I am inclined to believe we should not be held responsible for what happens on earth because we are incapable of being other than we are: fallen, wrong, depraved, etc. We can't help ourselves, we will inevitably cause harm and are no more responsible for doing wrong than a rock is responsible for submitting to gravity and hitting the ground.
In the film The Cider House Rules, the characters are confronted with, among other issues, abortion, incest, infidelity, violence, and suicide. Without exception, each character does something many people consider 'bad.' Towards the end of the film, they read a set of rules for the house where they are boarding. It turns out they have been breaking the rules constantly when they do things completely acceptable to them, like smoke in the house or sleep on the roof. The rules are irrelevant, outrageous, and comical. The same is implied for any imposed moral standard used to condemn the characters' very human, immediate story.
I cannot judge because I know there is nothing I would not do if circumstances were different. Child soldiers are just one saddening example of this. Knowing human potential prevents me from placing myself above another. If I lived as my theory allows, I might appear extremely forgiving. There would be no distinction between kind-of-sinners, and the worst of sinners. Ministers and murderers would be at the same level. The hardest puzzle I can imagine, loving people without trying to fix them, would be solved. I would be free to offer unhesitant love to anyone. I could not hold a grudge, be angry, hate, or even to a certain degree be hurt by anything except what imposes itself, like the rules in the cider house, on the world.
Nietzsche wrote in Twilight of the Idols, "We deny God, we deny the responsibility in God: only thereby do we redeem the world." But the problem with shirking responsibility is that the kind of forgiveness and redemption offered is not recognizable forgiveness or redemption at all. Instead of making clean, the effort is abandoned and experience is made insignificant. If our wrongness should be overlooked, and reconciliation is not possible for what has happened on earth, we might as well be done with it. Heaven, an eternity where there is good, maybe. We only hope. Our existence here, however, cannot be justified; life is endured futility.
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26 comments:
Hmmm...I want to respond intelligently to this post, so I will get back to you.
But as for your photo - "Are you my mommy?" If you haven't seen Doctor Who, you must.
John Steinbeck says this:
"‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win...It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man."
This is why I believe we have to be held responsible for the things we do wrong--why we have to be guilty. Also why you have to read East of Eden ; )
Jeremy - Are you mocking me? sheesh, at least I'm thinking up a response to your post for real.
nope, I've only seen one episode of Doctor Who.
elanor - I do have to read East of Eden, but I am confused how you can truly love everyone while simultaneously judging their actions.
Not mocking. Well, being ironic, but being serious about it. I think you raise a critical (no pun intended) issue here. So I want to stew over it. And you are definitely watching some more Doctor Who. It is fantastic.
i think the key to loving people while still holding them responsible for their actions (judging them) is forgiveness: you do not compromise your standard of how we should live, but you do not condemn people for being unable to meet that standard. yes, they made a mistake. yes, it was their fault. yes, you got hurt. and it's not ok for them to act that way. but their mistake is not going to keep you from having a relationship with them and wanting them to become all that they can be. it's accountability without rejection.
also, the fact that we ourselves don't meet our own standards for how we should live plays a big part in this. so it's not patronizing when we forgive other people for messing up: it's a forgiveness of mutual failure and a mutual desire to learn how to do better.
it's like when you're teaching piano. if you never tell the kid that he's doing something wrong, you'll never be able to teach him how to do it right. if you keep saying, "oh, it's ok, you didn't know that that note was supposed to be a C#," then that is actually not loving the kid: he's never gonna learn how to play. loving the kid would be telling him he played the wrong note, but then, instead of following this information with the declaration that he fails at music and will never amount to anything, you tell him the right note, and tell him that he CAN do it, he CAN play it right. then he does.
I think there's a difference between being responsible and being held responsible. I do not 'hold responsible' my piano students because I know they are in a learning process, they don't know what they're doing, and I'm their guide. I don't blame them for getting off track, I invite them to join me on the right one. Their mistake is their choice, but I overlook it and show them something better. They don't stay in the "relationship," as you call it, of being my student in spite of making mistakes, they stay because their mistakes are constantly being wiped away and forgotten: I don't give a damn about past mistakes (or present, for that matter).
