage than any tribesman. The war’s mechanization of conflict and the impersonal death of modern weapons reflected the mechanized and impersonal aspects of Western society.
Historians point to the opposing alliances, tensions in the colonies and unrest in the Balkans as the causes for WWI. These are all valid observations, but only explain the triggers of the war. Again, I believe you can see God’s plan in what was a horrific event by looking at what came afterwards. God was starting to undo what he had done with the West.
The period after the war saw another of the pillars of Western superiority begin to crack. With the hunger, chaos and uncertainty of the Great Depression, the West learned that capitalism was flawed. Doubt arose in the reverence for the market as some godlike force that would cure all in the end. The primacy of economic self interest, a necessary evil in creating the modern world, began to be replaced by a recognition that unchecked greed and avarice are in fact, detrimental to us all.
We now turn to God’s purpose for the one man who perpetrated more cruelty, inhumanity and hatred than any figure in history, Adolph Hitler. The idea that Hitler came from God makes most people absolutely cringe. The idea that there could be any justification to the Holocaust seems on the surface absolutely ludicrous. We are all familiar with the images. We all know the names: Aushwitz, Dachau, Treblinka. What happened to the ten million slaughtered at the hands of their fellow man remains the darkest moment in human history. Yet to say that God had nothing to do with these horrors would be to say that there are things outside of God's power. I do not accept this definition of Godhead. God was responsible for every victim killed in the gas chambers. If God had been caught, he would have stood trial at Nuremberg. Would have made for interesting testimony.
To understand God's purpose behind the Holocaust, we must understand how the world has changed since that time. Previous to WWII, racism was an acceptable ideology throughout the West. It was okay to hate someone because they were Jewish or Black or different. The Holocaust showed the world, and in particular Europe and the US, what happens when racism becomes a state ideology. The Holocaust discredited racism forever. The anti-Semite became equated with the NAZI which was equivalent to the enemy. The Jewish people suffered beyond measure during this period, but in doing so, they gained a state of their own, and the sympathy and tears of the entire world. Most importantly, they helped discredit a philosophy that had plagued humanity from the dawn of civilization, and although weakened, continues as a problem to this day.
In the USA, the Holocaust indirectly aided the African American's struggle to gain equal rights. The black soldiers who fought against Hitler knew they were fighting a racist regime. Returning home to the racist regimes of the American south, they sewed the seeds that would became the civil rights movement of the fifties.
Worldwide, there is now a sense that if racism becomes a national ideology, tragedies like the Holocaust will occur again. Although there are remnants of the past, it would be fair to say that, on the whole, racism has drastically declined since WWII. There are still a great many racists in the West; the lessons of the Holocaust haven't been learned overnight. The difference being that now racists are seen as deviants within the society, whereas before, they were accepted.
The book of Revelations speaks of numerous false prophets emerging before the second coming. Hitler was one of them. Indeed, fascism could easily be labeled a religion; it was certainly more than just a political system. The fascists attempted to address the problems of modernity and solve them. They offered their "believers" hope, a sense of community, and meaning to their lives, all attributes characteristically missing from modem society. Fascism was a religion very much suited to its time; a very appealing false prophecy. The racism of Hitler's brand of fascism discredited the whole movement altogether.
Let us now turn to finding God’s hand in the philosophical and cultural developments of the West. In my opinion, no work of art more poignantly portrays the anomic condition of modernity than Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Beckett shows us our culture waiting for God, and going mad at the same time. It is not that we are going mad because we are impatiently waiting for God. Instead, it is because we are going mad that we turn to God for help. Even more to the point, God has created a society that leaves individuals so unfulfilled that they are finally willing to give up four centuries of worshipping rationalism and turn inwards to look for the living God.
The chaos ,doubts, fears, and insecurities that have worked their way into the very fibers of our culture are like the loud noise of an alarm clock. They are telling us to wake up from our dream of materialism, ethnocentrism, and rationalism to a God and humanity’s higher purpose. The only way to the end the noise of a harsh alarm clock is to realize the period of dreams is over. One must awaken and consciously turn off the noise of the alarm. If one drifts back to sleep again, so be it. In the back of one's head, there is the knowledge that a new day has begun. We each will emerge into it and begin to enjoy it at our own pace. Some are still sleeping, and the noise of the alarm, the malaise of our time, will get louder and louder yet.
A glass of lemonade tastes much better to someone who is dying of thirst than to he who has just drank. There are those Westerners who are so stubborn and set in their ways that they need to be "dying of thirst", so to speak, before they will accept anything outside of their own realities. Creating that thirst has been the task of evil in modernity. This century has filled western society with a great spiritual and metaphysical thirst. It is a burning and consuming thirst. For several centuries, we have been working like crazy building a beautiful "garden" all around us. Now we have it. Food enough for all. Shade. Flowers. Humanity's garden. Being persitent creatures, we've taken the hoe of rationalism God gave us to build the garden and forgotten how to put it down. Moreover, we've forgotten that it was God who gave it to us in the first place. Now, many of us have been filled with such a thirst that we are finally realizing how to put the hoe aside, relax a while, and sip God's sweet lemonade.
That lemonade comes in many flavors, and none is inherently better than any other. For some the lemonade is the teachings of Jesus Christ. Others find it through meditation, love, a good book, their family, yoga, or communing with nature. However it comes, it fulfills the thirst.
