What about Job?

On another board, the subject of Job came up.

I know a lot of believers seem to find a positiv message in this particular book of the Bible, but I always thought it was a negative and nasty story. I always thought Job and the idea of Job was terrible.

It's Job 1:9-1:22 that bugs me (sorry for the long, loooooong quote):
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6: Now there was a day when the sons of God came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan came also among them.

7: And the LORD said unto Satan, Whence comest thou? Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, From going to and fro in the earth, and from walking up and down in it.

8: And the LORD said unto Satan, Hast thou considered my servant Job, that there is none like him in the earth, a perfect and an upright man, one that feareth God, and escheweth evil?

9: Then Satan answered the LORD, and said, Doth Job fear God for nought?

10: Hast not thou made an hedge about him, and about his house, and about all that he hath on every side? thou hast blessed the work of his hands, and his substance is increased in the land.

11: But put forth thine hand now, and touch all that he hath, and he will curse thee to thy face.

12: And the LORD said unto Satan, Behold, all that he hath is in thy power; only upon himself put not forth thine hand. So Satan went forth from the presence of the LORD.

13: And there was a day when his sons and his daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:

14: And there came a messenger unto Job, and said, The oxen were plowing, and the asses feeding beside them:

15: And the Sabeans fell upon them, and took them away; yea, they have slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

16: While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The fire of God is fallen from heaven, and hath burned up the sheep, and the servants, and consumed them; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

17: While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, The Chaldeans made out three bands, and fell upon the camels, and have carried them away, yea, and slain the servants with the edge of the sword; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

18: While he was yet speaking, there came also another, and said, Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother's house:

19: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead; and I only am escaped alone to tell thee.

20: Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped,

21: And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.

22: In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.
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God and Satan collude to destroy the life of a pious man and kill off his entire family as a test of his love for God? What sort of sickness is that?

I'm an atheist who grew up attending church weekly and the story of Job always seemed perverse to me. Perhaps if God weren't so clearly crazy and evil, the book would be easier to take.

I'd like to see what others on this board think.

Job didn't even get the worst of it. Consider all those servants and family members, killed in various brutal and painful ways just to settle a bet.

#2 - See, that's what I'm thinking too.

I know believers look at it a different way, so I'm curious to see what defense is mounted. Job and Abraham are two icons of the Abrahamic religions that I just never 'got'.

First thing to remember is that this is a story. If This were being told today, the first verse would be, "Once upon a time...." The bet between God and Satan (lit. The Accuser) is a plot device. We have a much more rigid mind set sometimes than our forebears, and when we hear stories about God we think "Theology" and "Truth" and we tend to take them more literally than an ancient Hebrew would.

Second, the story serves a purpose. The purpose is plain from the more extended dialogs that follow. (I assume you read the rest of the book.) The plot device is a set to take on the deuteronomic theology of the day, which basically says that if you do well, God will bless you, and if you sin, God will curse you. The story of Job is one very long exercise in saying, "That ain't neccessarily so."

Third, Job has a very important function, and not just for people of faith. I use it a lot in my work. People tend to think that if something bad has happened to them, THEY must be at fault. (Or they want to blame someone else.) The original plot device in Job serves to tell us that "Shit happens." When pressed for an explanation, that is basically God's answer as well. That is a very helpful lesson to learn. Stuff happens and it is not always someone's fault. Deal with it.

That is what I take from Job.

As an aside, I read somewhere, years ago, and it is probably a legend, but one that is retold, that when the discussions about which books of the Hebrew Scriptures occured, only one book was accepted without argument--Job.

Stuff happens and it is not always someone's fault.

But for the fact that in this story, the stuff is pretty explicitly God's "fault" and God's reasoning for inflicting the stuff is to settle a bet.

I much prefer Heinlein's version: Job: A Comedy of Justice

True.

But if you took the prelude, the prose intro away, the book would function as a guide to beating up people who are down on their luck.

Again, this is NOT a book about God, at least not until the end. The prologue is a plot device. Reading the prelude to Job for theology is like reading Little Red Riding Hood as a field guide to wolf behavior.

You get something of precursor when Job says to his wife, Shall we accept good from God, but not evil? (2:10, I think) But that is a sign of maturity, I think. There is nothing more pathetic than someone who thinks, God, the universe, their parents, their children, etc. ought to be a certain way. It is like railing against the wind. Stuff happens. This stuff happens, in the story, because God actually caused it, which should blow your minds, people of the ancient world, because you want to judge people by how the universe treats them. Guess what...the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Get over it.

To get to the God stuff, you have to wade through a lot, and then, what you essentially get is something along the lines of, You are not God, Job. Now that is the part I find essentially unsatisfying. (Me and Jung, so I am in good company here.)

That and the schmalzy ending, where Job gets everything back. THAT reads like someone just couldn't leave it with a unhappy ending, so they had to fix it.

Well, I have no problem accepting the Bible as a collection of stories. Presumably they were collected and preserved because they were interesting. What you're describing here is basically the atheist interpretation. Job's situation is more or less that of any protagonist in a dramatic story, except that the author of his misfortunes has been inserted in the narrative.

I raise my eyebrow when people start pushing the Bible as Truth, when they say it was divinely inspired and describes the path to spiritual redemption. Job is one of the parts that is hard to swallow. If you say "oh, that's just a story", then were does that leave the rest of the Bible?

If you can't trust the Bible when it talks about God, then who can you trust?

The problem is with God's reason. It's a dick wagging contest with Satan. Hello!!!!!

The "moral" is that you have to obey and trust in God and care only that he has some kind of reason and disregard whether or not his reason is totally bogus.

Whatever good ideas the story might contain, it's just a bad idea to have the believer come off better than God.

I think you miss Arctic's point. God's only a fictional device to advance the story line.

So Job is just another work of fiction written a really long time ago, huh? I guess I'll skip it since I don't like the ending or the characters or the plot all that much. (*sarcastic, maybe even snarky tone of voice*)

yeah, kind of like the Illiad and the Odyssey. Totally old, like totally not worth anyone's time.

Consensus seems to be that the story is fine if you are an atheist and don't believe in the fictional god character anywho, and appalling if you do believe in god (who comports himself very badly indeed). Works for me.

Having gone from the "What idiot would want to believe in a God like the one in the book of Job?" to finding myself turning to Job for comfort when I'm upset, I think you can't reconcile the two views.

A non-believer, by default, doesn't believe in the mandates of the bible. As a result, most would believe something along the lines of
1.) God is not necessarily good.
2.) God can be questioned, right down to his existence.

A believer of course, believes the opposite:
1.) God is ALWAYS good, even when it seems he's not
2.) God is not to be questioned
3.) God's ways will always be mysterious to men on earth

If you look at the story with the last three beliefs in mind, you have to accept that there was a reason God made that bet with Satan other than just to make a bet at the expense of Job. (I would posit, to make an example of Job to draw others* towards him. Which a nonbeliever might see as a bad reason, but a believer would see as a good reason.)

So, we've moved passed the "dick wagging contest" problem.

Then we have the "what did Job do to deserve God's wrath?"

Well, the answer in the book would basically be, who are you to know? And for a believer who believes their God is good, there is a comfort in that. Bad things happen and we don't know why, but in the end it is all for good. Or as Arctic put it, "Shit Happens."

And for the non-believer, well it's a bad answer and God seems heartless and random.

Basically, Job is a book for believers, not one for non-believers or one with intent to draw them in. And this matters a great deal, I think.

*By others here, I mean I those who have abandoned the law or perverted it, not necessarily nonbelievers

My first midlife crisis was a tattoo with the KJV Job 30:21 as text,

a rubbing from:
A Brother To Dragons: And Other Old-Time Tales by Amelie Rives a 19th century Harper's Romance,

and a cite to: R.P.Warren.

Brother to dragons : a tale in verse and voices by Robert Penn Warren is my favorite book.
Add A Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard and Job is one of the greatest stories. It takes a leap of faith. Without that faith, I "settle" being a happy heathen.

A believer of course, believes the opposite:
1.) God is ALWAYS good, even when it seems he's not
2.) God is not to be questioned
3.) God's ways will always be mysterious to men on earth

God sounds quite a bit like my abusive alcoholic father...

I think the point of Job is that he does question God. He rails against the injustice of his fate. He basically tells God to come down here and fight him like a man.

And that he was RIGHT to do so.

#10 It's convenient how God gets to be a "fictional device" only when he comes across as a total asshole.

