dreamer_easy | Just now, while washing up

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.