As we have been so deep in the trap of the temporal reality, God has made our thirst particularly tortuous. How else can we learn to appreciate the flavor of the lemonade? It has never been denied from us, as individuals. Many Westerners have come to know its flavor very well. Yet, as a culture, God's plan for Western society did not involve hanging out in his living room and playing. We were out in the garden, working diligently with calloused hands and calloused hearts. Now it's time we came inside. We bring with us the fruits of our labor to share with our brothers from around the world. The Indians sat near to God, playing and hearing his words. They have much to teach us. The Chinese talked with their family in the kitchen. They have much to teach us about the value of a family. Each culture has been doing its own thing, and they all have something to teach. We must not be overly proud of the barrel of goodies we bring from the garden. We have forgotten things the others have not. Others will want to learn from us, and we are already teaching them, but we must help them not fall into the same trap we did. The garden is not the only reality. Jesus said: "Lest ye become as little children, thou shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." He was telling us that in our natural heaven-state, that is what we are: little children. Entering heaven is a matter of realizing this. Like little children sometimes do, we have let our fantasies become too real. We are playing "grown up." We tell ourselves that as "grown ups", we no longer need our parents. God laughs, and fills us with such a thirst that we can no longer maintain our illusion, and we surrender to our need for His lemonade.
I have tried to show that historical events can be analyzed in such a way that even the most destructive tragedies can be given meaning. The terrible spiritual condition of our society, which sociologists have come to call "anomie", doesn't provide an established meaning to existence. The question, "What is the meaning of life?", although cliche through over use, is the most important question anyone can ask.
Christianity is perhaps the finest code of ethics on the planet. Yet for Western culture, it has given few insights into what role a person should have in the world. Although it tells one how to live one's life, the teachings of Jesus Christ don't provide much in answering what life should be lived for. It doesn't answer the question: What is the meaning of life? The clergy have had their answers, dependent on time and setting. Life for the king, country, family, job, or this or that political cause have been some of their answers to this important question. How different from the Hindu, which defines a man's role in life quite neatly: The first twenty yeats of a man's life is for education, the second twenty for building a home and family, and the last twenty for spiritual development. I am including this here because as western society pulls itself out the garden it has been working in for so long, each individual will face the question of what to do now? At least under the old system, economic gain solved that question. Making money never ceased. Now, each of us will have to look within our own souls for Divine guidance to solve this question.
In any case, the events of this century need not be so meaningless. When we can understand that, taken as a whole, this century has been about making us thirsty, we can finally understand how God can love his children and make them suffer at the same time,
Let us continue the historical analysis. The next great tragedy of the twentieth century was the Cold War. Although the USA and the Soviet Union never fired a single shot at one another, it can be argued that no war in modern history had greater cultural and psychological effects than the Cold War. In particular, its effects on American culture was profound, and thus far, not very well recognized. The two generations born under the shadow of nuclear war experienced bomb drills, fallout shelters, the Cuban Missile Crisis, much rhetoric on both sides, including statements about burying grandchildren and evil empires. From the nightmares of death by nuclear attack came a generation willing to stand up against a war like no previous generation of Americans had ever done before. The peace movement was born. The second generation, my own, born under the shadow of the bomb was also profoundly effected by the Cold War, but in a much more "thirst building" way than the former. This generation grew up in a culture so familiar with the Cold War that nuclear war
became to be seen as inevitability. This fatalism bred a new kind of anomie, one epitomized by a statement I heard frequently growing up, “won’t matter after they drop the big one.” The American Dream was dealt a severe blow.
In looking at events closer and closer to the present day, it becomes more and more difficult to analyze from the theological determinist perspective I have been using. The long term impacts of these events are perhaps not yet known. Analysis and theory give way to prediction and hypothesis.
One very current tragedy that does lend itself to this kind of analysis is environmental destruction. It may seem pretty straightforward that environmental destruction is a product of pollutants and bad policy. However, to reiterate, nothing is outside of God's will. A certain amount of destruction has been allowed to occur so that humanity will begin to love the Earth once again. Certainly, this is already happening to a certain extent. The last fifteen years have seen an outpouring of environmental concern within the culture. Although attitudes are extremely difficult to measure, my observations have lead me to believe that recycling and other low level environmental actions are done out of a feeling of duty. It has become the individual's duty to his or her planet and community to do their part. It indicates a growing altruism in our culture. Would this expression of love for the planet and the community have arisen had not the destruction of the environment occurred in the first place?
What I have been trying to accomplish in this essay is to convince the reader that God's ways need not be so mysterious. Every moment of every day is pre-determined, and if we make the modest assumption that God is not crazy, some kind of understanding of God's plan can be achieved by looking at what has already past. Any event in human history can be analyzed as to how it helped build the world we have today, a world which is not as pointless and devoid of meaning as social scientists are so prone to conclude.
Anything can be figured out. Whether or not one is "right" or "wrong" in one's analysis is not as important as the fact that an answer is provided. To know with certainty the whole of God's plan is not the goal here. Instead, the goal is to ease the troubled mind of the socially conscious spiritual believer when he can find no method behind the madness of modernity. Whatever higher purpose for a disturbing world event that comes into the mind of a theological social observer, that purpose is "right" if it shows how, in the long run, our species benefits and evolves. It was God who put those thoughts into your head in the first place. They cannot be "wrong". This lesson will become more and more important in the near future. The times will become more and more chaotic and confusing as our cultural thirst becomes stronger and stronger. In the face of growing hate and fear worldwide, first have faith that God has his plan. Second, try to understand what that plan might be
. I recently accompanied my family on a skiing vacation to Whistler, British Columbia. In this playground of the well-to-do, I spent an evening roaming the streets with my camcorder in hand, and approached random people and recorded their answers to a single question: “What is the meaning of life?” Most of the young drunk skiers responded that it had something to do with beer. One guy said as he walked along, “The meaning of life is that there is no God. As my favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche once said, ‘God is dead and we have killed him.’ God is man made.” He paused for a moment and then continued, “There is no God. Otherwise, there wouldn't be starving children in Somalia, and I wouldn't have all these problems in my life." When troops were sent there a few weeks later, I though of that random encounter that snowy evening. Indeed, atheists often point to the very existence of suffering in the world to support their assertion for God‘s non-existence. Yes, God made children starve in Somalia. God did it for a reason, too. Finally, our over-inflated armies were put to humanitarian use. The farms of the United States could feed half the world if needed. God's purpose seems pretty clear.