I have so much to say about the insights here that I hardly know where to begin. And if I did begin, the discussion would become the full-time work of several days. That would not be a bad thing in itself; it's just that I need to get a few other things done. I'll come back soon to make a few selected observations, but for now, I'll just recommend this work: God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer. Chapter 6 treats the books of Job and Ecclesiastes (the latter of which, by the way, is both Ehrman's and my favorite biblical book).

twomoredays: The view that you express, or rather the Book of Job's exact expression of it: that God has a perfect right--based on nothing except his sheer power--to treat his helpless creatures as cruelly as his caprice urges, and then to defy us to ask questions, has been probably the controlling concern of my life. I still struggle considerably with it, although I have entirely rejected Christianity. Therefore, I think we could have an extraordinarily productive dialogue on that topic.

Oh, as to God's "reasons" for Job's torture, there is no need to impute redeeming motives to God in order to supplement the ones that are explicitly given: the Satan (adversary; not yet the Devil) challenges God, and God accepts the bet to defend his ego against the Satan's accusation that Job will curse him. It is essential to note that we, the readers, know that this is God's motive, and we are perfectly right in assessing it as a stupid and immature one. What is cruel, stupid, and immature is cruel, stupid, and immature whether the agent is a human being or God. The fact that it is God who is depicted as doing the cruel, stupid, and immature action does not make the action any less cruel, stupid, and immature. In fact, if God is any source of morality, he should both know better and provide a better example of responsible and kind behavior than that. Would we commend a human father for treating his obedient and respectful child as God--the putatively perfect Heavenly Father--treated the absolutely helpless Job, who had done nothing but obey and worship him? No person of humane feeling or decency would, of course. Why, then, should we applaud our supposed infinitely benevolent Heavenly Father for doing the same, except on a much grander scale? A fundamental point must be made here: if God is infinitely benevolent, and that is something that we are supposed to know about him, he must be benevolent in a way that we can recognize as benevolent, except in a much purer and higher form. It is preposterous to say that God is perfectly benevolent when he patently demonstrates horrible malevolence. It is silly to say that malevolence is really benevolence because "God's ways are not our ways." If God is purely and supremely benevolent, he must instantiate perfect and supreme benevolence--which we can recognize as such, since we are being told in human language that the property in question is benevolence, of which we have an understandable conception--not the opposite quality. Malevolence is malevolence; it is not benevolence because it is God's malevolence.

The reader of Job knows that God's real reason for unleashing horrible suffering on the protagonist is the stupid one of the bet with the Satan. But God not only refuses to give Job an answer--which the reader knows is supremely damnable--but he vaunts his power like the cosmic version of a schoolyard bully to rub it in Job's face that he need not give an answer. Just as well for God, because the answer, as the reader knows, is preposterous. If God has reasons for the present horrible suffering in the world, we have no warrant to assume that his current "reasons" are benevolent, either. Wanton cruelty is wanton cruelty, and is obviously not to be praised, but is rather to be hated, all the more, not the less, if God is the perpetrator. God, being perfectly good and omnipotent, has far less excuse than human beings do.

There are some profound finer, subtler points in the story of Job that are worth careful examination and discussion. Just to take one example, there seem to me to be deep affinities between the theodicies of this book and Greek tragedy that involve vital and live questions and truths. But to defend morally God's capricious tortures of his own creatures on the mere basis that he is God--and thus incalculably more powerful than we are, which is the only justification that he vouchsafes to Job--is terribly mistaken. This is the ultimate expression of the "might makes right" doctrine. As Bertrand Russell once observed, this God is merely a reflection of the oriental despotisms under which his chroniclers lived; in those very ancient times, a single human life was not esteemed nearly as highly as in the post-Enlightenment world whose values we assume as eternal and self-evident.

#18: I think this assessment depends on what literary traditions you're looking at. If you're looking at works intentended as popular fiction, like the books of Job, Daniel or Ruth, it makes sense to have a different standard compared to how you would evaluate other types of religious literature. There's certainly some genre-crossing going on, but it is fair to say that there is a spectrum going from theological to secular on which different books would fit.

Arctic:

I know of no evidence whatsoever for your claim that Job is not really about God, and, as I gather, that God in this book is merely a symbolic stand-in for something like blind chance. The book presents itself as exactly about God, and I have never perceived any indication in the text that suggests otherwise. Your proposed interpretation is a typical effort of modern theologians to relieve God of responsibility for the atrocities that the Bible patently presents him as performing. Is it a symbolic God that sends a bear to rend children to pieces for calling Elisha bald-head? Or who orders the Hebrews not only to conquer cities but to kill everything in them "that breathes", including such innocents as infants and even animals, who could have had no part in any offense against the Almighty? Or how about the man who reflexively tries to catch the Ark of the Covenant before it falls onto the ground, and dies for it? God's behavior in Job is perfectly in character with his actions elsewhere in the Bible. It is preposterous to claim that some of God's activities--namely, the ones which we can manage to approve by our post-Enlightenment moral standards--are really, honest to God, attributable to God; while the enormities he is more often portrayed as committing are not to be taken as God's (merely, in fact, because they repel our more humane modern moral standards). Despite the prevalence of this arbitrary, God-whitewashing "interpretation"--the only and desperate purpose of which is to suggest that God really doesn't behave cruelly or offensively although the Bible constantly presents him as doing so--I have never been able to muster the slightest intellectual respect for it, and merely find it intellectually dishonest, although I understand very well the urge toward it.

The way I heard the story, the preamble where "The Satan" acts as agent provocateur, and the back part where Job gets back "..all that he had before", were
pious bookends stuck onto a more straightforward story about a guy who does everything right and gets the royal screw; a circumstance not unknown even in the ancient land of milk and honey.

I'm not sure about the politics of the redaction, but clearly there were voices that wanted the story included in what after all is a compilation of the national literature of the Israelites. I can imagine that the pious objected to the atheistic tone of the whole thing and that a compromise was worked out; a little bit like Mimi dying in the "desert" of Louisiana so that the opera could pass muster with the censors.

The bookends make the story acceptable to the sensibilities of the pius, but the story still remains uncensored, win win, everybody happy.

Arctic:

You wrote:

"Third, Job has a very important function, and not just for people of faith. I use it a lot in my work. People tend to think that if something bad has happened to them, THEY must be at fault. (Or they want to blame someone else.) The original plot device in Job serves to tell us that "Shit happens." When pressed for an explanation, that is basically God's answer as well. That is a very helpful lesson to learn. Stuff happens and it is not always someone's fault. Deal with it."

I agree that this is a moral that can be drawn from the book, and that it is partially--but only partially--salutary. We tend, inveterately but incorrectly, to think in terms of praise and blame, when sometimes things do just happen and aren't anyone's fault. I think, however, that there is a terrible mistake in Job's version of that lesson. Job teaches that our suffering is indeed not, or at least not always, due to our misdeeds, at least not all the time; but it negates the value of that moral by replacing the explanation that our sins are to blame with the deforming lesson that our suffering is caused by an intelligent being who regards us as mere objects of his cruel caprices. The doctrine that God is either allowing us to suffer or actively causing our suffering is, to my way of thinking, more damaging than the idea that we cause it ourselves. I am not at all comforted, but in fact have been made very miserable, by the thought--which has, in fact, dominated most of my life--that nothing I do can improve my lot, and that I am in fact absolutely helpless in the face of an irresponsible God who, as Job explicitly teaches, dominates and manipulates human beings by sheer power and not at all with regard to morality or kindness, and who finds pleasure in causing or at least allowing the manifest and incalculable suffering in the world.

"Like flies to wanton boys are we to the gods: they kill us for their sport."
Shakespeare, King Lear

twomoredays:

A couple of other points, as follows. You wrote:

"A believer of course, believes the opposite:
1.) God is ALWAYS good, even when it seems he's not
2.) God is not to be questioned
3.) God's ways will always be mysterious to men on earth"

But I know of absolutely no reason for the believer to believe this. There is only a deliberate decision to ignore reality and claim that the opposite is the case. The believer's tenets are, in fact, insisted upon vehemently and contemptuously by the Bible; but that is only so that you will refuse to conclude the obvious: that this God is not good, and is not to be trusted, and is not only to be questioned but also to be rejected. The only available device for making someone intelligent believe something preposterous and contrary to patent reality is to persuade him / her not to use his / her native intelligence. And the command not to use intelligence is all that the Bible has to offer in support of the claim that God is good. (Please see my remarks addressed to you in
# 19.) God backs up his commands and claims with brute force and revels in his refusal to give reasons for his atrocities. Why in the world should we assume that he has any respectable reasons for them, especially if we take Job to heart? When the Greeks, as Paul relates, refuse to accept his message of Jesus' blood sacrifice conferring appeasing God's wrath toward those who have faith, his exasperated complaint is that the Greeks demand reasons for believing what he said. All Paul can do, for his part, is fume in anger and heap vitriol on reason and those who exercise it. Vitriol, however, does nothing to support any factual claim whatsoever. The Greeks were right in their method, and Paul was wrong in his: his message was indeed "foolishness".

