Just now, while washing up

[dreamer_easy]

I had a theological thought. I'm reading Suzette Haden Elgin's The Judas Rose, an SF novel set in a misogynist future. A woman is failing to suffer while giving birth, so some nuns torture her, for the sake of her soul.

This set me thinking about cruelty. Evolution can seem a cruel and wasteful way to make creatures, but as a mathematical process, it has the advantage of being mindless and changeable. Now, the nuns' thinking goes something like this: childbirth is painful. Why? God must have made it that way. (Part of Genesis' job is to explain why both men and women have to toil and suffer.) Therefore childbirth should be painful. A more familiar example these days is opposition to sex education: if you have sex, you may become pregnant, or ill, or die. Why? God must have made it that way. Therefore, sex should mean an unwanted child, or sickness, or death. But from an scientific standpoint, HIV is just a virus, not a punishment - there's no reason to encourage its spread. (Similarly, science provides no support for "social Darwinism", which says the strong should dominate and/or eliminate the weak.) Evolution has no authority; it makes no commandments. Strictly speaking, it's no more capable of cruelty than a rock on which you stub your toe.

Comments

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Well put, and I've often observed that the most strident anti-abortionists are also the people most vehemently opposed to any measures that would reduce the number of unplanned pregnancies - sex education, access to contraception, and any other alternatives to their "abstinence-only" fantasies.

Of all the stories about the church objecting to anything that they saw as circumventing "God's will", my favourite is the one that Asimov cites about their objections to the lightning rod. The incident which apparently changed their mind occurred when a load of munitions being transported through Italy in the early 19C was stored in a village church during a thunderstorm, on the optimistic assumption that God would never smite a church. Of course, the church spire was the tallest building in the village and had no lightning rod... it was struck by lightning, ignited the gunpowder, and the entire village was destroyed.

[pedanther]

God expressing his displeasure with the church for harbouring warmongers, obviously. :)

(Bet nobody thought of that at the time, though...)

[antikythera.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I've ever heard religious types call evolution too 'cruel' a theory to be compatible with the idea of God... do they do that?

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I don't know, but it oftens seems cruel to me.

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

from an scientific standpoint, HIV is just a virus, not a punishment - there's no reason to encourage its spread.

There's no reason to encourage it from a theological standpoint either. People who try to make other people miserable and add to their suffering, even for the most pious motives, are not doing the work of God, plain and simple. Christ spent much of His time on earth touching the untouchables, healing those who were deemed "sinners" and written off by the religious establishment. There is nothing unChristian about working with people suffering from HIV -- *whatever* the cause -- or trying to provide them with the best possible medicines and treatments to alleviate their symptoms.

There are, of course, natural consequences for wrong things that we do to ourselves and others -- i.e. a person who abuses drugs contracting hepatitis -- but I can see no justification anywhere in the Bible for human beings artificially forcing negative consequences onto other human beings (i.e. the kind of scenario Haden Elgin describes with the nuns), as though making them suffer will somehow in itself be good for their souls. The apostle Paul spoke of disciplining his own body and making it his slave -- in other words, not allowing his physical wants to take precedence over spiritual considerations -- but that's a far cry from encouraging Christians (or anyone else) to come barging into other people's lives and making them suffer unwillingly and unnecessarily.

There's nothing virtuous about suffering in itself: in fact the idea that we suffer at all is (as you know) attributed to sin and the Fall right at the beginning of Genesis. Suffering can be valuable when God overrules to bring good out of it -- but that's between God and the individual, not something that other human beings have any right getting involved with.

[purplepooka.livejournal.com]

But how about preventing sex education and forbidding contraception? What about those who don't actually inflict the punishment, but try to prevent the use of education and technology to escape the "natural consequences" of wrongdoing?

[rj-anderson.livejournal.com]

Well, I certainly don't believe that Christians should try to force non-Christians to act like Christians: that's completely pointless, not to mention obnoxious. So in that sense, while I would ideologically support an abstinence-only curriculum, I don't think it's realistic unless a person has a profound personal conviction and motivation toward abstinence. Ultimately I believe that every parent is responsible for educating their child about sex according to their own convictions on the subject, regardless of what the school system is or isn't teaching.

And no, I don't believe in outlawing contraception or preventing kids from learning about it and how it works -- though I do draw the line at handing it out like candy and talking as though it's inevitable that every teenager will be sexually active, or as though proper use of contraception is going to provide them with full protection against pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. But whatever happens, if a teenaged girl does become pregnant or a young man does contract HIV, I believe they should have loving care and support, not cold dismissal.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Yes indeed - proper sex education includes abstinence as a good choice.

[stephen-dedman.livejournal.com]

Agreed - but not as the ONLY possible good choice, which is how the theocratically-inclined and reality-challenged want it taught, even to trying to forbid masturbation!

I agree that it's not inevitable that every teenager will be sexually active (at least, not with anyone else), but I suspect it's inevitable that some and perhaps most will be, even if the activity is involuntary in far too many cases. And IMHO, providing contraception and counselling to protect these from HIV and unwanted pregnancies is too important to be left in the freshly-washed hands of the anti-sex league.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

You seem to be vigorously agreeing with both of us. :-)

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Little note on drugs and hepatitis - it's sharing needles which passes on bloodborne disease (much as it's unprotected sex which passes on HIV and other delightful things).

[gdwessel.livejournal.com]

Evolution, then, is the tool of nature, not the end result.

A hammer or a gun, neither are inherently good bad or indifferent. It's merely how it is used.

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

I think to be strictly correct we have to say that natural solution is nature's tool - but even then a tool suggests nature is setting out to accomplish a goal, which it isn't. What nature has is a very simple procedure, repeated over an enormous amount of time with a vast amount of materials!

[jvowles.livejournal.com]

A thousand million monkeys with chemistry sets......

[kateorman.livejournal.com]

Not quite, since the monkeys are presumably acting at random, which is the opposite of natural selection!