Another benefit of the theological determinist philosophy is its usefulness in alleviating the difficulties of neurosis and depression on an individual level. My previous analogy of a glass of lemonade tasting better to the man dying of thirst came to one evening just as I was drifting off to sleep. I became instantly aware of how that single metaphor could explain the meaning behind the crisis of modernity, a dilemma that had been bothering me for some time. Moreover, it explained the purpose behind a very difficult period in my own life that I had recently come out of.
For many months before that, I had been beset by a disturbing period of neurotic angst. I wasn't sure if I could ever be happy again. I was feeling very alone, depressed, and desperate. Finally, one evening, I sat down and read, cover to cover, a inspirational book which had a profound impact on me years before as an adolescent. The evening I reread it, the words took on a new power and meaning for me. Afterwards, I was a renewed man. My faith in my oneness with a higher power had been restored and brought to even higher levels. The neurosis disappeared. I felt very "high" all of the time. God's message blew away the clouds of fear and guilt, and allowed the brilliant sunshine to pour into my soul. I had maintained this renewed feeling for several weeks when the lemonade metaphor I’ve used in this essay came to me, and I understood why God had afflicted me with the neurosis in the first place. The strong mental malady had driven me to a point of such thirst that the divinely inspired words of that book struck me like an ice-cold glass of the pink stuff strikes someone who crossed Death Valley without a canteen. I had become caught up in the garden of my everyday worldly existence, and neglected my spiritual development. God was calling me in from that garden.
Just as there is a plan for humanity as a whole, God has a plan for each and
every person on this planet. Whenever you face a difficulty in your life, don't look here and there for blame. It's nobody's fault. Certainly don't try too hard to find out how it's your own fault. You don't need the guilt. Understand that every barrier you I encounter came from God in his love for you. God has a lesson in every difficulty. If this lesson reveals something about your own nature that needs changing, then change it. Soon, these barriers no longer appear to be barriers. Instead, they become chapters in a textbook of life. God didn't put you here to suffer, but God does put suffering into lives for specific reasons.
Sometimes, it can be very difficult to figure out what these reasons might be. Sometimes, difficulties appear purely external. They seem to offer no lessons for the ones who are suffering. To return to my discussion of the Holocaust, what lesson was being taught to the victims? Can we say that God was teaching something to the ones in the boxcars being driven away to their deaths? Sometimes God's lessons are for the larger community. The needs of the many do indeed outweigh those of the few. Moreover, the human race is a single entity that only appears to be divided only when one observes it from the inside. The individual's suffering is the suffering of the whole. In this case, the suffering of those in the boxcars taught the world about the dangers of racism. When their souls are reborn in their next lifetimes, they will have learned something from the experience of their previous lifetimes. They will be born into a world where the philosophy that brought their deaths is slowly fading away. In the same way that time reveals the purpose of historical events, the lesson for individual tragedies may also take time to be revealed.
I think of the parents whose child is suffering from cancer. How can they be consoled? Would they not be more accepting of the idea that a random gene mutation caused the cancer as opposed to God? Perhaps this is the very lesson they, and all of us, need to learn, that even the most sad, tragic, incomprehensible losses of life are a product of God's will. If they can never overcome their grief to see this, the memory of the pain will remain. When they too are released from their bodies, and once again in the oneness of God, they will become aware that the loss of their child was a part of a greater plan. Perhaps they will suffer similarly in their next lifetime to deepen the learning.
Everyone has heard the saying that behind every cloud there is a silver lining. Normally, we only hear this when some sort of problem in our lives yields unexpected benefits. It goes beyond that. The whole reason the cloud exists is the silver lining. Seeing beyond the clouds can sometimes be difficult, but it is the first step in making those clouds disappear.
When I suffered under the weight of discontent and neurosis, I was being made thirsty by God so that I could taste his message more profoundly. Those who are happy and content in their lives react to the word of God quite calmly. They smile and say, "Oh, that's nice." For the individual in the throws of some personal crisis, the word of God will change their lives forever. Take the case of Saul of Tarsus. Do you think he was happy running around arresting all those early Christians? I don't think so. His was not the profession of a happy man. He undoubtedly had heard what these early disciples were saying, and perhaps, somewhere deep down, he agreed with it. Perhaps he was being torn apart inside by a conflict between his duty to protect his community, and his sympathy for the "dangerous" new sect from Palestine. Saul was a man "dying of thirst", so to speak. When God/ Christ came unto him and bade him to do his work, his condition before his conversion made the experience overpowering. Paul, filled with the God's power, then went out into the world and spoke with such conviction and profundity that Christianity remembers his words second only to the words of Christ himself.
The same process is operating in modern society. Western culture over the last few centuries has been acting much like Saul of Tarsus. Certain of our moral superiority, we have used our superior arms and power to oppress others. These others have a message for western culture. One that we once knew, but lost in our worship of rationality. The last 100 years have been a drawn out version of Saul being thrown from his horse. Our old identity of superiority has been smashed, just as Saul was humbled by the presence of God. Slowly, ever so slowly, in our confusion and sickness, our society is crying back to God, “What do you want from us!?”
By G. Apollo MacKenna
PREFACE - October 2006
How many times have you heard, “everything happens for a reason”? It’s normally understood to mean that some outcome, usually positive, explains why something negative occurred prior to it, a very comforting idea when faced with an otherwise inexplicable tragedy. The sufferer seeks to ameliorate pain by holding hope that he or she is not the victim of a cruel, random and meaningless universe. Whether the belief is held during the tragedy itself or in hindsight after a positive event deriving from the tragedy, when used this way, everything happening for a reason is a metaphysical concept. It implies that there is a fundamental and benevolent order to the universe wherein consequences become the reason events occur. It is a backwards causality. A rational person taking a logical, skeptical point of view won’t take as fact that there are silver linings behind every cloud, and clearly disagree that an assertion that clouds are caused by silver linings.