Now my other observation for the moment. Your post seems to me to reveal the typical desperation and grasping for straws in defense of God by any means. In one short post, you made the following two statements:

1) " . . .you have to accept that there was a reason God made that bet with Satan other than just to make a bet at the expense of Job. (I would posit, to make an example of Job to draw others* towards him. . . .)"

2) Basically, Job is a book for believers, not one for non-believers or one with intent to draw them in. And this matters a great deal, I think.

This seems clearly to mean that Job's example might have been intended to "draw others in" to God, where the "others" include only persons contemporary and familiar with Job himself, and who could thus see his "example." The corollary of this is, of course, that the "example" of Job in the Book of Job, as opposed to the "example" of the historical man Job, has no such intention. If so, you are not contradicting yourself when you proceed to say that the Book of Job is not intended to "draw" unbelievers "in." Then your claim is the consistent, but to my mind quite odd, one that God was interested in using Job's example to draw in his personal acquaintances--no more than a few historical people-- but the Book of Job has no such interest in "drawing in" the millions of readers who happen not to have had the temporal possibility of observing Job personally. I know of no evidence for that claim, and am unaware of any attempt to explain the theodicy of Job accordingly. However that may be, if that is what you meant, there is no problem, so far as consistency according to formal logic is concerned, with your analysis. Job, then, is a book for believers only, and is designed to be of no help to those who are incapable of praising and worshiping the supreme perpetrator of atrocities that cannot be defended and that God, for that very reason, proudly refuses to defend to sufferer or to humankind at large. God thus demands our worship on the strength of his sheer terrible power, used without any regard to anything that may be called goodness in any sensible way. The alternative to this interpretation--which may very well be the one you meant to communicate, as the natural reading suggests--is that your first and second claims flatly contradict each other.

I know that the front and back of the story are later accretions, that the oldest story is in the middle. I like the accretions -- holy jet setters goofing off in heaven and later the most awesome whirlwind, "WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I CREATED THE UNIVERSE?" Then, families and homes being fungible, his are replaced.

But, with or without the accretions, I see the story as not being about God. Rather it is about man's relation to God (not especially about God's relation to man). Man seeks an honest hearing in the face of God's will injuring him. He may not ever get one, and he must be accepting of that or despair.

Robert

Simple observation often reveals cases where the "good" get the shaft and the "wicked" die rich and happy.

The Abrahamic, and the Hindu/Buddhist pius (is that true of ALL religions? Dont know them all) seem to want to show that the seeming injustice and cruelty we see in the world every day is an illusion and that its "all right" after all.

The "bookends" try to do the trick by saying it was all part of the plan (just testing, Babes!) and it all turned out OK in the end.

The Hindu/Buddhist idea (I think) is either that its all maya (no real suffering, just an illusion) or its the workings of Karma, so it all works out in the end...either the bad stuff is payback for misbehavior in a previous life or the wicked but happy will suffer in the next. Books balanced, good comes of good, evil comes to the evil.

ref #25

WHERE WERE YOU WHEN I CREATED THE UNIVERSE?

When discussing religion with the pious there seems to come a point where the structure of the argument becomes "You shut up your donkey face!"; though sometimes framed in more elegant language; but it all comes down to the same thing.

Its interesting that the argument has such ancient lineage.

Job did shut his donkey face, but he wasn't punished for his opening it earlier. I do think that whirlwind is more elegant language; I also think that elegant language has weight.

Robert

rdurick:

1) modalursine didn't claim (at least in # 27) that Job had been punished earlier. That writer probably knows that Job had been tortured for no reason at all, except for the egotistical bet between God and the Satan, which is, if possible, worse than punishment for "sin." Thus, that point is irrelevant here.

2) I appreciate elegant language, too, and it does have "a kind of weight." But that weight does not include the capacity to turn cruel scorn of an inestimably weaker, suffering creature into something morally better. I find modalursine's points quite apposite.

criels,

My terseness may have led you to misunderstand me. When God finally showed up and the reckoning was made the reckoning did not include a punishment for Job's having earlier railed at God; I was illuminating, I hoped, Mr. Cow's assertion that we may be told to shut our donkey faces. The punishment as he sat on the dung heap was gratuitous.

I began to rethink the weight of elegant language right after I punched 'submit.' I think there is more to elegant language, especially longstanding elegant language, than unjustified narrow elitism, but I don't know, on reflection, what it is.

By the way a different God, the process theology one, would have handled it all differently.

Robert

It is true that God doesn't punish Job at the end of the book, just as Job's earlier torture wasn't punishment, either. But the point I meant to endorse was that God did give a reply no more decent--and in fact far less so--than "shut your donkey face." He taunted Job about who created the world, etc., as if that entitled him to torture his own creatures (who, after all, didn't ask to be thrown into this world in the first place). There can be no justification for God's treatment of Job, either during the body of the story or during God's grand appearance at the end. I think that modalursine's expression of God's point in colorfully rude terms suggests the truth that God was being rude and boorish and saying nothing better than the speaker of the "cruder" sentence, and that we should pay God's speech here no more respect than that of someone who did in fact say "Shut your donkey face." Whether put God's way or modalursine's, the effect and disregard for the hearer are the same. In fact, God's answer suffers badly in moral terms with the more homely "Shut your donkey face": what God says is more taunting and contemptuous.

You seem to have some more subtle point that I am missing. If so, I hope that you can communicate it so that I can understand.

19, 24

You bring up some interesting points and I want to try to respond to you, but please forgive me if I am not always clear. It seems to happen when I get into debates on LT.

You write:
The view that you express, or rather the Book of Job's exact expression of it: that God has a perfect right--based on nothing except his sheer power--to treat his helpless creatures as cruelly as his caprice urges, and then to defy us to ask questions, has been probably the controlling concern of my life. I still struggle considerably with it, although I have entirely rejected Christianity. Therefore, I think we could have an extraordinarily productive dialogue on that topic.

First, even those who have made that leap of faith and are arduous believers struggle with this idea. I struggle with this and still I think that Job has a message that comforts.

I'm going to try to work through this but I need to make the disclaimer that I'm not any sort of expert. I'm a person who didn't start reading the bible from a religious perspective until somewhat recently. As a result, some of my interpretations may be wrong or historically suspect. In some of the places where I find Job to be tricky, I have relied on the notes in my version of the NIV Study Bible. Furthermore, you're probably going to find some of my answers infuriating, stupid, irrational, or all of the above.

Okay, here we go. You write:

Oh, as to God's "reasons" for Job's torture, there is no need to impute redeeming motives to God in order to supplement the ones that are explicitly given: the Satan (adversary; not yet the Devil) challenges God, and God accepts the bet to defend his ego against the Satan's accusation that Job will curse him. It is essential to note that we, the readers, know that this is God's motive, and we are perfectly right in assessing it as a stupid and immature one. (Emphasis mine.)

I think you may be write about my previous seeking of a purpose other than the one explicitly given. You're right that the text says that the purpose was to prove Satan wrong. I do, however, disagree with assessing it as a stupid and immature one. Looking at the text through the lens of the believer, proving Satan wrong is something we would consider to be a good thing. Of course, that it had to be done through the suffering of Job, this is the part that is more difficult to understand. Why doesn't God just tell Satan to go away, he'll have none of his games? I think because not settling the bet is too dangerous. Satan claims that all Job's godliness is because God is good to him and blesses him and how can God prove this is not so without taking away those blessings, at least temporarily? So, no, I personally do not think it is stupid and immature, but necessary.

