TUESDAY’S TWEAKS TO THURSDAY’S THOUGHTS, September 1, 2020
Last Thursday I began ruminating again on the age-old question of bad things happening to good people. And the follow-up quest to make sense of things. We fall into that over and over again.
Sometimes it is in our rush to judgment – well those _______ just got what they deserve! One of things that caught my attention shortly thereafter was the picture in the news of the controversial statue (The South’s Defender, in St. Charles, LA) that was toppled by the winds of Hurricane Laura. My immediate reaction was, “Well, God, you finally got something right!” And then shortly after the realization – what kind of God use such widespread destruction and suffering, and even death, just to knock down a statue? Talk about a bungler!
And in thinking of all that, I was reminded of the argument between Voltaire and Rousseau. Maybe because it happened on November 1st, my birthday, although admittedly 1755 was long before my time, it seems I always have the great Lisbon earthquake rattling around in the back of my head. The city was utterly destroyed, and somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 people died in the aftermath. Catholics argued that it was God’s judgment on the Portuguese for tolerating heretics and Jesuits. Protestants said it was God’s judgement upon them for being Catholic. It dealt a terrible blow to the philosophical optimism of Liebnitz (“we live in the best of all worlds”) and Pope (“what is, is right”) and lead Voltaire to write a snarky poem “sur le désastre de Lisbonne” in which he denounced the optimists and the religious folks of his day for their foolishness. That in turn sparked a reply from Rousseau who criticized Voltaire for trying to apply logic and science to matters of the spiritual realm, to which Voltaire replied with his novel Candide.
If I’ve lost you, I apologize. But I am being reminded that there is a lot of stuff I should use this pandemic to go read all over again. I will close with this thought in tribute to our friends the Millers in France: “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” The rest of you, may go look it up if you wish!
Grace and peace…
Photo by Mike McAlister on Unsplash