Taken out of it’s usual platitudinous context, everything happening for a reason becomes stating the obvious. Everything does happen for a reason; everything has a particular cause or set of causes. Our innate desire to understand the world better drives humanity to try to discover those causes. The sciences developed as tool to learn why things happen, and that causes precede events is part of the scientific order of the universe.
Consider for a moment the nature of time itself. Einstein told us that time is the 4th dimension. We experience time as a linear progression because of our limited perspective. Imagine living in a two dimensional universe, a plane, like a sheet of paper. That plane could move through a three dimensional universe and would experience the travel in a linear manner. If we could see through the 4th dimension, we would see that the future already exists. It brings into question the whole concept of one thing preceding and causing another. In a Euclidean world, point “A” on a line does not bring point “B” into existence simply because it comes before it in the particular perspective we take. Traveling on that line, it appears that “A” causes “B”. Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc.
In the philosophical debate between free will and determinism, the Einsteinian conception of time provides a scientific model by which a deterministic universe can be better understood. It is equally valid to say that the past determined the present as it is to say that the present determined the past because only one set of events would create the present reality as it currently exists. Furthermore, present events are occurring in order the create a future that we cannot see, but already exists.
In this essay, I endeavor to maintain a rational and logical point of view. while holding some presuppositions that I do not take the time to defend because they are not the subject of the essay. The first presupposition I have already mentioned, that we live in a deterministic universe. The second is that there is a force that created this universe. We have labeled this force “God”. This essay is not about defending a belief in God against those who would say that this belief is inconsistent with the rational and logical point of view I want to use.
Baba Ram Dass described three ways people come to believe that there is or might be a God. The first is through faith. Throughout history there have been learned beings, and they say there is a God, and by having faith that what these beings have said is true, the person believes as well. Faith can’t be defended with logic, although it easily attacked. The second way one can come to believe in God is through direct experience. Through meditation, prayer, drugs, or being thrown from a horse on a hot day, one has a transcendental experience, one experiences God first hand. The third way is through deduction. The person has a feeling that there must be more than this everyday reality and studies the words of the worlds religions, theologians, spiritualists, and concludes that they can’t all be nuts. Maybe there is a God; he or she doesn’t know for sure.
It’s for this last group that I direct any convincing I am trying to accomplish in this essay. The traditional view of God in almost every religion is that God can and does influence humanity directly. How can that be true looking at the world today? What kind of God allows the world to be how it is today? If everything happens for a reason, wouldn’t it be God determining those reasons? My essay looks for those reasons.
Main article written Winter, 1993
Revised 2006
I. The Question of Causality
Why do babies die? Why do people suffer? Why do wars continue? Why is the modern world a seemingly cruel and meaningless place offering few answers to life’s most important questions? Why is that we can travel to the moon, end diseases, connect the whole world electronically and yet still can’t overcome our tendency to fear, hate, kill and oppress one another?
These are tough questions to answer, particularly if one also holds a conviction in an all-powerful, ever-present, all-loving divine force. The question of why God allows evil to exist is not a new one. Although theologians of many religions have explained the tragedies as being caused by Satan, sin, karma, or the numerous weaknesses and shortcomings of humanity itself, only a few dare put the causality behind suffering into the hands of God. Putting the "fault" on God for modernity is challenging as it leads to the conclusion that if God created the likes of Hitler, then God cannot be truly benevolent. Even if one accepts this causality, one is then faced with the question of why. Why did God make Hitler?
A temporal perspective explains historic or personal tragedies in the context of our physical, empirical reality. One knows why babies die; the science of medicine attributes a cause of death. This scientific perspective is not restricted to the hard sciences; sociologists have explored at length the crisis of meaning in modernity, and use terms like anomie, disenchantment or differentiation to explain social and historical dynamics. The political scientist uses game theory and benefit analysis to explain why war has always been a part of human history. All these scientific answers are true and valid on a certain level, but for the individual who asks why, on a metaphysical level, life has been so full of tragedy for our species in this era, these scientific explanations offer little.
Answering these questions purely on the basis of their scientific causality is like answering the question of why we eat by saying that we eat because we put food in our mouths, chew, and swallow. We eat because we are hungry. Yet, if one looks at the act of eating alone, one would not know about hunger. It is the same with science. It can teach us all about the dynamics of how evil operates in the world, but it has not been able to answer the question of why evil exists in the first place.
II. God’s Plan
A disciple once asked his master, "How can l know if something is part of God's plan?" The master replied, "If it were not, it would not exist, not even for an instant."
Reconciling reality with an omnipotent, omnipresent and omnibenevolent God troubles many socially conscious . There are those who advise, "Fret not, it is part of the Divine Will, and God works in mysterious ways." For some, this simply not enough. Even if God's essence is unknowable, his ways are all around us. His ways are our ways, and through thoughtful examination, they can become known. It does not require a revelation, only insight and imagination. A sociological analysis of human history can reveal God’s plan within our troubled past and present.
On the surface, this kind of an examination might lead the objective analyst to conclude that God is a cruel, violent, and unjust force, handing out death and suffering to those who have prayed for help. By looking at world history over the last hundred years, it's easy to see how this could be the interpretation one would make. This is a short sighted way to look at the world. It's like saying, to return to the eating analogy, that teeth are violent and cruel because of what they do to food. No one would say this.
Teeth have their function, Without them, hunger could never be satisfied. Violence and human suffering serve a similar function as teeth: breaking things down.
