A few weeks ago, I sat up late with my landlady talking and drinking cheap moscato wine. Our two-hour conversation strayed all over, from stories about her Chilean upbringing to the story of how I met Dave. Halfway into our second glass, God and Evil wandered into the conversation.
She gestured with her wine glass toward the windowed walls, admitting that because of Nature's beauty she believes in God, but she has a problem with all the evil happenings in this world. She reached up with both hands and repositioned her glasses, and looking at me over the rims she told me story after story of the things she has seen: a single mother dying of cancer and living alone with her mentally handicapped son, friends' daughters raped, people shot. "How can I believe in a good God?" she asked, words slanted with her Chilean accent.
Every time this kind of question comes up in conversation I have the same answer. I swallowed a sweet mouthful and replied, "It's the cost of free will." This answer is the only thing that gives me comfort, to me the only thing that makes sense of both a good God and an evil world: free will. Since I was nearing the bottom of my second glass and nearing my limit, I can't remember what exactly I said. But I know I talked about the two options this world had: we could've been programmed like robots to love and do good, or been allowed the real freedom to choose right or wrong. The problem with Good Programming is that no choice is truly yours (Would you like an apple or an apple?); the problem with Real Freedom is that our bad choices have bad, sometimes horrific, consequences. A very long time ago, God decided that this cost of being able to choose evil was a worthy price for free will. I admitted to my landlady that it is a terrible thing that such evil is here, but this must be somehow better than the alternative.
The conversation wandered to more innane topics from there, and I got back to my apartment a little tipsy some time after midnight. I went to bed, a few days passed, and I didn't think much more about the conversation.
At work, I try to read a little bit of the Columbus Dispatch online while I'm eating my lunch. About three weeks ago, I inadvertantly began following a story about 4 missing people in the town of Mount Vernon about an hour away from where I live. As days ticked by, and the missing persons remained missing, the story quickly rose to the daily cover. Each day only had details about how Knox County was still trying to find them; the reporters tried to write the same story three different ways, each day having a little less hope for the 2 women and the 2 children.
Four days after the four went missing, the Dispatch ran a story of how the 13-year-old girl, Sarah, had been found bound and gagged in the basement of a house within walking distance of her mother's home. Authorities arrested a 30-year-old man, Matthew Hoffman, on charges of her kidnapping. Sarah had been found, but her brother, her mother, and her mother's friend remained missing.
The days started to tick by again. 300 people from the community intensify the search. Monday passes, Tuesday passes, Wednesday comes and the people of Mount Vernon are still searching. Somewhere in there, authorities report that Hoffman's records show he purchased a plastic tarp. And then Thursday, the eight-day mark, I get to the Dispatch site and see the word "TRAGEDY" in the headline: the three bodies were found. Details came in jagged bits and pieces: Hoffman had told the police where to find the bodies...the three had been stabbed to death and then dismembered before being dropped in pieces into the top of a hollow beech tree...after the bodies were removed, men in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources cut down the beech tree on Friday.
Last Saturday Dave and I were in Delaware at the outdoor shooting range. You have to purchase a range pass (either for the year or the day) from a gun store before arriving, and then give it to the guy from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at the range. Around 5, after 2 hours of shooting, we were packing up and signing out and began talking to the ODNR range facilitator. He said he was grateful that Friday had been a late day for him - had he been scheduled in the morning, he would've had to help chop down the hollow beech tree.
Dave and I saw our landlady later that night, and we talked about the story and exchanged what details we knew. Terrible saddening details.
She bid us goodnight after visiting for 30 minutes on the basement steps, and after she went back into her apartment I remembered the conversation that she and I had. I remembered what I said about free will, that it's better to allow choice and evil rather than to program love.
Is free will really worth it? Is it worth this?
I remembered what the range facilitator had told us, that the two women and the little boy had been dismembered by a chainsaw.
Is free will really worth the price?
I know I'm asking questions too big for me to answer.
So I have to trust.
I have to trust that God knows better than I. I have to trust that my microscopic perspective can't understand what I'm questioning. I have to trust that a robotic world without free will is worse than this.
I have to trust that God is right. And remember that the police rescued Sarah. That not all is lost.
She gestured with her wine glass toward the windowed walls, admitting that because of Nature's beauty she believes in God, but she has a problem with all the evil happenings in this world. She reached up with both hands and repositioned her glasses, and looking at me over the rims she told me story after story of the things she has seen: a single mother dying of cancer and living alone with her mentally handicapped son, friends' daughters raped, people shot. "How can I believe in a good God?" she asked, words slanted with her Chilean accent.
