Job

I had an electric guitar come to my house yesterday and beat me up because I skipped to another track before it was through playing. “I’m doing this for your own good,” it said. “What do you mean?” I pleaded as blood filled the spaces between my teeth. “I am the Transcendent; I am the All in All; and you, you, are but a worm made of mud, and you need me.” When it finally turned to go, I begged it to stay. “I love you,” I said; “I’ll write bad checks for you,” I said; “I’ll rob banks for you; I’ll sauté my eyeballs in vomit and feed them to cockroaches for you. Just please, please don’t go; I’m begging you.” I can still hear its laughter as it walked away, the door left open so bottle-flies could eat my blood. 

Nothing fills me like an electric guitar, but sometimes I listen to Ebb Tide (an easy listening piece from 1953). I have nine versions of Ebb Tide, and not one contains an electric guitar, but I think they’re all about a man’s love for the electric guitar, although Peggy looks sad and shakes her head when I say this. 

I’m told that people who are dying sometimes develop a fondness for harp music and Gregorian Chants. I hope I never come to that. I hope I go out listening to an electric guitar—either that or Ebb Tide.

I emailed the draft of what you just read to one of my loyal and loving readers for his/her (how can one ever really know another person’s gender?) opinion. He/she responded: “I knew you were one fucked excuse for a boil on the righteous Job’s hairy asshole, but you have truly exceeded yourself with this crap.”

I wrote back: “If that’s your attitude, I’m glad I didn’t send you the part where it gets worse. As for the above, it’s metaphor, dude—or dudette. This is what those old-timey Middle Eastern guys would have written had they listened to Led Zeppelin while doing drugs instead of sitting in a sweltering tent in the desert listening to donkey farts and smelling sheep shit while green flies buzzed around their heads.

XXX

The words of Job sound as ancient as they are, even by Biblical standards. They are also highly visual and constitute one of my earliest memories. Indeed, Job haunted me for years because nowhere in the Bible is the lack of a moral distinction between God and Satan more evident. Yet, I also love the book because of how hard its ancient author worked to make sense out of injustice. The fact that he failed hardly matters against the fact that he did his pathetically bad best.

The book opens (I write from memory, so a few insignificant details might be wrong) with God and Satan hanging out, and God trying to lord it over Satan by saying, “Have you considered my servant, Job, how good he is, how there are none like him in the whole earth?” God smirks as he says this because he knows very well that the existence of a man who does no evil would keep Satan up at night. As God knew would happen (he knows everything, after all), Satan tries to appear nonchalant by only vaguely acknowledging that he has even heard of Job. The two fall into a silent reverie as they sit sipping their beers, and then Satan says, “Say, Jehovah, how about you letting me have a little fun with your friend…Job, was it? I’ll bet you a fish dinner that he’ll curse you to your face when I’m done with him.” Satan isn’t so confident as he appears, but he hates God’s guts, so he’s not about to show insecurity.

“You’re on,” God says. “Do anything else you please, but don’t kill him.” About then the bartender announces that it’s closing time, so God and Satan go their separate ways; God to heaven for a good night’s sleep, and Satan to hell to convene a night-long council of demons to come up with a plan for making Job so outrageously and unjustly miserable that he will curse god.

A day or two later, Job can be found covered head to toe with boils and sitting naked in a large pile of sheep shit. His wealth is gone, his servants massacred, and his family killed by high winds, except for his wife whom Satan thoughtfully spared. Three friends drop by. They spend days sitting in shocked silence before first the one and then the others launch into torturously long and tedious speeches that set Job’s teeth on edge because his “friends” (who stupidly assume that God is just and loving) are intent on blaming his problems on him, and he knows he’s innocent. Then, his wife shows up and glares at his friends (who she never liked anyway but especially not now that she can’t afford shampoo to wash the Middle Eastern stink from her hair). She too knows that Job is innocent, but she’s so thoroughly disenchanted with the way the patriarchy has screwed-up her life ever since she was a child, that she hates anything with balls, so she says to Job, “That’s some god you’ve got there, hubby-dearest. If he had done to me what he’s done to you, I would curse him and die, and I think that’s what you should do. Please allow me to demonstrate,” and so she does, at least the cursing part. She then leaves, God knows to where since she’s up in years, has no family or Obama-care, and is completely destitute. 