A self-loving individual who puts himself through suffering can only be called irrational when the purpose of that suffering remains unknown. Think of the runner. The athlete experiences a great deal of pain, and does so in an act which, on the surface, reaps no reward. No one is observably more healthy after a single run; the benefits only show up over time. It is only because the runner knows the health benefits of their activity that she continues in the face of pain. Of course, some run for the sheer joy of running, but would they have found that joy if they hadn't been motivated by that initial desire to keep fit? Human existence is very much the same way, but we have yet to understand the benefits of our pain
III: Capitalism Science and Technology
I have been painting a picture that focuses on modernity's problems and not its advantages. This is an unfair portrait, for in modernity's advantages we can find the key to understanding the metaphysical purpose behind its problems. The modern age's greatest contribution to human development is science and technology. That frequently maligned church of our age, science, has awoken in us the awareness that we are God. Perhaps this isn't so readily apparent. Science has changed the whole way we look at the world; it has changed our mentality and eliminated boundaries. The belief that human capabilities are limited has been replaced by the idea that through science, anything can be accomplished. Science is miracles manifest. We have gone beyond manipulating our environment; we now actually create, control, and destroy it. Beyond just coexisting with the other life on this planet, genetics has allowed us to actually create life and alter it. The impact of our increased awareness of our own power has not yet, for the most part, transferred to a greater awareness of our oneness with Divinity, but it has eliminated the inferiority complex humanity suffered under for thousands of years. In previous ages, humanity was separated from the Gods by the incredible powers those gods were seen to hold. Now, similar powers are at our own disposal.
Technology is the handmaiden of science. Technology, like science, has become increasingly criticized for its negative societal impacts. Despite these valid criticisms, who can deny all the benefits that technology has brought us. Without it, you would not be reading these words right now. It is technology that has given us the tools to put our thoughts into words more easily read the words of others readily and inexpensively. More communication leads to greater intellectual stimulation and greater understanding of our world. Right now, each of us has the ability to pick up a telephone, instantly reach around the world, and find out what's going on from Bermuda to Bangladesh (2006 note: initial version written pre-internet). This is a good thing. Just as the advent of agriculture freed man's attention from survival and allowed him to build civilizations, technology has freed us from the boundaries of our own civilizations and allowed the free exchange of ideas on a global scale. Technology has brought about the Global Village; cultural exchange between peoples now happens at the speed of light. So then, if technology and science are such wonders, why did God cause them to develop first in only one part of the world? The west used these scientific and technological gifts to dominate and oppress the rest of the world and is the root of many conflicts to this day. Moreover, the west's own advancement in these fields led them to feel superior over the other cultures of the world, which in turn became a further justification for the many tragedies of imperialism. God planned it this way.
In order for science and technology to impact a society on a major level, the social organization of that society needs to be keyed to promoting economic development. The Caliphs of Islam held science in high regard during their many centuries of rule, but the way of life of the common people did not change much during that time. It is not science itself that creates technological progress. Only when science exists within social structures that promote its development does social change accompany scientific change. Capitalism is one such social system. Technology has always given its possessors a market advantage, but only under capitalism has the concept of gaining a market advantage been deemed so important. Without capitalism, the English landlords might have never driven the peasants off their lands, the wool industry might have never exploded, and the Industrial Revolution would have never happened.
Even with the premise that God is omnipotent, we can start looking for God’s influence on history by looking at religion’s impact on society. Both science and capitalism emerged from somewhat religious sources. Pre-modern scientists like Newton and Copernicus were deeply religious men who believed that understanding the universe meant understanding God. Capitalism emerged as the dominant economic system in the west in large part because of the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and divine grace. They believed that you were one of God’s chosen or you weren’t, and there was no way to know for sure. Accumulation of personal wealth was seen as sure sign of God’s favor, and hence the medieval antipathy for avarice was set aside. A three century marriage between science and capitalism has brought us to where we are today, a world where what once seemed miraculous has become commonplace. This has not been achieved this without paying a penalty. Western society itself has become mechanized and we have lost a communal sense of meaning in life
IV: Calloused Hands
When a westerner really comes to know and appreciate the culture of one of the so-called non-developed nations, there comes a moment when he realizes that the peoples of these nations are, for the most part, much happier than the people in the west. Anomie is another of the invention of the west. The unceasing urge for personal validation through commercial success that has allowed the west to create incredible scientific and technological advancements has also left us wanting. There is never a sense of enough in western culture. The hunter-gatherers, rice farmers, shepherds, and fishermen of the Third World do not have the amenities of "comfortable" living the westerners deem as so important to happiness, yet, they are happy. Provided, of course, they are not starving. It's hard to be happy on an empty stomach.
Let us compare the human race to a single human body, If a body was faced with a task that would cause the part of the body that did the actual work to become sick, callused, and rough, would one wish that upon the whole body? Do the work with one part, and share the benefits upon completion. The rest of the body would then work to heal the damaged area. This is what has happened. Western culture has been humanity's "hands". It has built things and learned skills, and in the process, became callused and hard. Much of the rest of the world has remained technologically "backward". We can see an exchange occurring. The west brings its advanced technology to the rice farmer, increasing his yield and decreasing the risk of starvation. The east influences our culture through its philosophy and religion. Never before has the wisdom of Asia, Africa, and the Native Americans attracted as much attention in the West as it does today. They have something the West has lost in its rationalistic pursuits of wealth and scientific facts. Our culture senses this. We long for their sense of community, their sense of personal meaning in their lives, the ability to experience the joy of life itself. Each culture on this planet serves not only the needs of its individual members, but also fulfills a role in a greater planetary organism.
God has given the west science, and also giving us capitalism, brought the gifts of technology to the world. Inextricably linked to these gifts is the maladaisical, meaningless, desperate, cultural phenomenon we experience as the crises of modernity. To achieve these modem miracles of technology, the west needed to put aside its happiness for a while. Religion stayed with us, but as science became the dominant version of "truth", it put religion at a different, lower level. We broke God's first commandment to the Hebrews. We put the God of rationalism ahead of the theological God, Without empirical evidence, the very existence of God became questioned, God became an option, not an assumption,
This may sound like a condemnation of the rationally dominated mind set, To a certain extent, it is. However, in no way was their way of looking at the world "bad" or "wrong". Western culture's deviance from the comforting oneness of God was an absolutely essential part of the development of technology. It has been part of God's plan that the west should "sleep" for a while as it built the tools of humanity's great future. The time of sleeping is over. The twentieth century was about waking up,
V: Making the West Thirsty
The tum of the previous century was a time of great hope in western culture. The typical western man at that time believed in the God his church interpreted for him. There was very little direct experience of God of the eastern variety. This man had total faith in capitalism and science, The market and the scientist would cure all of the world's ails. To him, God obviously held the West in a special light. The technological, and what he saw as intellectual, artistic and cultural superiority of western society stood as proofs of this. This ethnocentric self-image needed to be torn down to wake the west up from its slumber and see the big holes in its own culture, To do this, God tore big holes in the fields of Europe.