And then:
In fact, if God is any source of morality, he should both know better and provide a better example of responsible and kind behavior than that. Would we commend a human father for treating his obedient and respectful child as God--the putatively perfect Heavenly Father--treated the absolutely helpless Job, who had done nothing but obey and worship him? No person of humane feeling or decency would, of course. Why, then, should we applaud our supposed infinitely benevolent Heavenly Father for doing the same, except on a much grander scale? A fundamental point must be made here: if God is infinitely benevolent, and that is something that we are supposed to know about him, he must be benevolent in a way that we can recognize as benevolent, except in a much purer and higher form. It is preposterous to say that God is perfectly benevolent when he patently demonstrates horrible malevolence. It is silly to say that malevolence is really benevolence because "God's ways are not our ways." If God is purely and supremely benevolent, he must instantiate perfect and supreme benevolence--which we can recognize as such, since we are being told in human language that the property in question is benevolence, of which we have an understandable conception--not the opposite quality. Malevolence is malevolence; it is not benevolence because it is God's malevolence.

Oh boy. I'm pretty sure volumes and volumes have been written on this and that there has been much dissatisfaction with even those volumes. And it is tempting to claim I don't have the theological chops here–and I probably don't–but I'm going to try to address this anyway.

I think that to see God's benevolence anywhere in the Bible and especially in the Old Testament, you have to believe in the fall. Without the fall, the God of the Bible isn't benevolent and we can stop right here. But if you'll allow (even theoretically) that man is inherently fallen, then man deserves every single punishment doled out in the Old Testament and much more. God's benevolence stems from the very fact that he chooses, at times, to pardon man despite the evidence against him. And that is benevolence we can see. What we can't see is why he chooses some times and some men and not others.

The story of Job, told in the way it is told in the Old Testament, exists because of the rational, theological answer to why God chose some men to bless and some men to punish. The theological theory was that obviously those men who were punished had done something to deserve it.

If you read Job this is captured in the main tension between his friends who argue, surely you've fucked up somewhere man, and Job who says, no, really, I've done my best to be righteous and holy and upright.

And I think the story of Job is our way of knowing that God is benevolent even though we don't get to see all the benevolence. That through the book of Job, God is truly saying, "Look, guys, we're going to hit some turbulence, it's going to seem like I am batshit insane, but just hang in there and you'll see that I knew where we were going the whole time."

And, I've addressed like what half a point, now? I'd like to keep at, but it's really late and I need to sleep.

To be continued...

Hmm, so I pulled out my copy of God: A Biography by Jack Miles last night to see what he had to say about the whole Job episode last night and found he had this to say about the book:

"There is, in no other words, no higher, impersonal synthesis beyond personal good and personal evil. The Lord God himself is ultimate in this vision, and therefore evil and good must be found simultaneously and personally in him if they are found anywhere. If Zephaniah rejects, as error, the claim, 'The Lord will do nothing good or bad,' the counterclaim, the scandalous truth that the Book of Job places in evidence, is not 'The Lord will do only good'; it is 'The Lord will do good, and he will do ill."

So, of Miles is right, this would invalidate my first point for believers. (God is always good, even when it seems he's not.) I'm not actually sure this is the case, however. (After all, Miles is treating Job through the lens of literary criticism not religion. The question, I suppose, being whether we need to come to the same conclusions from both approaches. I don't believe so.

Back to post 19, you write:
The reader of Job knows that God's real reason for unleashing horrible suffering on the protagonist is the stupid one of the bet with the Satan. But God not only refuses to give Job an answer--which the reader knows is supremely damnable--but he vaunts his power like the cosmic version of a schoolyard bully to rub it in Job's face that he need not give an answer.

I actually think what you hit on here is probably the part of Job that most mystifies me at the moment. Why need Job be left out of the loop? After all, you're right, the reader knows exactly why God took from Job.

I kind of want to posit that God can't tell Job because it defies his nature to interfere with man in a way that causes man to doubt him. But if knowing the truth about God's actions would cause Job to doubt him, to walk away from God, then we're right back to there being something damning about God's actions.

But maybe, Job wouldn't have doubted God, would happily have served him to defeat his Adversary? I actually think this is more likely. But then why doesn't God tell Job? And how do we know that the theologians are wrong? Aren't we back to "Might makes right" as they posited all along? Apparently not since God requires intercession from Job on their behalf, implying that they had slandered God.

Let me go dwell on this for awhile.

#33 - twomoredays,

I kind of want to posit that God can't tell Job because it defies his nature to interfere with man in a way that causes man to doubt him. But if knowing the truth about God's actions would cause Job to doubt him, to walk away from God, then we're right back to there being something damning about God's actions.

What?!

So God appearing and saying 'Hey, I'm in a dick measuring contest with Satan. Sorry buddy!' will make Job doubt, but God doing nothing will not make Job doubt? What sort of crazy logic is that?

I'm pretty sure that there are one or two people who have lost their faith in God because the crap kept piling up and God just didn't seem to care.

(Sorry if that was too crass.)

I have always thought of Job as god's lawyerly post-script to the promises of the old testament. Throughout the old testament, god is usually promising his chosen people special treatment (ex. Deuteronomy 30.9 - Then the LORD your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers) and extolling his own virtues (ex. Deuteronomy 32.4 - He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.). As we have discussed above, even the most faithful cannot fail to notice that god often fails to deliver on his promises and to behave in ways that do not appear particularly just or upright. So should the reality of the world put the lie to the promises of god, and thus negate his reputation or even his existence?

Of course not, says god the lawyer. He would want to add some legalese: Results in bible not typical. God's justice may be withheld due to cosmic bets, inattention, or for any reason he damn well pleases. Although the information and recommendations in this book are presented in good faith and believed to be correct, god makes no representations or warranties as to the completeness or accuracy of the information. This book and heavenly intervention provided on an "as is" basis, with no liability for any errors or omissions in the materials or actions. All rights reserved.

Job basically sums up all these points in story format. It is essentially god's "get out of reality free" card, the answer (satisfying or no as your opinion may be) to the ever present question of why a just and powerful interventional god allows bad things to happen to good people. Without it the bible just wouldn't hold up in the real world. With it, any questioning believer can assuage their doubt with the knowledge that god at least has a plan.

To sum up: to Arctic it means shit happens, to jlelliot it means god has a plan, and to me it means god is an asshole.

Perhaps that's why it's still topping the bestseller lists!

Yes, God wins by hook or by crook, doesn't he, jlelliot. I smell something wrong with the contract here.

It seems that people have been writing about the problem of bad things happening to good people (and vice versa) for as long as they have been writing about something other than staples in the warehouse.

In addition to the mainstream Jewish and Christian explanations (see #14), there are a variety of others (heresies, if you like). For instance, God isn't good or it wasn't God.

In addition to the mainstream Jewish and Christian interpretations of the Book of Job (such theodicy), there are heretical ones there too. And in addition to the modernist interpretation (it's a universal story — note that everyone is a foreigner), there are post-modern ones. For instance, it's a parody of wisdom literature.

Haha, just wanted to clarify that I don't believe the bible at all - I think Job is a necessary inclusion to keep the reality of chance and the world from utterly destroying belief in god, but I think it was added with that intent by people.

To summarize, shit happens, which the bible explains by saying god has a plan, which may or may not include acting like an asshole.

I understood.

Just wanted to make sure. Have you seen the Mr. Deity web series? There is a really funny episode about god always winning - it is episode 4. Here is a link.

Not a bad clip. Its main defect is that the God character, although he has the appropriate utter disregard for earthly misery, lacks the active cruelty of the "real" one.

(You can pretty much assume that I don't know about anything on YouTube. I've gotten the impression that I'm missing lots of entertaining material.)

Hey twomoredays, what think you of your off-shoot thread so far?

ref #41
What a hoot! I'm lovin it! I dont suppose it would make a good TV show, huh. Oh well.

Well, I think it's fascinating, but I always think theological-type stuff is fascinating.

I suppose it surprises me that there are some people who seem content with a totally irrational faith. It shouldn't surprise me, but it does.

I'm not saying the Bible should always have a clear science based explanation for everything, but I'm thinking that at least its internal logic on the big stuff (Is God good, in this case) should be more or less consistent.

so I am sitting in the psych ward this morning, talking to a woman whose 6 year son has Leukemia. She has been severly depressed for years, and she is full time caretaker for her kid. Husband is no help.

She was feeling suicidal, and thus is now sitting in someone else's pajamas in a locked room.

What would any of you say to her?

edited to add; this is not a snarky, rhetorical question.

> 46. Frankly, I would try to say little or nothing. And instead, be present, and listen.

But, I'm not a physician or a psychiatrist, or a chaplain or a counselor, so I've neither the academic background nor the licenses and training -- nor, I imagine, the human wisdom -- to know the proper way of coping with this type of case.