Every time this kind of question comes up in conversation I have the same answer. I swallowed a sweet mouthful and replied, "It's the cost of free will." This answer is the only thing that gives me comfort, to me the only thing that makes sense of both a good God and an evil world: free will. Since I was nearing the bottom of my second glass and nearing my limit, I can't remember what exactly I said. But I know I talked about the two options this world had: we could've been programmed like robots to love and do good, or been allowed the real freedom to choose right or wrong. The problem with Good Programming is that no choice is truly yours (Would you like an apple or an apple?); the problem with Real Freedom is that our bad choices have bad, sometimes horrific, consequences. A very long time ago, God decided that this cost of being able to choose evil was a worthy price for free will. I admitted to my landlady that it is a terrible thing that such evil is here, but this must be somehow better than the alternative.
The conversation wandered to more innane topics from there, and I got back to my apartment a little tipsy some time after midnight. I went to bed, a few days passed, and I didn't think much more about the conversation.
At work, I try to read a little bit of the Columbus Dispatch online while I'm eating my lunch. About three weeks ago, I inadvertantly began following a story about 4 missing people in the town of Mount Vernon about an hour away from where I live. As days ticked by, and the missing persons remained missing, the story quickly rose to the daily cover. Each day only had details about how Knox County was still trying to find them; the reporters tried to write the same story three different ways, each day having a little less hope for the 2 women and the 2 children.
Four days after the four went missing, the Dispatch ran a story of how the 13-year-old girl, Sarah, had been found bound and gagged in the basement of a house within walking distance of her mother's home. Authorities arrested a 30-year-old man, Matthew Hoffman, on charges of her kidnapping. Sarah had been found, but her brother, her mother, and her mother's friend remained missing.
The days started to tick by again. 300 people from the community intensify the search. Monday passes, Tuesday passes, Wednesday comes and the people of Mount Vernon are still searching. Somewhere in there, authorities report that Hoffman's records show he purchased a plastic tarp. And then Thursday, the eight-day mark, I get to the Dispatch site and see the word "TRAGEDY" in the headline: the three bodies were found. Details came in jagged bits and pieces: Hoffman had told the police where to find the bodies...the three had been stabbed to death and then dismembered before being dropped in pieces into the top of a hollow beech tree...after the bodies were removed, men in the Ohio Department of Natural Resources cut down the beech tree on Friday.
Last Saturday Dave and I were in Delaware at the outdoor shooting range. You have to purchase a range pass (either for the year or the day) from a gun store before arriving, and then give it to the guy from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources at the range. Around 5, after 2 hours of shooting, we were packing up and signing out and began talking to the ODNR range facilitator. He said he was grateful that Friday had been a late day for him - had he been scheduled in the morning, he would've had to help chop down the hollow beech tree.
Dave and I saw our landlady later that night, and we talked about the story and exchanged what details we knew. Terrible saddening details.
She bid us goodnight after visiting for 30 minutes on the basement steps, and after she went back into her apartment I remembered the conversation that she and I had. I remembered what I said about free will, that it's better to allow choice and evil rather than to program love.
Is free will really worth it? Is it worth this?
I remembered what the range facilitator had told us, that the two women and the little boy had been dismembered by a chainsaw.
Is free will really worth the price?
I know I'm asking questions too big for me to answer.
So I have to trust.
I have to trust that God knows better than I. I have to trust that my microscopic perspective can't understand what I'm questioning. I have to trust that a robotic world without free will is worse than this.
I have to trust that God is right. And remember that the police rescued Sarah. That not all is lost.
Comments
Does this mean God is pro-choice? (Of course, not talking about the abortion issue!)
IF... you have enough knowledge of any situation. Viewing things as gray means that you are not experienced or naturally intelligent to the level required to deserve to have an opinion about something. Of course all opinions are not equal, as someone will have more facts on their side than all others. I decided as a young boy to not have opinions in any matter until I acquire all the facts I can possibly attain from at least 3 sources but usually 5 or more. Thus I have Factinions not mere opinions which most people gain from feeling or copy from a friend, family member or a single news story or chance read article. Yet, they argue their unfounded opinions vehemently out of foolish pride and ego. Nietzsche and a couple Greek philosophers spake (sic) of the "superman" which was free of the main vices I have listed above. I have done so and if others are willing to spend time to study, actually think and know the workings of people and how to actually make the best of all possible worlds -Utopia- we would have it. Normal people however, have chosen to fit in at home or school or some displaced group and as such will be no better than others now or before their time, which they should see as "our" time.