World War One cast the first shadows of doubt over the West’s self-image of superiority. Western culture saw itself as above the “savages” of the rest of the world it had conquered, but the millions who died in the trenches of the most horrific war humanity had yet suffered showed the entire world that the West could be more savage than any tribesman. The war’s mechanization of conflict and the impersonal death of modern weapons reflected the mechanized and impersonal aspects of Western society.
Historians point to the opposing alliances, tensions in the colonies and unrest in the Balkans as the causes for WWI. These are all valid observations, but only explain the triggers of the war. Again, I believe you can see God’s plan in what was a horrific event by looking at what came afterwards. God was starting to undo what he had done with the West.
The period after the war saw another of the pillars of Western superiority begin to crack. With the hunger, chaos and uncertainty of the Great Depression, the West learned that capitalism was flawed. Doubt arose in the reverence for the market as some godlike force that would cure all in the end. The primacy of economic self interest, a necessary evil in creating the modern world, began to be replaced by a recognition that unchecked greed and avarice are in fact, detrimental to us all.
We now turn to God’s purpose for the one man who perpetrated more cruelty, inhumanity and hatred than any figure in history, Adolph Hitler. The idea that Hitler came from God makes most people absolutely cringe. The idea that there could be any justification to the Holocaust seems on the surface absolutely ludicrous. We are all familiar with the images. We all know the names: Aushwitz, Dachau, Treblinka. What happened to the ten million slaughtered at the hands of their fellow man remains the darkest moment in human history. Yet to say that God had nothing to do with these horrors would be to say that there are things outside of God's power. I do not accept this definition of Godhead. God was responsible for every victim killed in the gas chambers. If God had been caught, he would have stood trial at Nuremberg. Would have made for interesting testimony.
To understand God's purpose behind the Holocaust, we must understand how the world has changed since that time. Previous to WWII, racism was an acceptable ideology throughout the West. It was okay to hate someone because they were Jewish or Black or different. The Holocaust showed the world, and in particular Europe and the US, what happens when racism becomes a state ideology. The Holocaust discredited racism forever. The anti-Semite became equated with the NAZI which was equivalent to the enemy. The Jewish people suffered beyond measure during this period, but in doing so, they gained a state of their own, and the sympathy and tears of the entire world. Most importantly, they helped discredit a philosophy that had plagued humanity from the dawn of civilization, and although weakened, continues as a problem to this day.
In the USA, the Holocaust indirectly aided the African American's struggle to gain equal rights. The black soldiers who fought against Hitler knew they were fighting a racist regime. Returning home to the racist regimes of the American south, they sewed the seeds that would became the civil rights movement of the fifties.
Worldwide, there is now a sense that if racism becomes a national ideology, tragedies like the Holocaust will occur again. Although there are remnants of the past, it would be fair to say that, on the whole, racism has drastically declined since WWII. There are still a great many racists in the West; the lessons of the Holocaust haven't been learned overnight. The difference being that now racists are seen as deviants within the society, whereas before, they were accepted.
The book of Revelations speaks of numerous false prophets emerging before the second coming. Hitler was one of them. Indeed, fascism could easily be labeled a religion; it was certainly more than just a political system. The fascists attempted to address the problems of modernity and solve them. They offered their "believers" hope, a sense of community, and meaning to their lives, all attributes characteristically missing from modem society. Fascism was a religion very much suited to its time; a very appealing false prophecy. The racism of Hitler's brand of fascism discredited the whole movement altogether.
Let us now turn to finding God’s hand in the philosophical and cultural developments of the West. In my opinion, no work of art more poignantly portrays the anomic condition of modernity than Beckett's Waiting For Godot. Beckett shows us our culture waiting for God, and going mad at the same time. It is not that we are going mad because we are impatiently waiting for God. Instead, it is because we are going mad that we turn to God for help. Even more to the point, God has created a society that leaves individuals so unfulfilled that they are finally willing to give up four centuries of worshipping rationalism and turn inwards to look for the living God.
The chaos ,doubts, fears, and insecurities that have worked their way into the very fibers of our culture are like the loud noise of an alarm clock. They are telling us to wake up from our dream of materialism, ethnocentrism, and rationalism to a God and humanity’s higher purpose. The only way to the end the noise of a harsh alarm clock is to realize the period of dreams is over. One must awaken and consciously turn off the noise of the alarm. If one drifts back to sleep again, so be it. In the back of one's head, there is the knowledge that a new day has begun. We each will emerge into it and begin to enjoy it at our own pace. Some are still sleeping, and the noise of the alarm, the malaise of our time, will get louder and louder yet.
A glass of lemonade tastes much better to someone who is dying of thirst than to he who has just drank. There are those Westerners who are so stubborn and set in their ways that they need to be "dying of thirst", so to speak, before they will accept anything outside of their own realities. Creating that thirst has been the task of evil in modernity. This century has filled western society with a great spiritual and metaphysical thirst. It is a burning and consuming thirst. For several centuries, we have been working like crazy building a beautiful "garden" all around us. Now we have it. Food enough for all. Shade. Flowers. Humanity's garden. Being persitent creatures, we've taken the hoe of rationalism God gave us to build the garden and forgotten how to put it down. Moreover, we've forgotten that it was God who gave it to us in the first place. Now, many of us have been filled with such a thirst that we are finally realizing how to put the hoe aside, relax a while, and sip God's sweet lemonade.