I commend the work that you do, and wish you luck in this particular situation.

I'm not sure I find the book of Job particularly comforting, myself; but then, some people don't see what I find fascinating about Tolkien or Lovecraft. To each his own...

Arctic,

I can't say what I would say. I will freely admit that I probably wouln't have the appropriate skills to deal with a situation like that.

I can tell you that if I were the person in the psych ward though, I would be very unlikely to take comfort from the book of Job. That's just as bad as 'it's all a part of God's plan...'

this is not a snarky, rhetorical question.

Coulda fooled me.

Unless you're a physician who can say "Good news! We can cure your depression with this perfectly safe and effective little pill" ; there isnt much to be said.

Even I can tell "We wish you an easy death" is probably not quite right.

Is she asking a question that needs to be answered?

Is the kid a gonner or is there a reasonable chance he'll get better? (Doesnt sound like it, but I figured I'ld ask anyway, just in case)

Who is taking care of the kid while Mom is incapacitated?

Is mom going to be stuck with a multi million dollar bill?

Can she get a new identity and start over?

I don't think Arctic was asking a snarky, rhetorical question at all. I agree with your points Modal, but give the guy the benefit of the doubt, huh? He's already playing a tough room.

I know he was earlier saying that Job can be a comfort to some people. I suppose it can if they don't know that first part.

Hmmmm....

Has the rain a father? Or who hath begotten the due?
....Have you seen the treasury of the hail? ....

(If not, then "You shut up your donkey face" ).

What would YOU say, Bob Dog, to this person who is really up a creek without a paddle? Dont know?
Well, YSUYDF.....just sayin.

What I said was very little. What she needed was to learn to accept her situation. Her son has leukemia. He may die. Caring for him is an incredible burden. Her husband is no help.

Fighting reality can really aggrevate depression in some people. The more they fight it, the more they lose. The more they lose, the worse they feel. The worse they feel, the more they lose the battle...you get the picture.

We talked through it, and she voiced her frustations, but moved toward some acceptance. I didn't quote Job, but she picked up on having to accept both good and evil from the universe. Well, she started that process.

When I saw her this afternoon she was a doing a bit better.

Arctic:

I am uniquely well-qualified to address this question. I have written posts scattered around this group's forum addressing a form of this question. The first thing to note in preface is that your question assumes that the truth of whatever religious doctrines that you may see fit to convey to this sufferer is totally irrelevant: the objective is to make her feel better for the present by any means available. That assumption is a bad start for me. I have a strong bias in favor of truth.

Second, I am not at all confident in your implicit assumption that dispensing false religious doctrines to her will prove consoling. If that were the case, I suspect that, especially if her misery has been protracted over years, she would have considered religion as an escape before (granting that your form thereof may be different and potentially more effectively consoling to her than the ones to which she has been exposed).

But here is a much more compelling reason for suspecting that religious notions may not satisfactorily comfort her: and I speak of this one from extremely painful experience of almost my entire life. It may not be consoling at all to her to be told that God is responsible for the horrible suffering that she is undergoing. To think that some divine, omnipotent (or at any rate supernaturally potent), purposive God is presiding over the vast sum of one's own and all earthly miseries, is to my mind, and in my long experience, ultimately horrifying rather than comforting. Now that I have finally shaken off belief in the God who would allow and even cause such horrors, and even potentially impose eternal and even worse horrors beyond this life, I am far better off than when I was oppressed by such belief. I would much prefer to believe in a dumb material universe that does not care about anyone one way or the other, and clearly see that such well-being as I and others are capable of achieving must come from our own resources and efforts and the help and comfort of those who love us.

A really stupid question was here. See Arctic's comment #56 below.

And if that were you in the psych ward, I would have a totally different approach. For me, people tend to know the truths they need to survive. It is not my job to lay any notion of religious truth on people. It is my job to help them see what reality is for them, and to help them figure out how they can best cope with it. You found a way. Other people find different ways.

She is a PSYCH WARD in a HOSPITAL, of which I am on staff, and only one of her many providers of care. OF COURSE she is seeing a shrink.

What do you mean by "what reality is for them"? I'm thinking about the reality of what Bertrand Russell (superfluously) called "stubborn facts": e.g. her son is terminally ill, her husband is useless, etc. It seems to me that that state of affairs is reality, not just reality in her head. I'd seriously like explication.

Arctic #56

Sorry about that stupid oversight. I didn't go back to check that because I went into emergency mode. Personal reasons.

Different people value different things. Many of us may find little consolation in the story of Job. That doesn't mean noone can. It's called cultural relativism. Many non-christians like to cite relativism in order to say that christian "truth" doesn't equate to everyone's truth. But the argument goes both ways no matter what one's opinion of reality is. The facts may be on your side, but it's not your life and not your decision to make about how other people view reality on their own.

What is realilty for them? I guess by that I mean what they will use to process the facts in their life, and what they need in order to accept them. For her, the facts are pretty straight forward, but how she will deal with them is going to be up her.

Other times the reality is not so clear. Is the marriage over--or not? Is your drinking a problem--or not? Are you working on striving to live, or have you accepted an imminent death? Are you going to listen to your doc, or are you going to continue to believe there is nothing wrong with you? Do you believe you can change--or not?

The answer to these questions will be the patient's reality. I can talk until I am blue in the face, but THEY have to see it.

Edited to add: Sometime I can point out reality to them, for example the guy who wanted to vet me by asking if I believed in Genesis 1,2 literally. At one point, after going nowhere in the discussion, I pointed out that he was locked in a psych ward, and if he wanted to sit and discuss creation theories that was up to him, but it would not help him get better.

He got the point.

Thanks, Arctic. I get more of your meaning about "what reality is for them" now. The next thing I'd like to understand better is this: in view of the fact that you don't recommend identifiable religious doctrines--as all chaplains in my experience have done--and yet you are helping the patients cope with their realities, how and in how many ways do you understand your role as different from that of a secular therapist or psychological counselor? It's hard for me to get the idea of a chaplain who offers no religious doctrines.

Sometime there is no discernable difference. My training is mostly secular. If I were talking with someone who did not believe in God, the only difference is that I might let them vent that out, if they needed to, while a secular therapist might see that as irrelevent to the discussion.

The big difference is that people know who and what I am when I come in the door. So when I lead groups in the pysch ward, they are freer to ask questions about faith than they are with the other docs or nurses (even though some of them have very defined faiths.) The tricky part for me is (and I realize some people will find this kind of humorous) is to steer them away from delusional behavior, ie usage of God as drug, messianic complexes, direct words from God, etc. While I do believe in God, I also believe in mental illness, and can usually tell the difference. Often patients will religious delusional behavior will trust me more than they do the docs, and so I end doing the non-medical work with them.

With patients who do have faith, we talk about God, and how they feel God is involved (or not) with their lives, and often we pray.

Many times I people start by brushing away any religious things I might have to offer, but then, after we talk a bit, they start to open up, will tell me their religious story, which is often a significant piece of their history. It is just not one they have felt comfortable talking about.

criels, I hope I'm not reading too much into your posts, but you seemed to imply that believing in some sort of all-powerful God is always going to be painful in the end and, well, I don't buy it.

My whole post-adolescent life has been riddled with bad coping mechanisms. And a lot of secular therapy - which helped some times and not so much at others, but it was good old-fashioned Christianity that helped me get some of that in order.

I have to see my suffering as having some sort of purpose or, to put it frankly, I really would give up. If all my life is just bad brain chemicals, bad genes, bad upbringing (and maybe that's all it is) but if I have to believe that's the truth, well then I start to quickly slip into depression and from depression to self-harm and suicidal ideation and to... well you get the idea.

God (and the story of Job, for the matter) helped me get to acceptance. And without acceptance, I think there's a good chance I might not be here typing this.

Does belief in God protect me from further episodes of depression? No, of course not. But does a belief in God keep me from sliding further and faster than I would without? I'm nearly positive it does.

Maybe God is my faulty coping mechanism now, but it's a lot less faulty and permanently damaging than all the ones before it.

I wonder if maybe our different experiences have to do with upbringing. I was brought up without much of a concrete idea of God, so maybe I was a lot more free to see a loving God and not a vindictive one. I don't know.

If I were in the mental health care profession would I walk around prescribing God to my patients? No, of course not. But if they were someone interested in some sort of divine, I would suggest that they could use their beliefs to help get them through a bad time. Just as I would suggest that they might need to let go of God, at least as they had previously seen him, if it was something that was making whatever they suffered from worse.

