When Bad Things Happen, Part II

In this morning's San Jose Mercury News there was an Op-Ed ("In Japan and Elsewhere, 'Murderous' Nature is a Neutral Party") by Fenton Johnson that initially appeared in the LA Times ("Shaking Open Our Self-Centered Eyes"). In it he takes to task those who see the Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami from a human perspective:

"The key is not to rid ourselves of seeing the world in human terms; we're imaginative creatures, our imaginations are where our greatest fun lies, and besides, we comprehend the universe by placing it in a box whose boundaries and metaphors we draw from human experience. We don't need to abandon anthropomorphism, but we desperately need a bit of distance from the tendency to see the world through our inevitably self-centered eyes...

"To describe an earthquake as cruel (or a tsunami as murderous) assumes that good and evil are qualities established and defined by some overarching, presumably supernatural power whose ways and means lend themselves to human comprehension and even control. But who says the universe was created so that human beings might understand it -- that it must make or is supposed to make sense?"

Johnson's understanding of the Japanese disaster is an example of what I labeled in an earlier post ("When Bad Things Happen: The Japanese Earthquake and Tsunami") the gnostic approach in my thesis. This is the position individual's take that rather than seeking a rational explanation of evil, it instead seeks to transcend it through the acquisition of some greater knowledge (i.e., gnosis) of the way things truly are.  In fact, when recounting feminist theologian Sallie McFague's  ("Models of God") understanding of evil that "McFague is forced to conclude that God, in some sense, must be responsible for the... evil that has befallen human history... Evil, however, is in the eye of the beholder:"

"But is God, then, not in some sense responsible for the horrendous evil that has already occurred... in human history? In a monist ontology, one has to give a qualified yes to the question: since there is no evil power comparable to God, God is in some sense responsible for the worst that happens in the cosmos. But qualifications are crucial. First, the universe is, as an evolutionary phenomenon, so immense and complex, with so many constituent phenomena interrelating in so many ways, that evil is a relative concept. What is evil to some species, what diminishes or destroys them, is to other species for it brings them satisfaction and fulfillment (p. 141)."

In other words, what may be bad for one of God's creatures could be good for another. I suspect that very few individuals living in Japan would find such a perspective comforting. Taking such a position is far easier from behind a desk in a divinity school than in the rubble of an earthquake. Nevertheless, it illustrates how one might attempt to distance oneself from the tendency to see the world through our self-centered eyes.