That lemonade comes in many flavors, and none is inherently better than any other. For some the lemonade is the teachings of Jesus Christ. Others find it through meditation, love, a good book, their family, yoga, or communing with nature. However it comes, it fulfills the thirst.
As we have been so deep in the trap of the temporal reality, God has made our thirst particularly tortuous. How else can we learn to appreciate the flavor of the lemonade? It has never been denied from us, as individuals. Many Westerners have come to know its flavor very well. Yet, as a culture, God's plan for Western society did not involve hanging out in his living room and playing. We were out in the garden, working diligently with calloused hands and calloused hearts. Now it's time we came inside. We bring with us the fruits of our labor to share with our brothers from around the world. The Indians sat near to God, playing and hearing his words. They have much to teach us. The Chinese talked with their family in the kitchen. They have much to teach us about the value of a family. Each culture has been doing its own thing, and they all have something to teach. We must not be overly proud of the barrel of goodies we bring from the garden. We have forgotten things the others have not. Others will want to learn from us, and we are already teaching them, but we must help them not fall into the same trap we did. The garden is not the only reality. Jesus said: "Lest ye become as little children, thou shall not enter the kingdom of heaven." He was telling us that in our natural heaven-state, that is what we are: little children. Entering heaven is a matter of realizing this. Like little children sometimes do, we have let our fantasies become too real. We are playing "grown up." We tell ourselves that as "grown ups", we no longer need our parents. God laughs, and fills us with such a thirst that we can no longer maintain our illusion, and we surrender to our need for His lemonade.
I have tried to show that historical events can be analyzed in such a way that even the most destructive tragedies can be given meaning. The terrible spiritual condition of our society, which sociologists have come to call "anomie", doesn't provide an established meaning to existence. The question, "What is the meaning of life?", although cliche through over use, is the most important question anyone can ask.
Christianity is perhaps the finest code of ethics on the planet. Yet for Western culture, it has given few insights into what role a person should have in the world. Although it tells one how to live one's life, the teachings of Jesus Christ don't provide much in answering what life should be lived for. It doesn't answer the question: What is the meaning of life? The clergy have had their answers, dependent on time and setting. Life for the king, country, family, job, or this or that political cause have been some of their answers to this important question. How different from the Hindu, which defines a man's role in life quite neatly: The first twenty yeats of a man's life is for education, the second twenty for building a home and family, and the last twenty for spiritual development. I am including this here because as western society pulls itself out the garden it has been working in for so long, each individual will face the question of what to do now? At least under the old system, economic gain solved that question. Making money never ceased. Now, each of us will have to look within our own souls for Divine guidance to solve this question.
In any case, the events of this century need not be so meaningless. When we can understand that, taken as a whole, this century has been about making us thirsty, we can finally understand how God can love his children and make them suffer at the same time,
Let us continue the historical analysis. The next great tragedy of the twentieth century was the Cold War. Although the USA and the Soviet Union never fired a single shot at one another, it can be argued that no war in modern history had greater cultural and psychological effects than the Cold War. In particular, its effects on American culture was profound, and thus far, not very well recognized. The two generations born under the shadow of nuclear war experienced bomb drills, fallout shelters, the Cuban Missile Crisis, much rhetoric on both sides, including statements about burying grandchildren and evil empires. From the nightmares of death by nuclear attack came a generation willing to stand up against a war like no previous generation of Americans had ever done before. The peace movement was born. The second generation, my own, born under the shadow of the bomb was also profoundly effected by the Cold War, but in a much more "thirst building" way than the former. This generation grew up in a culture so familiar with the Cold War that nuclear war
became to be seen as inevitability. This fatalism bred a new kind of anomie, one epitomized by a statement I heard frequently growing up, “won’t matter after they drop the big one.” The American Dream was dealt a severe blow.
In looking at events closer and closer to the present day, it becomes more and more difficult to analyze from the theological determinist perspective I have been using. The long term impacts of these events are perhaps not yet known. Analysis and theory give way to prediction and hypothesis.
One very current tragedy that does lend itself to this kind of analysis is environmental destruction. It may seem pretty straightforward that environmental destruction is a product of pollutants and bad policy. However, to reiterate, nothing is outside of God's will. A certain amount of destruction has been allowed to occur so that humanity will begin to love the Earth once again. Certainly, this is already happening to a certain extent. The last fifteen years have seen an outpouring of environmental concern within the culture. Although attitudes are extremely difficult to measure, my observations have lead me to believe that recycling and other low level environmental actions are done out of a feeling of duty. It has become the individual's duty to his or her planet and community to do their part. It indicates a growing altruism in our culture. Would this expression of love for the planet and the community have arisen had not the destruction of the environment occurred in the first place?
What I have been trying to accomplish in this essay is to convince the reader that God's ways need not be so mysterious. Every moment of every day is pre-determined, and if we make the modest assumption that God is not crazy, some kind of understanding of God's plan can be achieved by looking at what has already past. Any event in human history can be analyzed as to how it helped build the world we have today, a world which is not as pointless and devoid of meaning as social scientists are so prone to conclude.
Anything can be figured out. Whether or not one is "right" or "wrong" in one's analysis is not as important as the fact that an answer is provided. To know with certainty the whole of God's plan is not the goal here. Instead, the goal is to ease the troubled mind of the socially conscious spiritual believer when he can find no method behind the madness of modernity. Whatever higher purpose for a disturbing world event that comes into the mind of a theological social observer, that purpose is "right" if it shows how, in the long run, our species benefits and evolves. It was God who put those thoughts into your head in the first place. They cannot be "wrong". This lesson will become more and more important in the near future. The times will become more and more chaotic and confusing as our cultural thirst becomes stronger and stronger. In the face of growing hate and fear worldwide, first have faith that God has his plan. Second, try to understand what that plan might be
. I recently accompanied my family on a skiing vacation to Whistler, British Columbia. In this playground of the well-to-do, I spent an evening roaming the streets with my camcorder in hand, and approached random people and recorded their answers to a single question: “What is the meaning of life?” Most of the young drunk skiers responded that it had something to do with beer. One guy said as he walked along, “The meaning of life is that there is no God. As my favorite philosopher, Friedrich Nietzche once said, ‘God is dead and we have killed him.’ God is man made.” He paused for a moment and then continued, “There is no God. Otherwise, there wouldn't be starving children in Somalia, and I wouldn't have all these problems in my life." When troops were sent there a few weeks later, I though of that random encounter that snowy evening. Indeed, atheists often point to the very existence of suffering in the world to support their assertion for God‘s non-existence. Yes, God made children starve in Somalia. God did it for a reason, too. Finally, our over-inflated armies were put to humanitarian use. The farms of the United States could feed half the world if needed. God's purpose seems pretty clear.