Lunar:

The misunderstanding here is a simple one. I was concerned with the question whether belief in God is true, not whether its psychological effects are beneficial or not. Thus, for my purpose, if "the facts" are "on my side," then that is precisely what I am concerned to tell the other participants here. Your concern here, and your criticism based upon it (which I think is directed primarily at me, though I may be wrong about that) is entirely different: it is concerned exclusively with whether God-belief is psychologically beneficial, and that is not what I thought we were discussing. I am arguing that if people believe in any god I know anything about, then their belief is factually mistaken. You are telling me that I am wrong for doing so because the truth about that question is irrelevant and what I should be concerned about is accepting people's beliefs, however false, because they are psychologically comforting. We are simply doing two entirely different, and incompatible, things, and that can only lead to rancor, because it is an issue of right or wrong and we are not directly addressing that because I thought we were talking about the truth or falsity of belief in a god.

I was born with a disability and I went to a Christian conference (this was back in the good old days when I was a "believer") on disabilities in the church. One of the speakers said that the book of Job was "the sufferer's handbook." So I, like the lemming I was back then, picked up the Bible and read the book of Job 3 times.
After I accepted the wager as God's way of saying he had faith in human kind and Job's irritating whining as "I guess I'd feel that way too if I was in his shoes," I came to the end where the moral of the story seems to be "shut up and take it." The message really didn't help me all that much.

Arctic, if the book of Job informs you about "shit happening" that's great. But I notice you don't go charging in on someone who is suicidal for some pretty understandable reasons and start pontificating about it. You're way more compassionate than that.

Job is a book that can be read many ways. It's a minefield. For many people it is no comfort at all, and you obviously recognise that yourself. So why did you post that lady's story in this thread?

I hope she's doing better.

I have a general question about hospital chaplains, actually. My understanding is that, although they are generally clergy or the like, they aren't there to evangelize or provide only religious counseling of their own religion/denomination. I thought that, instead, they functioned as an optional resource for patients and families -- i.e. they won't forcibly counsel someone who doesn't wish it -- and they kinda function as a catch-all, go-to resource. A shoulder, a listening ear, someone who will contact a clergy from the patient's own religion if requested ... that type of thing. A chapter in one of my books about Muslim women was written by a Muslim lady who seemed to do exactly that, mostly with patients who were non-Muslim. She said that religious doctrine, especially her own, had very little to do with her actual job. Mostly she listened, held, comforted, and acted as go-fer.

Is that anywhere close to accurate? My contact with hospital chaplains has been very minimal.

Yes, that is pretty much right. I rarely go to a room where my presence is not requested by the patient, and I never go into a room or visit with a patient unless someone (nurse, doctor, social worker, family member, etc) requests it.

The only exception to this is my work in the pysch ward, where I lead groups, but then I put on my therapist's hat, and I never bring up religion. It if comes up in group, I usually ask to talk to the person alone, unless the whole group is interested.

I am part shoulder to cry on, part clergy, part therapist, part social worker...

And it is very rewarding.

-68 Interesting. I am currently in medical school, and have had many dying patients turn to me for religious comfort. Usually they tell me their beliefs about the afterlife, and ask me to agree with or confirm their views. Of course, I am happy to have them believe anything that gives them comfort, and I want to be comforting, but I also hate to lie, so I've struggled with coming up with an appropriate response to this type of direct question of my religious philosophy. If you have any suggestions I'd love to hear them.

I've also really wondered about the lack of clerical/religious presence in the hospitals - most patients do start talking about their faith when they start thinking about death, and I've always thought that their own religious leaders or at least a person in a similar faith would be more comfort than this random atheist student. Do pastors and suchlike not go to hospitals to visit dying parishioners anymore? I've never seen one, and I have thought about contacting a few, but reading your post it seems obvious to me that I should just get to know my hospital chaplains. How do you go about referring patients to the chaplain?

Our hospital has electronic charting, so the doc tells the nurse to make a referral, and the nurse charts it, and it gets to me. But yes, get to know your chaplains. And feel free to say, "You know, those are some really good concerns. Maybe you would like to speak to our chaplain?" Which you might feel more comfortable saying if you knew the chaplain, and knew that he or she was competent.

Pastor do visit, but not all I guess. Many people are very private about their illnesses, and they don't tell their pastor they are in the hospital.

In response to Arctic's original question, I don't think that I'd say anything to this woman. Unless it was "I don't know." Or maybe a heartfelt "You're right, that's shit."

I tend to find questions work better. Things like "How are you?" or "Is there anything I can do for you?"

so I've struggled with coming up with an appropriate response to this type of direct question of my religious philosophy.

Again, I like "I don't know." or "I'm not sure." in such situations. While some people may find it discomfiting that someone else is not automatically giving validation to what they believe/want to believe, it also offers quite a bit wiggle room.

On the original subject of Theodicy, oddly enough a couple of Jehovah's Witnesses stopped by my place while I was having my starter coffee and cigarette on the front porch today. They pointed to 1 John 5:19 - "The whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one."

They also pointed to John 4:5-6 -

"5And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

6And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. "

Though in there translation, they'd argued that God had granted the devil that dominion which would seem to bring us back where we started.

I know it is fine to say "I don't know" or to try to deflect the question off yourself, but it seems a little cold to me. I have mostly been going with statements like "thoughts like that can be such a comfort" or something asinine sounding like that, but now I will add "maybe you would like to talk about it with our hospital chaplain?" on the end, and hopefully that will be useful. Thanks for the advice!

I know it is fine to say "I don't know" or to try to deflect the question off yourself, but it seems a little cold to me.

See, for me, I have no problem saying that because it's not a cop-out (for me, at least). What do I think? I have no idea. Ask a question of me and get a bit of me.

Edited to add - In other words, I don't view this as deflecting the question from myself. It's an honest answer.

I absolutely see what you are saying, and in any normal interaction I would completely agree. But to me as a health-care provider interacting with a dying patient, I feel like I should make it as little about myself as possible. So it is no problem for me to answer "I don't know" or "I don't believe that" or what have you when patients are just inquiring out of curiosity, but it becomes a problem for me when it is clear the person is looking for affirmation, not for doubt or to start an intellectual debate about religion. Usually these people are really struggling with the idea of death, and I just have a huge amount of trouble saying anything that is only likely to give them more pain. However I'm not normally one to hedge when people ask me directly what I think about something. So I end up with these two opposing motivations, and I never know what to do about it.

To be honest with you, I think you're less uncomfortable with answers than you are with the situation.

In post #72, you say that "to try to deflect the question off yourself" "seems a little cold to me."

Yet this is precisely what you feel your duty should be, if as you state, you believe that you "should make it as little about {your}self as possible."

I'm certainly uncomfortable with the situation still, though I am working on it, but I don't have trouble responding to other types of questions (about planning funerals and wills, hoping to see graduations or birthdays or what have you, reflecting on life, etc). I do agree that my personal beliefs have very little importance in this instance, but I haven't come up with a way to deflect the question that doesn't feel cold to me (suggestions are welcome!), and obviously my goal in the situation is to be as supportive as possible.

What I usually do is say, "Well, that is a good question. What do YOU think?" (Most people have a good idea of what they want to hear.) Then we can talk at length about their answer.

To me those types of questions just seem so transparent that they irritate me, but if they work in your experience I'll certainly try them. Also in most of these situations the person has told me what they think (It's good to know that at least soon I'll be in heaven, I'm going to a better place, etc) and then ask me "Right?" or "Don't you think?" or something along those lines. And then I never knew what to say, because I certainly don't.

No one answer can cover every situation. It would be appropriate to say something like, "I am not a very religious person, but we have a chaplain" mixing honesty with helpfulness.

I am sometimes surprised at what works. If someone says, "I don't know," sometimes I will say, "If you did know, what would say?" and they give me an answer.

