Review: When Bad Things Happen To Good People

 I was, in November 2004, the victim of attempted murder. You might very well say God tried to kill me. (After all, not even a sparrow falls dead without God being there, the Bible says. And for those who would argue that it was the man's free will and was therefore out of God's hands: the Biblical God, the Bible says, created this man knowing he would try to kill me. And there is no free will, but not because of God's omniscience -- Boethius's argument is convincing to me. And I don't believe there is a God, so of course I'm just having a little fun at the expense of the religious.) I was being hacked to pieces by a man using a knife, and a family of Christians came down the trail and scared off my assailant. It was an act of random violence.

 One of my teachers, an instructor who taught my oil-painting class, gave me a book soon after he heard what had happened. It is called When Bad Things Happen To Good People. I read it once. It was given to me with humble good will and was written in good faith for the most part at least. The author, Harold S. Kushner and his wife (and his late son), experienced personal tragedy. They lost him to progeria, a disease that causes premature aging (among other things), when he was barely fourteen years old. In the book, Kushner comes to the conclusion that God must not be all-powerful. This is the death of the "Theistic God" -- or at least his emasculation.

 I was surprised Kushner, a rabbi, would allow such a devastating claim. There are apparently great lengths some people will go to to "keep their faith." I commend him for writing a book with the honest intention of providing grieving families with an alternative to other popular works, which were "more concerned with defending God's honor with logical proof that bad is really good and that evil is necessary to make this a good world, than they were with curing the bewilderment and the anguish of the parent of a dying child. . . They had answers to all of their own questions, but no answer for mine" (WBTHTGP p. 4). He wrote, "I hope this book is not like those" (p. 5). The proof of the pudding is in the eating.

 "[A]ny attempt to make sense of the world's pain and evil will be judged a success or failure based on whether it offers an acceptable explanation of why he and we had to undergo what we did," he begins in his introduction. Progeria caused Aaron physical and psychological pain throughout his too-short life. Many other people experience progeria, whether in themselves or in a child or other relative. Does this book help people like them keep their faith and give them comfort? I don't know. As an unbeliever my entire life (how can one believe when one is not yet conscious?) I took no comfort in reading it, aside from the knowledge that a fellow victim was trying to help people like us.

 My suffering has not been great by any means. I was chopped up and sewn back together. I met a pair of good Samaritans who kept me from driving home -- I had no idea of the extent of my wounds and was planning to go home and take a shower -- and then gave me a diaper to put on the long, deep laceration on my neck while they drove me to the hospital. I am very thankful that they scared the psychopath away and took care of me until I could get to the operating room. I hope I would do the same if I were in their shoes.


 I have been in communication with a fundamentalist Christian who argues that his God need not answer to humans for his actions and cannot be judged by us. This stance seems to be close to the Nietzschean one of some "superior" men not being bound by the same moral laws as other, "lesser" men (not Nietzsche's words). Kushner analyzes the Book of Job as a case study in unneccesary human suffering. He looks at this Biblical-Nietzschean position in a paragraph that contains the sentence, "But that is precisely what Job has been claiming throughout the book: There is a God, and He is so powerful that He doesn't have to be fair" (p. 42). How can we call a being "all-loving" or "all-good" if it does not behave like a loving or even a good human being? The words lose their meaning when we put it above good and evil; it is "beyond good and evil," as Nietzsche's book is titled. Nietzschean believing Christians and Jews? That is a head-scratcher.

Kushner seems to terribly misread a passage in Job:

Have you an arm like God?
Can you thunder with a voice like His?
You tread down the wicked where they stand,
Bury them in the dust together . . .
Then will I acknowledge that your own right hand
Can give you victory. [Job 40:9-14]

"I take these lines to mean 'if you think that it is so easy to keep the world straight, to keep unfair things from happening to people, you try it'," Kushner gives in his exegesis (p. 43). God is lording it over Job (no pun intended), and Kushner sees him as admitting weakness! It is, in my reading, as if God is put on the defensive, and so is more aggressive and overbearing than usual, because he feels guilty for having given Satan explicit permission -- ordered him to, even! -- to torment an obedient and faithful man for the sake of a bet, the outcome of which it may be presumed God already knew.