Another benefit of the theological determinist philosophy is its usefulness in alleviating the difficulties of neurosis and depression on an individual level. My previous analogy of a glass of lemonade tasting better to the man dying of thirst came to one evening just as I was drifting off to sleep. I became instantly aware of how that single metaphor could explain the meaning behind the crisis of modernity, a dilemma that had been bothering me for some time. Moreover, it explained the purpose behind a very difficult period in my own life that I had recently come out of.
For many months before that, I had been beset by a disturbing period of neurotic angst. I wasn't sure if I could ever be happy again. I was feeling very alone, depressed, and desperate. Finally, one evening, I sat down and read, cover to cover, a inspirational book which had a profound impact on me years before as an adolescent. The evening I reread it, the words took on a new power and meaning for me. Afterwards, I was a renewed man. My faith in my oneness with a higher power had been restored and brought to even higher levels. The neurosis disappeared. I felt very "high" all of the time. God's message blew away the clouds of fear and guilt, and allowed the brilliant sunshine to pour into my soul. I had maintained this renewed feeling for several weeks when the lemonade metaphor I’ve used in this essay came to me, and I understood why God had afflicted me with the neurosis in the first place. The strong mental malady had driven me to a point of such thirst that the divinely inspired words of that book struck me like an ice-cold glass of the pink stuff strikes someone who crossed Death Valley without a canteen. I had become caught up in the garden of my everyday worldly existence, and neglected my spiritual development. God was calling me in from that garden.
Just as there is a plan for humanity as a whole, God has a plan for each and
every person on this planet. Whenever you face a difficulty in your life, don't look here and there for blame. It's nobody's fault. Certainly don't try too hard to find out how it's your own fault. You don't need the guilt. Understand that every barrier you I encounter came from God in his love for you. God has a lesson in every difficulty. If this lesson reveals something about your own nature that needs changing, then change it. Soon, these barriers no longer appear to be barriers. Instead, they become chapters in a textbook of life. God didn't put you here to suffer, but God does put suffering into lives for specific reasons.
Sometimes, it can be very difficult to figure out what these reasons might be. Sometimes, difficulties appear purely external. They seem to offer no lessons for the ones who are suffering. To return to my discussion of the Holocaust, what lesson was being taught to the victims? Can we say that God was teaching something to the ones in the boxcars being driven away to their deaths? Sometimes God's lessons are for the larger community. The needs of the many do indeed outweigh those of the few. Moreover, the human race is a single entity that only appears to be divided only when one observes it from the inside. The individual's suffering is the suffering of the whole. In this case, the suffering of those in the boxcars taught the world about the dangers of racism. When their souls are reborn in their next lifetimes, they will have learned something from the experience of their previous lifetimes. They will be born into a world where the philosophy that brought their deaths is slowly fading away. In the same way that time reveals the purpose of historical events, the lesson for individual tragedies may also take time to be revealed.
I think of the parents whose child is suffering from cancer. How can they be consoled? Would they not be more accepting of the idea that a random gene mutation caused the cancer as opposed to God? Perhaps this is the very lesson they, and all of us, need to learn, that even the most sad, tragic, incomprehensible losses of life are a product of God's will. If they can never overcome their grief to see this, the memory of the pain will remain. When they too are released from their bodies, and once again in the oneness of God, they will become aware that the loss of their child was a part of a greater plan. Perhaps they will suffer similarly in their next lifetime to deepen the learning.
Everyone has heard the saying that behind every cloud there is a silver lining. Normally, we only hear this when some sort of problem in our lives yields unexpected benefits. It goes beyond that. The whole reason the cloud exists is the silver lining. Seeing beyond the clouds can sometimes be difficult, but it is the first step in making those clouds disappear.
When I suffered under the weight of discontent and neurosis, I was being made thirsty by God so that I could taste his message more profoundly. Those who are happy and content in their lives react to the word of God quite calmly. They smile and say, "Oh, that's nice." For the individual in the throws of some personal crisis, the word of God will change their lives forever. Take the case of Saul of Tarsus. Do you think he was happy running around arresting all those early Christians? I don't think so. His was not the profession of a happy man. He undoubtedly had heard what these early disciples were saying, and perhaps, somewhere deep down, he agreed with it. Perhaps he was being torn apart inside by a conflict between his duty to protect his community, and his sympathy for the "dangerous" new sect from Palestine. Saul was a man "dying of thirst", so to speak. When God/ Christ came unto him and bade him to do his work, his condition before his conversion made the experience overpowering. Paul, filled with the God's power, then went out into the world and spoke with such conviction and profundity that Christianity remembers his words second only to the words of Christ himself.
The same process is operating in modern society. Western culture over the last few centuries has been acting much like Saul of Tarsus. Certain of our moral superiority, we have used our superior arms and power to oppress others. These others have a message for western culture. One that we once knew, but lost in our worship of rationality. The last 100 years have been a drawn out version of Saul being thrown from his horse. Our old identity of superiority has been smashed, just as Saul was humbled by the presence of God. Slowly, ever so slowly, in our confusion and sickness, our society is crying back to God, “What do you want from us!?”
posted by Joko at 2:17 AM
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