Thanks again for help, I'm sure I'll get better at it with more experience.

januaryw:

Thank you for sharing your personal experience with suffering and Job as offering a putatively appropriate response to it. My situation is comparable. I have had severe major depressive and anxiety disorders since early childhood. I suppose that having been introduced at around age 7 to a god of this nature was one factor that triggered any innate predisposition I may have had for that condition. My crushing, unbearable, incessant illness was, until I was about 16, identified as a "spiritual problem," and it was approached as such by the "Christian therapists" to whom I was taken. When I was hospitalized at 16 and deemed at risk for suicide for grossly abusing--in order to assuage my mental suffering--pain and sleeping medications that I had been prescribed after a car wreck, psychopharmacological treatment was advised and immediately offered (but not accepted). I continued to believe thoroughly in the infinitely cruel Christian God who is presented in the Bible. I was later hospitalized for my psychiatric condition many times, and received a variety of treatments, including a type of antidepressant that is seldom used (a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, which requires dietary restrictions), more than one round of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), not to mention the standard talk therapy, both individual and group. After a very long time, I began receiving psychiatric treatment, which was far from satisfactorily beneficial until an effective cocktail of medications, which now number 6, was hit upon. After years of study of, and many more of experience with, the putative Christian god, a reading of the Bible from beginning to end convinced me that Christianity was, beyond serious question, false. As with you, the Christian God, who tells us in effect to "shut up and take it" and elsewhere blames us poor, hapless mortals for all our miseries, and threatens us with eternal hellfire for sometimes trivial and shockingly arbitrary "sins," was no help to me. The most important point to me: it is false. That is enough to cause me to reject it. But second, so far from helping me, it was killing me; yet another reason for rejecting it.

81> But second, so far from helping me, it was killing me; yet another reason for rejecting it.

I think that is an adequate reason for rejecting it, for throwing it adamantly out of your life.

I have not been so adamant about existentialism. Without knowing it, I was an existentialist. It was killing me. I had to become a stoic -- to will oneself to believe something is a mighty challenge. Nevertheless I still have respect for the world view of existentialism and the existentialists. I read them carefully, sometimes lachrymose from my inability to participate.

I also personally find Christianity wrong (sorta), but I find wisdom in the Bible along with nonsense. I find that some of the best thinking is colored by Christianity because it was done in the West where there was no practical alternative. I can reject the church without rejecting the wisdom.

I like to say that I'll take my wisdom wherever I can get it.

Robert

twomoredays:

Post 63 puts a very different light on your concerns about Christianity. Before, you were arguing that it was factually true. Now, on the other hand, you are suggesting that you need to believe in Christianity in order to cope, and that you should, therefore, continue to believe whether Christian teaching is true or not.

You state that you must believe in a form of Christianity in order to get by: you may very well be right about this. I never meant to suggest that this could never be the case, and it very probably is the case with some people and at some times. If for you personally, belief is indispensable for your ability to cope, then that is entirely your decision. The benefit of doing so is obvious. The "should" here is your judgment to make on this question, which is of vital, urgent, and intimately personal importance to you.

#64: "The misunderstanding here is a simple one. I was concerned with the question whether belief in God is true, not whether its psychological effects are beneficial or not."

Nope. In post 53 you clearly state that you think dispensing false religious doctrines will fail to be psychologically consoling. That is what I was mostly responding to. I'm partial to that assessment myself, but it is not my place to judge whether it would work or not for someone else. I understand why some atheists are hypersensitive about the dogmas of others. I think it's mostly to do with the fact that such dogmatic people are capable of wielding political power over dissenters. But that is a problem created by the existence of government, not religion.

Lunar:

You wrote: "In post 53 you clearly state that you think dispensing false religious doctrines will fail to be psychologically consoling."

False. I "clearly stated" no such thing, especially where "clearly stated" implies positive assertion as it does in your sentence above. You seem not to have taken my deliberately chosen words seriously. Think about the following facts:

1) "I am not at all confident in your implicit assumption that dispensing false religious doctrines to her will prove consoling."

I do not think of "I am not (at all) confident in" as equivalent to positively asserting falsehood. I intended to express my doubt about a proposition with some hope of subjecting it to further consideration.

It is worth noting, although you did not emphasize that I apparently meant for my statement to apply to everyone, that I was speaking of 1) myself and 2) this one person (see "to her," which is the pronoun I continued to use) in her particular case that was under present discussion. I did not generalize it into a necessary or universal law. At the end, I did say that I felt better believing that people would come to an end other than Christianity or even theism taught; but that is, and is expressed as, my sentiment and wish for the human race (and surely I am entitled to have my own wish for the fate of the human race): I never said that teaching a non-religious view to everybody would be consoling to everybody. (I have recently discussed the matter of religion and consolation in at least one separate post.)

Notice that my continued careful phrasing was deliberately designed not to be "clearly stating)" something I was sure that I knew, especially something as sweeping as you alleged:

"I suspect that. . ."

"reason for suspecting that religious notions may not" (note suspecting, may)

And last, but certainly not least, carefully compare my entire following statement with what you alleged that I "clearly said":

". . . (granting that your ArcticStanger'sform of religious belief may be different and potentially more effectively consoling to her than the ones to which she has been exposed)."

Lunar:

One more crucial point.
Note that the first paragraph in the post on which you remark is in fact explicitly about truth and falsehood, and I said that I was interested in truth more than in comfort. More importantly, you will find, if you read my posts, that almost everything I have said has been about the truth or falsehood of religious belief. I have explicitly stated more than once that it is the question of truth with which I am overwhelmingly concerned.

Corrigendum:

Where I wrote in post 85:

"I never said that teaching a non-religious view to everybody would be consoling to everybody."

This statement, while true, was beside the point. It should read instead: "I never said that false religious beliefs would (always?) fail to be consoling."

Although you did not explicitly say "always," I think that is what the overall force of the post implies. But whether or not the idea "always" is implicitly present, I would be very surprised at myself if I did say that, because I know that it is plainly false.

Took me a long time to catch up on this thread, but doing so answered some questions I had been pondering.

It occurred to me, quite a few posts back, that perhaps part of the purpose of Job was 1) to admit that folks often find that life isn't giving them a fair shake, despite all they do to try to live rightly, and then 2) to show that a person can legitimately say to God, "You screwed me!" and not die.

It's one thing to say that God is all-powerful. But it's hard to love a God that is so powerful that you are terrified of it all the time. To show that you can challenge God and live, was surely an earth-shattering notion at the time Job was written.

Apologies -- I haven't read the whole thread above. But actually I think Job is a very valuable book. I remember when the tsunami happened, I heard from several sources that all those people died because they weren't Christian. We can also remember Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson saying that the moral failings of the US were the reason that 9/11 occurred. And then there were the folks that blamed Katrina on gays and abortion in New Orleans. These were pretty dumb things to say, but there are people who do believe in a very superstitious form of Christianity. During the Loma Prieta earthquake, a number of ceiling fans came loose from the ceiling of our office building and crashed to the floor. Most of us ducked under our desks, which was a good move. However, a small minority just got down on their knees and started praying. That was dumb.

The moral of Job is that bad things happen all the time, and that faith and prayer don't offer any protection from a lot of them, at least in this world. And if you as a believer blame the victim, you are a heretic, because you are claiming to know the mind of God -- so you better go read Job! Faith and prayer may bring inner strengths -- I have no doubt that some find them key in recovering from addiction. But you can't explain famine and plague and natural disasters and individual cancers on lack of faith. The world doesn't work like that.

criels, you wrote:

Now, on the other hand, you are suggesting that you need to believe in Christianity in order to cope, and that you should, therefore, continue to believe whether Christian teaching is true or not.

You state that you must believe in a form of Christianity in order to get by: you may very well be right about this.

First, what I actually wrote was this:
I have to see my suffering as having some sort of purpose or, to put it frankly, I really would give up.

It is not that I am dependent on Christianity itself, but dependent on the idea that suffering have some sort of purpose. Furthermore, when I am better and the storm of neurotransmitters is calm, I can even accept that it is all random and purposeless, but in the midst of all the suffering that idea can quickly make one suicidal.

That being said: I am profoundly concerned with whether or not Christianity, as a whole, is true. Perhaps I am silly, then, for constantly testing my faith against others arguments to see if it stands. But I couldn't hang on to it if I didn't do this.

I suppose, somewhat ironically, I don't have enough faith to just accept "the Bible is true" without somehow determining for myself whether I believe the Bible is true in the face of all the facts.

But I think God gave us the gift of critical reasoning with the intent that we use it on everything, him included.

In sum, Yes, my faith offers me a great amount of consolation and this is important to me. But it also just as important to me that it is true. I'm not sure I know of anyone who can will themselves into believing something they know is false.

True? False? One thing I teach my children and my students--whenever you are faced with two choices, look for the third.

Which is why I totally suck on true/false and multiple guess exams.

Which is why I never give true/false and multiple guess exams.

ref # 91

This is the sort of thing that makes me crazy (Though of course you might say I walked in that way).