 He may be trying to write his own Book of Job. We could easily compare the books on suffering and God -- books he found lacking in his grief -- to what is said by Job's friends, who cease believing Job is a good person so that they can keep believing in God as they conceive (of) him. He does not directly compare them, but the reader can readily see the analogy. Kushner writes of Job's friends, "They want to believe that God is good and . . . is in control of things. And the only way they can do that is to convince themselves that Job deserves what is happening to him." They try to silence the voice in them that says, "But for the Grace of God, there [go I]'" (p. 38). (The original quote, by a man whose name I forget, was, "But for the grace of God, there goes [his name].") Kushner may be updating the book for modern readers and arguing that God is not omnipotent just as the Book of Job said (in his estimation).

 When I talk to Christians about what befell me -- and I rarely do -- they invariably say something like, "Someone was looking out for you!" Probably, they have not thought this through. Is their God limited in its power, as Kushner says, so that it was not able to stop the attack from happening in the first place? If I had died, would that mean God was not "looking out" for me? No. To them, God would then be said to work according to his private, incomprehensible divine plan. There's just one of your typical Christian's heads-I-win-tails-I-win gambits. The statement, "Someone was looking out for you," is made unfalsifiable. It is just a euphemism for, "Don't complain: 'Where were you when I planned the earth?' [as Job 38:4 goes]."

 These Christians know, in their hearts of hearts, that sufferers do not like hearing this. Why don't they? Does it make sense, is it "true", in the famework of the Bible? Is this conception of a god internally consistent? More to the believer than to the skeptical reader: Is the statement, laid bare without euphemism, satisfying to the believer? Would it prevent grief or dismay in the face of tragedy, or even comfort? The answer is, "No," even from the Christians I have talked to at a Bible study I used to frequent. One is supposed to, in their opinion, use the bait-and-switch tactic, offering cheap bromides and platitudes during grief, and ensuring the sufferer has not broken with ideological orthodoxy after grief is intense, by using the "truth" laid bare of this euphemistic, insincere (or even if the comforter is ignorant enough to be sincere) condescension. It makes me feel sickened at the mere thought! Saccharine before the "time-out" chair!

Sorry. Lost my equanimity for a minute there. Here is the table of contents of the book.

 Introduction: Why I Wrote This Book
1. Why Do the Righteous Suffer?
2. The Story of a Man Named Job
3. Sometimes There Is No Reason
4. No Exceptions for Nice People
5. God Leaves Us Room to Be Human
6. God Helps Those Who Stop Hurting hemselves
7. God Can't Do Everything, But He Can Do Some Important Things
8. What Good, Then, Is Religion?

I am going to skip to the end and re-read the last chapter.

 Uh-oh. He writes, "I no longer hold God responsible for illnesses, accidents, and natural disasters, because I realize that I gain little and I lose so much when I blame God for those things." Emotional, pragmatic justification; but he did write a popular book and intended to comfort, not seek truth through reason.

 Here is something very interesting. Kushner is not a "big-Plan" or "grand-design" sort of fellow, for he says, "The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God's part" (p. 134 Italics mine). I doubt many prosperous and otherwise fortunate Christians will be persuaded to this view, nor of Kushner's conclusion that God is not omnipotent. People who are hurting badly, people who have suffered deeper wounds than those made by a knife blade, poorly aimed because of the waning twilight, may be so desperate for a comforting book and so crushed, their will to believe on such shaky ground, that they will be willing to modify their belief systems the way we all are wont to -- because of internal discomfort, psychological tension and the promise of relief. Psychologists have found that a person can be made to agree with many things he or she wouldn't otherwise agree with, if he or she is confused first and then presented with the desired action or opinion as the tension-relieving solution.

 Kushner's book is a testament to the ability of the religious mind to rationalize away contradicting evidence. He seeks to keep the blame off God in what, to me, is a novel way. I didn't see it coming. His reasoning throughout the book is motivated, however -- and he says this -- by the wish to comfort. Just look at this sentence: "We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are." One ought to feel sorry for a creator god whose creation has gotten out of hand, beyond his control, like some Frankenstein's monster.

