for miketrollstigen - not to convert, but to explain better than I can.

Received in the mail from deenbat. MWAH!

Kushner is a rabbi with thoroughly worked out views on the role of God in his life. In this book he naturally asks how a loving, caring God could allow the slaughter of millions of innocent Jews in the Nazi death camps. Kushner also dedicates his book to his son Aaron Zev, who lived barely 14 years. Aaron died of the rare and terrible disease, progeria, in which the natural ageing process runs at 5 times its normal pace. So it is inevitable that an intelligent man like Kushner will ask the question: how could God let these things happen?

I was curious to know how Kushner would address my perspective as a card-carrying atheist. This is in fact more or less his starting point, and he presents the atheist case with thoroughness and clarity. At times I thought, "Hold on! Shouldn't you be doing a different job?"

For Harold Kushner knows as well as I do that we have no guardian angel who periodically intervenes in the workings of Nature to save the good guys from harm. Earthquakes are very democratic and indiscriminate in whom they kill. Kushner privately chides people who have just had lucky escapes from accident or illness when they say things like, "Now I know there's a God looking out for me." Kushner is even-handed in seeing that, if God doesn't get the rap for Auschwitz, he/she/it also can't get the credit for making someone too late to catch a plane that crashes.

The basic conundrum is this: if God is all-loving, all-powerful and all-knowing, God wouldn't let X,Y,Z happen; God must be responsible for all the bad things in the world as well as the good. Kushner's response is essentially to shift all blame by redefining God as non-interventionist: in the beginning God wound up the universal clockwork and let it run of its own accord in keeping with the laws of Nature.

We then get the familiar Judaeo-Christian rationales: God has made us the gift of free choice (so it's all our own fault, not God's); things we think of as bad can be quite nifty (like the usefulness of pain in telling us to take our fingers out of the fire); overall, God has a Cunning Plan, it's just that sometimes we are too small to understand it.

Intriguingly, Kushner holds that the laws of Nature are morally blind (yes!), but God is NOT morally blind. What on Earth can he mean? I didn't get this point.

The most fascinating aspect of this book for me is that Kushner understands my atheistic viewpoint and indeed expresses it very eloquently. For a brief moment, God is in the dog-house. But then all of Kushner's subsequent arguments take the existence of God as a priori, as a given fact: God's existence is the one chess piece (like the king) that must stay on the board at all costs; anything else can move, but not that.

I don't agree at all! Of what earthly use is such a malleable concept? This elusive, mysterious kind of God explains nothing, does nothing to improve our understanding of the universe - quite the opposite! So why does the attachment to this empty notion of God remain so powerful for many people?

Many apologies, I'm dreadfully behind on BC admin due to work, being away, etc, etc. Book safely received. It's travelled from, I assume, a believer in the Judeo-Christian YHVH, to an atheist and now to a pagan/hermeticist. I hope to add my views in the not too distant future.

I now follow my own specific path, which I do not wish to impose on others. In the past, however, I did have an extremely active interest in theology and read widely on the subject. It is from that perspective that I wish to state this is the weakest, most pathetic so-called theological work I have ever read. It is interesting to note that the book was published in 1981, thus towards the end of a period of intense theological fermentation, at least in the Christian sector, although I do not know if Judaism underwent a similar experience. However, Kushner seems not to have been inspired by any of this.

On the one hand, while advocating the viewpoint that God will not interfere/intervene, either against natural laws or against human free will to choose for good or evil, Kushner shies back from advocating the full "God is dead" theology. The cynical part of me wonders if this is because doing so would put as risk his livelihood from his rabbinical profession. On the other hand, Kushner states in one place that he believes miracles do sometimes happen, although he offers no explanation for the selectivity with which these occur. Nevertheless, he will not proclaim the evangelical concept of an all-powerful being who does interfere at moments of his own choosing. Thus, God simply becomes that which gives people strength to cope with whatever brown stuff happens to be thrown at them. In my mind, this is a denigration of the strength and will that we as humans can sometimes succeed in finding within ourselves, placing this positive response outside of ourselves.

I do not agree with either of Kushner's contradictory stances. I see human beings as the agents of ongoing creation, regardless of what may or may not have brought it all into being in the first place. I see humans as having the task to hone their strength to bring about whatever they will, this being good or evil according to the choices they make. In my world view, this activity can involve a connection with spiritual and natural forces, which some may view as gods. Atheists prefer to see all this as happening within a purely human psyche. As long as each side leaves the other in peace to develop in the way they each see as being most appropriate, it makes not one iota of difference.

Unless otherwise asked for it, I intend to wild release this book. It may be an interesting experiment about whether it is meant to fall into the hands of a specific someone...

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

During BC meet

Releasing this book only because I unfortunately suddenly have to get rid of Mt TBR.