Sure, there are plenty of times when the better choice of two is really neither. Should it be AM or FM? Well, how about phase quadrature ole' chum?

But just because there's dawn and twilight doesnt mean there's no difference between night and day.

Either giving milk to Ganesh will help get you get that
zoning variance, or it wont.

>92 modalursine: Modalursine, Night and Day might not be the best analogy to religious belief. The law of the excluded middle definitely does not apply. A religion may be partly true, and partly false, and partly unknowable.

>90 twomoredays: Twomoredays, In what sense do you believe that the Bible is true? Allegorically true? Literally true? True in its moral guidance? Inerrant? And how do you test this belief?

>93 jmcgarve:
Would you accept it as fair to say that I haven't quite made up my mind about how exactly true the bible is?

I do tend to say, at least to the friends I discuss my religion with, that I find the bible to be true when the writing is intended as literal. I also believe that even literal language must be read, at least to some degree, within the cultural context in which it was written.

(For instance, Paul goes off at some point about women who do not cover their hair speaking in church. Culturally, he was basically saying women who deny their marriages in church shouldn't be allowed to participate in church services.)

And obviously poetic language such as the beginning of Genesis is not meant to be taken literally. I assume that some unimportant details may have been embellished for literary effect. It's the word of God, yes, but interpreted through the eyes and words of man.

I also do no understand Christians who quote Leviticus when they're discussing homosexuality. I don't think Jewish law should matter to them at all.

I do not, however, believe in cherry picking. I don't think it's fair to leave out the "hard" parts. And there are some hard parts I still struggle with. I don't like that women aren't allowed to be leaders and pastors in the church.

I also tend to be really wary of Revelations. (I really just don't understand it.)

In sum, I think the Bible is inerrant in its basic message. God is three persons in one: the father, the son, and the holy ghost. God sent his only son to die on the cross and save us from our sins. And the only way to heaven is through belief in him.

How do I test this belief? Through application I guess. Part of the trickiness of faith when intersected with logic is that a lot of faith can't be proved one way or the other. How do you set up a test for the trinity? Christianity as the one true religion? Jesus's resurrection?

Judging the Bible's inerrancy, for me, is going through and seeing if it all matches up. At the end of the day do the cogs and the gears and the wheels of the individual commands create something worth basing my life on? Do the parts not fit together or do I just not know how they fit together yet? When I put them all together at the end of the day, does the machine run?

ref #93
I wasnt thinking or religion per se, but rather reacting to AS's dislike (which I actually share) of choosing between two alternatives.

--whenever you are faced with two choices, look for the third.

Excellent advice. I do that myself, especially with respect to technical problems.

Now when you say that a religion may be partly true, partly false and partly unknowable, I would ask you to get down to cases. Take Buddhism. I'm "warm" to some aspects of therevada Buddhism...that everybody is responsible for his own enlightenment, you've got to do it yourself, none of this "let George do it" business you see in some Buddhist traditions (Bodhisatva's giving you their merit. Really!) and that even the Gods are subject to the laws of the world, to the four noble truths and to the laws of Karma and Samsara (sp?).

But even there, the whole system rests on accepting the four noble truths which I think are a bit too pessimistic

Take NT #1: Life is suffering. Well, its true as Tevye famously tells us that "there's more to life than happiness", but "Life is suffering" isnt the whole story either. the way I see it.

Then too, you need to accept that Karma and Samsara operate as described, and all of that wont wash unless you believe in reincarnation too, so that the bad or good karma you've accumulated in life A can come around and work its effects on you in life B.

So who knows, maybe some of the psychological insights of traditional buddhism have some merit and maybe certain kinds of meditation pioneered by the buddhist tradition may have merit beyond their original intent of producing satori ; I dont rule it out.

But as a system, Buddhism if falls if reincarnation falls,
the same way that "Revealed" religion in the western sense fails if there's nobody home to do the revealing.

If you want to believe in reincarnation, hey! its a free country, but you have to know that there's no evidence whatever at all to support it and no known mechanism to make it operate.

So reincarnation is either an actual fact and phenomenon of our world or its not. I cant think how to prove or disprove it empirically (so I'm not an experimental genius. D'oh!) but by gum until someone shows me a third alternative, its either one way or the other, how could it be "a little bit pregnant" ?

I think you are confusing (and I may have made the same mistake in the context of my original post) choosing and believing. "Is reincarnation true?" which is what you seem to be asking, is a different question from "Is reincarnation, as I traditionally understand it, true, or is there no carry on of one's life after death to successive people?"

If asked the former, I would have to say, No. But, if given a choice between the latter two alternatives, I would say I don't like either.

I remember being in Bremerhaven, on a cold, rainy summer day, looking out at the sea, feeling like I had been there before. I hate swimming, but I love being in boats. I never get sea sick, and in some cases was the only person on the boat who was not.

Imagine my surprise to read that my family name, Murray, comes from the gaelic for mariner. In all likelihood much of my distant family's past was spent on boats. Did something come down through their DNA to mine? Did something get passed? I feel it did, but I can't say what or how. Do I believe in Reincarnation? No. Is there another choice? Yes.

>94 twomoredays: Good post, very candid and clear. However -- you can see that your standard as to the literal truth of the bible still leaves a number of judgment questions as open and subjective. Also, I think it's a little difficult to get the doctrine of the trinity out of scripture, as it wasn't invented until much later.

Ref #96
Is ataraxia compatible with grumpiness? As I float tranquilly through life there are one or two things which threaten to upset my "hozho", such as attempts at what seems to me to be a kind of "bait and switch".

The Hindus , Buddhists, Pythagoreans and Kabbalists
among others, seem to know what they mean by transmigration of souls, or by גלגול הנשמות (Gilgul HaNeshamot). That the actions of ones life may have effects on the lives of others now living or yet to come, is not it.

The common sense and common place observation that "The evil that men do lives after them" or that our actions have consequences for others is emphatically not the doctrine of Karma or of gilgul.

Suggesting that mundane facts of life support the notion that "there's a wee bit or even more than a wee bit of truth" in the mystical doctrines totally denudes those doctrines of their particular meaning and special power, confuses the distinction between fact and fiction, and generally creates a great fog of bewilderment where none need exist.

I feel like the little kid who says "I say its spinach and I say to hell with it."

I have been rereading Job, partially in preparation for class this week, but also because of this thread.

I saw something I did not see before. In a few places, Job, Elilhu and to a lesser extent Zophar all provide a prelude to God's final answer. (Job in 9:5-10 and 12:7-25, Elihu in 37:14-24 and Zophar in 11:7-9.) Also, in the Hymn to Wisdom in chapter 28 we also find a set up for God's answer. (Chapter 28 is an interlude, and may or may not be from the literary mouth of Job.)

So what God does end up saying is, in essence, what people have been saying about Him up until now. In other words, in the context of the book, all God does is affirm what people have already said about him. Granted he does so in a more powerful and eloquent way. I guess, being God, he gets a higher literary function.

Now I have struggled a bit with what this all means. But I feel it is an important part of the what the books is doing. Clearly the final speech is meant to be inflammitory. God does not provide an answer, and I don't see how anyone reading the book can read that AS an answer. It is meant to be provocative.

But it is provocative in that in is merely a more powerful repetition of what some, Job included, have already said about God. God is merely affirm what they already believe. And yet that, when it comes from the Mouth of the Almighty is disturbing.

I don't know. Perhaps the point is, if we say it about God we can contain it somewhat, but if we were to hear God say it, it would infuriate us, scare us to death, or as what happened to Job, cause us to fall to our knees. We already have it in our heads; when we hear it out of the storm of God, it becomes frighteningly real. Something like that.

I hope some one can put this together better than I did.

I've just finished reading God: A Biography, which has quite a bit to say about Job. It regards that sequence as the apex of the Hebrew Bible, and notes that (in the Tanakh order of books) God never speaks again after that speech to Job.

I find it difficult to summarize two chapters of deep thought, but the essence of its interpretation is that God silences Job with a display of power, but Job also silences God by refusing to take mere power as an answer about justice.

Abstracting from Job's speeches, Job says that God is not the kind of God that would do what He has done, and God is in the end forced to agree. The Bible does not show a changeless God, so this is perhaps the most important event in God's life.

The book also compares with I Chronicles 29:10-19, where David says similar things about God, and it invites you to imagine what it would sound like if God said those things about Himself.

Good call, enrique! Heinlein's book is great, even with the spotty source material.