Job and his friends are stunned by what she said, so while Job sits lancing boils with shit-encrusted fingernails, his friends wonder if they’ve been there long enough that it wouldn’t be a fox paw (French hadn’t been invented yet) if they left. Right about then, Job launches into his own little speech that concludes with him saying that he’s going to love and serve God no matter what, because if God treats him this bad when God likes him, he sure doesn’t want to piss God off.

Just as he says this, the tent flap opens and, lo and behold, the Almighty is standing there silhouetted by the blinding light of the noonday sun. He isn’t a happy camper, so he goes on a tirade about how ancient, and smart, and powerful he is; how no one can hold a candle to him in any way whatsoever; and how no one should ever question anything he does. After he rants on for awhile like a love-gone-bad, he rewards Job for his unreciprocated love by giving him perfect health, a bigger and more desirable family, and bigger and more desirable herds. As for Job’s first wife, she eventually dies of dehydration in the desert and is condemned to hell for doubting God’s goodness.

I will now return to Led Zeppelin, whose song at the top of the page (along with marijuana) inspired this post.

Every description of God is an excuse for his absence*

Yesterday's mass murder in America points to one of the seemingly limitless problems I have with the Jewish, Christian, and Moslem view that God has both the infinite willingness to do good and the infintite ability to do good. The problem is, why doesn't he? God knew the Connecticut shooter was on his way to that school, and he could have stopped him, but he didn't. If I, imperfect being that I am, had known, and could have stopped him, but  hadn't stopped him, what would you think of me, and why should you think differently of a perfect God?

Christians offer various answers to why God permits evil and suffering. One is that we brought them on ourselves through original sin, so God is not responsible. Another is that God has given us the power to cure cancer, end war, enact gun control laws, provide universal healthcare, develop better warning systems for natural disasters, and so forth (ironically, surveys show that most American Christians favor war while opposing gun control and universal healthcare), and so, again, God is not responsible. Yet another claim is that suffering ennobles us, and is necessary for us to achieve our full potential for strength and compassion. According to this view, we wouldn't even recognize good in the absence of evil because we would have no basis for comparison. There's also the claim that the God for whom "all things are possible" couldn't hinder evil without hindering freewill, although why freewill is considered so important, I can't imagine. And finally, a great many American Christians believe that God not only allows evil and suffering to befall their country, he wills it to punish us for such sins such as re-electing Obama, taking prayer out of schools, and being "soft on homosexuality."

If such answers appeal to you, you are probably already a believer because, like transubstantiation, the virgin birth, and talking jackasses, only the faithful can make sense out of them, and this is only because they are unwilling to apply the same standards of rationality to religious belief that they apply to every other facet of life. If you are one of those believers, and you disagree, feel free to present your rational arguments. 

While I will admit that suffering can sometimes be ennobling, I won't admit that it has any place in a universe that is run by an infinitely good and infinitely powerful deity. This is because such a deity would be able to achieve all of the the good that suffering inspires without anyone having to suffer. In other words, he could eliminate war, crime, cancer, diabetes, child molestation, cruelty to animals, and every other evil on the face of the earth while at the same time lifting us to the exalted moral state of angels. The fact that he chooses to leave us in this hellhole of undeserved misery that life on earth represents to quadrillions of lifeforms constitutes ample reason to declare his existence a fantastic fiction that has, in any measurable way, done more harm than good over the course of history.

One of the reasons I've been attending some of the events at an Episcopal Church of late is that I very much want to think well of Christians. I want to see them as being as rational and intelligent as any atheist, but then something like this school shooting comes along, and I hear their pablum about the miracles God performed in saving some while others died, and I feel like a quixotic moron for even trying to find rationality in Christendom. My only question this morning--a pessimistic morning for sure--is to wonder how self-servingly delusional religion has to be before it qualifies as mental illness?

*I have no idea who said this.