Who Would Pay Attention To That?

I should have mentioned in yesterdays post introducing some days of going over what Hans Kung wrote about the question of pain, (also called the question of evil, the question of suffering, etc.) in his book On Being A Christian, that that section comes in the 6h unit of the book dealing with interpretations of the Resurrection, that unit begins:

The crucified and yet living Christ is the concrete summing up of the Christian message and the Christian faith.  He is himself the wholly concrete truth of Christianity and it was the concrete, living reality of his historical person and his fate which gave early Christianity its superiority over contemporary philosophical theories of salvation, Gnostic visions, over the mystery cults and their comparatively abstract figures unmoved by fate.  "The picture of Jesus as the Christ conquered them through the power of a concrete reality."  [a quote from Paul Tillich in his Systematic Theology] And even today the individual historical concreteness of his person constitutes the strength of the Christian faith as opposed to universal religious world views, abstract philosophical systems and socio-political ideologies - which, however, for their own part have inclined to depend on a concrete hero in the person of a founder or leader (of the nation, of the party), of the head of a school, or the master of a mystagogue or guru.  

But there are some who will then ask:  what about the different Christian "truths," articles of faith, dogmas, which - unlike the concrete figure of Jesus - are so difficult to understand and assimilate?  How are they related to this one concrete truth of Christianity, which is Jesus Christ himself?  These "truths" are to be understood as attempts to interpret the one truth. 

Years ago, I wrote about something I heard Dr. Mary Karr on Krista Tippet's program, On Being, who said:

Even just being in mass that you stand up and kneel down, that you move in unison, that I know a lot of cradle Catholics complain about how sheep-like you feel, or they’re like dumb cattle or something like that, but I sort of found it — it’s like being in hip hop class. [laughs] When you move like everybody, you kind of feel like you are like them. And the idea that we’re hunks of meat incarnate — in meat, that it’s not metaphorical, the idea of Jesus and the Eucharist. It’s not a metaphor that you’re going to be renewed. It’s not a metaphor of his body or his “teaching,” quote-unquote, or his love or whatever. It’s his body. It’s so lurid.

And I remember looking at the body on the cross and saying to my son that — I don’t even remember whether I ever wrote about this or not — but I remember looking at it before we were baptized and saying, “I don’t get this whole crucifixion thing. It’s so awful. I mean, the suffering, beaten critter nailed up there is just so gross. Why don’t they just have you say the jump rope rhymes, and then you’re redeemed?” And my kid, who was young, like, maybe, I don’t know, 8 or 9 said, “Who would pay attention to that?”

The answer to the question with the question "Who would pay attention to that?" seemed to me and still seems to be to be one of the more profound ones in regard to the Christian faith that Hans Kung and Paul Tillich and other profoundly intelligent and diligent and rigorous scholars have also addressed.   It is related to what I said the other day about the futility of trying to answer the "question of pain, evil, suffering" for someone else,  it is only something that you can find an answer to that will answer it for you for yourself.  If someone hoped to give an answer to someone that would help them, it would certainly be necessary for them to engage with the person who was suffering, directly or through their love or sympathy with someone else or some other of our fellow sentient creatures in a way that would be convincing.  It is unconvincing to be lectured on pain and suffering by someone who you are not convinced is talking out of their own, personal and most concrete experience.  The experience of suffering being among the most concrete of human experiences, especially when that suffering irreparably alters a life or ends it.   

Being lectured about such topics on the basis of utilitarianism or the more callous forms of what passes as modern philosophical discourse - generally by people who grew up in affluence who have often never suffered much or struggled with poverty or the more inconvenient forms of common suffering and who, even when those inevitable blows of losing loved ones come, have those blows softened by their affluence - is seldom held up to the winds of skepticism that it should be.  It is, though, generally unaccepted by the large majority of humanity who are not affluent.   Though some of the more clinging of adherents to those things are the near affluent or those who aspire to it or its trappings such as  the theorist of affluent repute, Thorstein Veblen, may have been the most astute observer.  

