Wendy Doniger: on disasters and the problem of evil

[Guest guest]

Letting God Off the Hook

Wendy Doniger

in " On Faith "

Sept. 5, 2007

 

[Note: A new article from everybody's

(un)-favorite irritant, and it doesn't even

contain a mention of sex or fertility. Wow!]

 

In our culture, disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 are often

the occasion on which we confront the problem of evil

publicly together, though of course as individuals we bump

into it every day, and theologians have broken their heads

over it 24/7 for thousands of years.

 

After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water,

food, after searching for the living and then searching for

the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is

always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase,

concentrates the mind wonderfully. Christians and, to a

lesser extent, Jews, have approached the problem of evil

with monotheistic blinders and fallen into the trap of the

four-fold paradigm: God is good (or merciful), God is all-

knowing, God is all-powerful, and there is evil. How could

God do this to us? (Woody Allen, a much under-rated

theologian, came up with the best answer to these questions,

I think: God is not evil, he's just an underachiever.)

 

But Hinduism, the religion I know best, is not hobbled by

monotheism, and therefore most Hindus do not assume that

their god is merciful, or all-knowing, or all-powerful,

though they are well aware of the existence of evil, which

they formulate in a more basic and existential, rather than

monotheistic, way. The question then becomes, not, " How

could God do this to us? " but " How can this happen to us?

Why us? "

 

Hindus have, moreover, tackled the problem in mythology

as well as philosophy. Philosophy doesn't do the trick for

most people; the myths pick up the pieces where philosophy

throws up its hands. Hindu mythology can startle us into

new and creative ways of rethinking our own inevitable

entanglement in this insoluble problem.

 

When Hindus round up the usual suspects, there are several

possible culprits, and Hinduism has embraced them all at

one time or another, in one sect or another: god, the devil,

fate, and it's your own damn fault. Let's consider them one

by one.

 

As for god, many of the Hindu gods create evil out of their

own inadequacy; indeed, there are myths in which the god,

stricken with the pollution that results from adultery or

murder, is rescued by his human worshippers, who willingly

take the sin upon themselves forever after in order to free

the god to return to the divine work that is essential for

human thriving. On the other hand, there are also myths in

which unredeemed sinners (murderers, blasphemers, what

have you) accidentally commit an act of worship

(overhearing a sacred text being recited, or lighting a lamp

only in order to rob a temple, or blasphemously calling out

the name of god when they trip and fall down), and are

saved at their death by this one unconsciously pious act.

And then there is the argument of plenitude: the gods at the

time of creation realize that, in order for the universe to be

perfect, it must have everything in it, and that must include

the deaths of children, the suffering of the innocent, and all

the rest.

 

Devils, or demons, or the various things that go bump in the

night, create deal of trouble for us in minor ways, though

they are generally not directly blamed for the creation of

evil in the first place. Indirectly, however, they are

responsible for the origin of some forms of evil when the

gods, in order to fight them, corrupt them with heretical

doctrines that then filter down to humans and make another

sort of trouble.

 

In addition to these explanations, Hindus in the face of

disaster often invoke fate, what Hindi-speakers call honi,

persistent, inexplicable bad luck, against which even the

gods are powerless.

 

And finally, there is the " it's your own damn fault "

argument, which Hindus call karma, the belief that

apparently undeserved misfortune is actually well-merited

punishment for sins committed in forgotten past lives. (This

can also take the form of the theological guilt trip: " God

must be punishing me for something bad that I did. " ) The

sociologist Max Weber, in his survey of various religious

approaches to evil, thought that karma was not only a

satisfactory answer but the best of all available answers.

 

The fact that Hindus have devised so many other answers

proves Weber wrong, I think. But ultimately, of course,

there is no satisfying answer. The best that we can hope for

is the reassurance of knowing that others, too, have dived

under the wave of disaster and brought back from the abyss

the flotsam and jetsam of the wisdom of their suffering, and

that some of these inadequate but imaginative responses

may comfort us, too.

 

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/wendy_donig

er/2007/09/letting_god_off_the_hook.html

or

http://tinyurl.com/2mrrdj