But of course that might be a bad analogy altogether because the teacher/student relationship demands a superior, and one of the ideas behind this theory is that no one is superior.
Elanor, you're letting me down. Why do I feel like I'm defending Jesus? Isn't grace just another way of saying we are not held responsible for wrong? The way I see it, I can offer unlimited forgiveness, whereas you can only offer 'forgiveness in spite of ____'
to your last paragraph: there are two different ways of using the phrase "held responsible." the first way means that you are punished or in some other way forced to face the consequences of your mistakes. the second way only means that you are held to be the one responsible (as opposed to someone else, or no one) for committing the action. as i understand it, grace uses the phrase in the second way (which, if I get what you're saying, you are denying) but not in the first: by forgiving us, Jesus can hold us to be the ones responsible for our actions without holding us responsible (without condemning us).
and yes, the "in spite of____" is exactly right. the forgiveness that Jesus offers is forgiveness in spite of_____.
"reconciliation is not possible for what has happened on earth"
You seem to state this as an axiom, but I do not understand why you hold this view.
People make reconcilliation aong themselves all the time (and thru institutions we make reconcilliation even among absent or deceased parties.)
Why do you find this impossible were God is concerned?
Your point of view seems to be deeply indifferent to evil, and seems to brush off all human experience of good.
Am misunderstanding you somehow?
Here's Jeremy's response:
http://thecollegiateadventuresofjeremy.blogspot.com/2008/08/okay-so-my-friend-bethany-has-been.html
elanor - maybe I am trying to say that forgiveness is the least we can expect given our circumstance. Christians talk incessantly about the Fall, but to us it is not a fall: it's our starting place, it's all we have. From the moment we enter the world, we are frightened, lonely, and bad. Grace is powerful because of its necessity, not because of the goodness of the act of giving. We do not simply need grace, we should receive it.
Joe - "I do not understand why you hold this view."
I see it like this: no matter how many Bin Ladens we eventually find and eventually put on trial, people died seven years ago in NYC. The past is irreversible. Reconcile technically means "cause to coexist in harmony," which I'm all for, but you seem to be using the word differently, more as saying someone had to pay.
I am sorry I appear indifferent toward evil. I guess I don't think on those terms anymore. It's so very abstract, and our lives are so immediate.
It's time for me to be really annoying and inconsequential.
"It's so very abstract, and our lives are so immediate."
But it is important to remember that we are eternal spiritual beings.Our existence is not always as immediate as we think. An infinite thing viewed from a finite perspective will always appear abstract, but that does not mean that it is indeterminable.
yay, Ben's back!
I've learned to accept indeterminableness as a condition of life. I would not say I have seen good or evil, instead only infamous gray. We can never have this 'infinite perspective,' so I honestly don't see the point of denying our view and straining to see something else.
Regarding new blog title, how about:
beyond good and evil: a postmodernity worth living in.
OR
memoirs of an immediate story
OR
finding the infinite in the finite: one sojourner's journey
OR
dramatic irony: the story of a human life
OR
cashing shadows: and other illusory entities
OR
masie hazie - confusion in cyberspace (I don't recommend this one)
OR
something else
i haven't commented in a while, but it looks like others have picked up the slack.
i have been reading what you write, though. i'm currently reading a big ol' book by N. T. Wright called "Jesus and the Victory of God" where he tries to lay out what Jesus looks like to him from a historian's perspective (specifically, a historian who doesn't think our other information requires that we explain away the gospel narratives). I bring this up because he talked a little bit about the kind of Jesus Nietzsche knew in his time, and the shortcomings of that Jesus. I don't blame people for rejecting the God of a controlling story that is not good, but I am hoping that there is a good one. I don't know if 'good' is the right term for a controlling story that is not in fact controlling except towards the idea of control, but that's what I mean--something like freedom.