----------- 

Hans Kung begins his section God and suffering with one of the most acute of modern examples of evil.

"Auschwitz":  that one word sums it all up for T. W. Adorno, R. L. Rubenstein and others.  But, looking around the world and over the course of history, many another name could be added.  Human suffering, who can take in this history of human suffering, compared to which the millions of years of pre-human history of nature scarcely count?  [says the human being, I'll interrupt in protest] This is a history of contradictions and conflicts, of injustice, inequality and social distress, all the incurable involvement in sickness and guilt, all the meaningless fate and senseless wickedness: an endless stream of blood, sweat and tears, pain, sorrow and fear, loneliness and death.  It is a history of which all identity, significance and value of reality and human existence seem to be constantly radically called in question by non-identity, pointlessness and worthlessness.  In this history of suffering the primal reason, primal meaning and primal value of reality and human existence also become constantly, radically questionable through chaos, absurdity and illusion.  

Even the suffering of one person for a single day raises at once the question, why?  Why should I be afflicted, just at this moment?  What is the point of it?  Why is there all this terrible individual and collective suffering, crying to heaven - even against heaven?  Is it not to be charged against the Creator of mankind: mankind overburdened with suffering?  God supposed to be the embodiment of all meaning and yet there is so much that is pointless in this world, so much meaningless suffering and senseless sin.  Is this God perhaps what Nietzsche accused him of being;  a despot, impostor, swindler, executioner?  Are these blasphemies or provocations of God?

From Epicurus to the modern rationalist Pierre Bayle - whom Feuerbach regarded as his teacher - the answer of the skeptic to the question why God did not prevent evil has scarcely changed.  Either God cannot prevent evil - and then is he really all-powerful?  - or he will not - and then is he still holy, just and good.  Or he cannot and will not - and then is he not both powerless and resentful?  Or, finally, he can and will:  but then why is there all the wickedness in this world?

That is just the beginning of Kung's presentation of the problem that evil presents, not only the Christian who believes that God is holy and good, the Creator of the universe as it is and as it will be.  That creation, in one of the rare occasions when I can seriously disagree with Hans Kung, that we are merely the now living conscious parts of, includes those millions of years of pre-human suffering and the suffering of our fellow creatures now, many of whom endure their suffering at the hands of humans and our use of them.  

I think it's necessary to note that in many cases when they deal with the question of pain, evil, suffering, that the atheists' the "skeptics" answers have been to discount not only the God they want to dispose of but any real meaning or importance of suffering except for their own and those they feel appertain to them.  I have written about that as articulated by Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg, the utter callousness of the Darwinists, of Nietzsche, who considered the use and suffering of the many by the Superman to be of unimportance.   The price of materialist-atheist-scientism is far worse than the question of suffering for the believer in God, it not only dismisses the consideration of God, it renders suffering as a problem unintelligible.  

Though the atheist who suffers, even those who discount the moral dimension of the problem or even the reality of the consciousness who experiences pain never really has that problem when its reality is made concrete in their own experience,* though in the worse cases, their  intellectual articulation of it is some of the most dishonest nonsense peddled as intellectually respectable in the history of rewarding such stuff.   I think their inability to link their own experience with suffering is a symptom of a highly respectable form of academic sociopathy that is also linked to the importance they place on their dishonest intellectual articulations of it.  I think its respectability comes from the permission it gives to those who wish to be absolved of moral responsibility. Many of those being rich people of privilege, it is a well financed effort.  

I think that is why such people, in history and today, have had such a profound hostility to the Hebrew tradition in its original Jewish articulation and in its later Christian one.  That was one of the major projects of scientistic culture of the 18th and 19th and 20th centuries and one which continues.  Such people would violate nothing about their atheism in creating and peopling an Auschwitz, any nominally Christian person who participated would have to break every single moral teaching of Jesus, Paul, James, as well as The Law and the Prophets.  

* It is my experience that there are no more accomplished whiners about even their slight experience of personal pain and even a vague sense of unfairness than those who are ready to discount it for others.  Trump is, certainly, the current best example of that.