Suntne Angeli?

Our good luck is to be working in a world where there is no ultimate justice and God knows there is no justice in the world. —Orson Wells

I leave my examination of the intellectual proofs or arguments for the existence of God, not convinced that there is a God. If the Scholastic proofs alone are the only validation of my knowledge, I am tending toward an atheist position. However, because I say these arguments don’t hold water, it is not to say that God does not exist. In other words, logic is not personal—my remaining unconvinced cannot be used to support a non-theistic position.

Many religious people, not just believers in the Abrahamic tradition, look to the acknowledgment of Evil as moving them closer to believing in God. I will call this exploration “stories we tell ourselves about the origin of Evil.” Believers claim that this adds the power of deep emotion, even intuition, to our stories. Their persuasiveness and coherence also depend on the cultural setting that gives rise to them, but for the moment, we can set this aside and simply say that we have experienced evil in the world. If we are theists who believe in a benevolent God, this presents a problem, but might it also be an opportunity to prove the existence of God?

This relationship between evil and the existence of God is paradoxical. After the barbaric horrors of the Second World War, many people of my generation point to the evil of the holocaust and say that this disproves the existence of a benevolent deity. The pro-deity camp points to the Garden of Eden and traces the evil and humankind’s agency as well as to a huge falling out between YHWH and some of his angelic hosts. The existence of Evil should convince us that God exists, 

This is the story that I am going to examine. The story of the fall of Lucifer went through several rewrites before the nuns at Saint Charles taught me that the evil in the world is the fault of Satan and his rebellion against the all-powerful Jehovah. In the myth, I learned that before he fell, Satan was called Lucifer, or light bearer, a name that indicates great beauty. (Baltimore Catechism #3, Lesson 4 - On Creation).2

Neither Satan nor Lucifer appears much in the Hebrew Bible, with the significant exception of the Book of Job. It was not until the early Christians began to search for some depravity of humankind’s fall horrific enough to require the sacrifice of God’s son that the character of Satan/Lucifer was fleshed out. Although mentioned in many places in the synoptic gospels and Revelations, Augustine of Hippo (Civitas Dei) put Satan at the scene of the crime in the Garden of Eden. In the story we read in the Hebrew Bible, it was just a talking snake who beguiled Eve. 

The shadow lingering from the God-in-the-sky myth is that God creates an existential problem by allowing evil—à la Job—why do the bad prosper while good people suffer? For the pious, this is a test. There is an unwritten rule or assumption: God only wants to make us better, which requires a leap of faith into the unknown. But this also, on some very real level, entails a denial of the reality of suffering. To say that suffering as a test dulls the sting. Get stoic and get through it—a survival mechanism. But is this even close to reality as it presents itself?

Reworking this story or myth even takes us out of the Biblical era and into the third century. It also has traces of the Manichean gnostic cult that Augustine belonged to for almost a decade. It was not a minor flirtation with some New Age religion; however, it is key to the Christian understanding of evil in the world. It introduces the notion of “free will” and thus responsibility and accountability. Probably, I need to look no further for why Avery was insistent that the part of belief in God is the acknowledgment that God exists. 

Elaine Pagels, in The Origin of Satan, talks about the role Satan plays in the zeitgeist of the early believers. There were people of God, the followers of Jesus, on the one hand, and those who were opposed on the other. This was problematic for Jews who were not followers of Jesus. Pagles says this myth contains the roots of the long, horrendous history of antisemitism. She says that in Mark’s gospel, Satan is identified with “the Jews.” It is no longer a myth. Real people were responsible for the execution of Jesus. The Church of James had names and addresses. It was about real issues right down here on earth. 

This also muddies the waters if I use the myth to trace some deep intuitive human intuition, some deeply felt belief in the unseen world. However, the creation of evil personified also has consequences and falls short as evidence of God’s existence. You can’t negotiate with evil. You have to kill.

My conclusion: Listen to your better angels, but that alone is not going to clear a certain path to the deity,

2 The LDS extends this odd belief to Lucifer, extending his rebellion to the Son of God himself ( Doctrine and Covenants 76:25–29).

Judge Judy and The Sanctification of Common Sense

You might have guessed that our heavenly version of the creation of evil has a more ordinary version, which I call “The Sanctification of Common Sense.” This also has its limits.

 

Do you remember that lovely Chanel cocktail dress that your friend Angelina borrowed without asking you and then ruined when she got wasted at a party that went from sedate to wild in a New York second? Then she compounded the injury by giving it to a dry cleaner who promised the world and returned an unwearable rag. That one? The one Angelina could not afford to replace? The one that carried so many precious memories of love and romance that you were going to treasure for as long as you lived? Yes, that one.

According to the Psalmist (8.5), Angelina is fashioned after the image of God, “a little less than the angels,” yet she managed to destroy Coco Chanel’s little black dress and probably a lot more. There is no justice in this world: one careless act destroyed both memories and friendship. You wanted to talk about it, but somehow, the messiness of the situation carried memory and friendship far beyond a simple conversation. 

You’ve watched Judge Judy on TV and imagined you, Angelina, and the dry cleaner standing before Her Honor, and you asked for redress. Indeed, the norms of friendship had been strained if not destroyed. Even though she's not Solomon, Judge Judy is Jewish and has a no-nonsense tone. She might set your world aright by crafting an equitable judgment. You felt personally violated by your friend Angelina. She knew how much it meant to you. You had a lot of investment in that little black dress. I will examine the story for evidence of an innate sense that Justice exists in the universe. It is perfect in so many ways.

The argument for the existence of the All-Knowing being able to right deeply-felt offenses.is designed precisely to satisfy this kind of personal vengeance. We know from experience that the verbal tongue-lashing delivered by Judge Judy, even if she assigns the maximum $5,000 fine and you can collect it, is not sufficient to satisfy the kind of deep grief and indignation that you feel, but it is something. You know that, given similar circumstances, almost everyone except the super-rich or deranged would feel the same and deserve equal justice.

What is also true is that you know that the feelings of vindication you might experience while watching TV are just that, an unraveling of feelings, and that’s just an illusion. There’s no guarantee that justice for all crimes will be satisfied, even at the tribunal of the All-Knowing at the Last Judgment. What is also true is that just by turning on the TV and watching Judge Judy, you are helping increase the sales of whoever has paid for the commercials and, let’s follow the money, help improve the wealth of conspicuous luxury brands so that the likelihood of universal justice is diminished.  

And here is what I think: There are bad people. Humans have devised the only justice in the human realm to order ourselves and create space for peaceful cooperation. It is not Divine. That we entertain divine justice is a result of assigning the governance of human affairs outside the world humans inhabit, or it could be whittling down our preconceived notions and beliefs to something very rudimentary and authentic, a fundamental and foundational understanding of the Golden Rule.