Jeremy - hah! 'masie hazie'... I like them, but they're all too long. Maybe we could figure out something using 'immediate story' or the wonderful typo 'cashing shadows.' I'm also considering calling it 'Vomit' off of James Baldwin's quote, "All art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists, if they are to survive, are forced, at last, to tell the whole story, to vomit the anguish up." But I think it's pretentious to call what's written here 'art.' I would consider it confession though, so maybe.
Dan - yes, I think you tumbled half the book. Just kidding. It does sound interesting, I'm curious as to why Wright believes his interpretation of Jesus as 'good' is more legitimate than other views of him throughout history. But I guess he doesn't really need one.
I was hoping that typo would be overlooked...oh, well. There have been worse!
Seriously though, it made the title better.
i don't think Wright claims that his Jesus is more 'good', just more accurate--less of a straw man. methods which tear down ideologies that have little relevance to the one supposed to be in question have little relevance to the question at hand of whether God as Jesus presents him is good or not, and of how he defines 'good'. he talks about what makes a good theory in there somewhere...that it accounts for more otherwise inexplicable details, for one. a metanarrative is the same way.
yes, i have tumbled a lot. don't feel obligated to read it, it is just convenient to me to store away sections that are particularly interesting or striking because it is a really long book and they'd be hard to find otherwise.
i will see you in three weeks! that is scary! not that i will see you, but that summer is almost over.
you could call your blog "tales of a delinquent peasant". or "tails of an elegant pheasant". or "tallis of an aliquot Present". those are your three choices.
That makes sense.
Yeah, blogs are good for storing, I feel like I tumble tons of 3 quarks daily links. It's so convenient.
hah, those last two paragraphs are such Dan kind of humor. Not a bad thing at all. Can't wait to get back to school.
Re: indifference to evil
I reread your post and I see that I overlooked a great deal. you actually stated more or less that indifference is not an acceptable option.
So the only thing that perplexes me is the adamant pessimism. I find nothing rational in the assumption that "reconciliation is not possible for what has happened on earth". It seems an odd article of faith to cling to. It seems more of a mood than a philosophy.
I sympathize with your opening paragraph about the responsibilty laid upon a broken human race who did not ask to be flawed or broken, but who perhaps must pay for. But that seems miles from this Cider House thing.
The Cider House Rules, if I understand what you wrote about it, seems to imply something ridiculous about evil. That is, it seems to equate "evil" with mere rule violations. Well if sleeping on the roof is a near eqivalent of incest, well then heck. But what idiot equates the man who crawls on the roof to sleep in a cool breeze with the man who crawls into a child's bed to vent his lust upon them, delighting in the sobs and cries and blood and dispair of the helpless?
I do not get this notion that evil is an abstraction. Evil is real. It is violence, and injustice, and suffering, and exploitation, and degradation. There is absolutely no mercy in indifference; nothing but complicity.
Personally, I would be horribly disappointed to learn if (a) God were unable to sort out all the vagaries of human existence, (b) that God were not in fact displeased with those who seek pleasure in the abuse of others, (c) that God were incapable of restoring the losses and sufferings of evil's victims, or (d) that there actually were no God at all to give a cosmic damn about good or evil.
If we are all that uber-screwed then there will be plenty of time in the eternal void for despair. I'm not gonna bother with it yet while I walk on this verdant earth, amid the joys of love and generosity and joy. There is too much life afoot to presume the triumph of death.
I did not state indifference is not an option so much as recognize where it leads.
It's more 'defeated idealism' than 'adamant pessimism,' I think. I find nothing rational in the assumption that things can be reconciled. Perhaps it is only a 'mood' and shortsightedness based too much on experience here-and-now, but a theme I've had in recent posts is that experience is all we have to work with.
The Cider House response to your second comment is that you are trying to make us a great deal more important than we are. No matter how you spin it, the Cider House does say the pedophile is the same as the man sleeping on the roof. Your claim that that kind of evil is real is no more sensible than calling sleeping on the roof evil. You say this is complicity, the Cider House might agree - Ivan was responsible for killing his father long before Dmitri committed the act.
I would be horribly disappointed to learn any of those things as well.
I'm glad you love life. The Cider House would say you bother with life far too much. Which I suppose works well with your 'death vs. life' worldview.
i love the new title.
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