 He shows good sense when he writes that "we can give [bad things that happen to us] a meaning" (p. 136). I think of my misfortune as evidence against the goodness or existence of the Theistic God. (Of course, Kushner would use it as evidence for the limited power of God because he wants to preserve his religious belief at all costs.) I have found a transcendent purpose, of a sort, in it. To tell the truth, the attempted murder, as it was happening, was almost mystical. At the time in my life I'm talking about, my will to live was just strong enough to raise my arm and block one blow, which cut my muscle in half and chipped the bone. (There were five other blows, both from the blade and the butt of the knife.) I was ready to die, and from what the man told me, during the conversation we had while he was cutting me, I knew he meant to kill me for his enjoyment. It was, looking back on it also, almost a "religious" experience. It was surreal. I felt fear only in one sharp, brief pang, and then it passed altogether. An eerie calm was over me.

 But I lived, thanks to dumb luck. Would Kushner credit his new, improved God with saving me -- for I was certainly about to be killed -- by sending people -- a Christian (very Christan) family nonetheless -- to scare the evil man away? Why not credit him with the evil of the attack? He created everything and everyone as they are, the story goes, and so is responsible for everything. (And there is no free will -- so don't start down that road, Christian apologist.) Was God busy saving people parking spaces, or curing cancer, or progeria, when he took a cigarette break and noticed I needed his help, just in the nick of time? Ugh. I have let myself get carried away by my disgust again.

 "We too [like the Holocaust survivor whose family was killed years later -- not in the concentration camps, but in a forest fire -- after they had rebuilt their lives] need to get over the questions that focus on the past and on the pain -- 'why did this happen to me?' -- and ask instead the question which opens doors to the future: 'Now that this has happened, what shall I do about it?' I may use the horror story of the attack -- and the man was not found -- to try to impress on believers the ludicrous nature of their belief in the Theistic God. Coming so near death has not harmed me for the long term. And I had been taken there before. I cannot say I have a new lust for life, more spring in my stride, more drive to do good and make the world a better place. But I suppose that I wouldn't notice it if I did. Most victims of violent crime don't: otherwise, people wouldn't make a big deal of it when they do. When I was a young boy, the class was asked what we would do if we had x number of days to live. I was among those, perhaps the majority, who said we would not do anything different. Maybe this is germane to the discussion.

 The specter of doubt is casually cut out by Kushner. He cites an idea put by theologian Dorothy Soelle, that the victims of death and tragedy become "the devil's martyrs" when witnesses and hearers of histories see the tragedy and death as evidence against the existence of God (p. 137). True, Soelle (and Kushner) are also arguing that we shouldn't view life as a bad thing in light of the tragedy. True that. Nietzsche's "What does not destroy me makes me stronger" is a good approach to personal tragedy. On the other hand, they try to preempt arguments against God, based on the evil in the world, from an assumed pragmatic high ground. "God survives the argument from evil because the argument from evil weakens faith in God -- a bad thing," they appear to say. If I understand them correctly, I have them dead to rights in their dishonestly, subterfuge, condescension and pandering.

 "The facts of life and death are neutral," he opines, and continues, "We, by our responses, give suffering either a positive or a negative meaning" (p. 138). The argument from evil is again preempted. He banishes the possibility of raising it, but goes on to say we should delude ourselves and see only good in bad, "positive" in "neutral." He would make the victims of Nazi "medical experiments" into "witness[es] for the affirmation of life rather than its rejection" (p. 138). True, it is tragic when tragedy strikes a person and they appear to turn away from life, but he goes on to say, "[T]he one crucial thing we can do for [those we loved and lost] after their death is to let them be witnesses for God . . ." (p. 138).

 There is evil in the world. "Look at the bones!" (Monty Python and the Holy Grail). Look at the blood, the despair, the pain, the torture chambers, the knife coated in the author's blood, the blood-stained clothing and diaper; the scars, the dead children, killed by cancer; the traumatized survivors of rapes and devastation, the tragedy of schizophrenia, mutilated corpses, rape kits, the scores upon thousands -- or even hundreds of thousands -- killed in earthquakes and tsumanis, the many tens of millions murdered in death camps both Communist and Nazi; the continual suffering in the non-human animal world, the shadows of human figures on the pavements of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the frozen casts of human forms from the city of Pompeii, the torture instruments used in God's name, the girl raped then brutally murdered! See God's glory, proof of his existence and his loving greatness!


Kushner, Harold S. When Bad Things Happen To Good People. NY:Avon, 1983. Print.