The Tsunami and Faith - Part 1 (January 4, 2005)

Eric Zorn has written a column in today's Chicago Tribune (January 4) that questions the legitimacy of religious faith in light of the recent tsunami. I would like to respond to some of his points.

1) Zorn is troubled by those who pray to God for deliverance and who thank him when they get it, because he feels this suggests "that those who suffer have it coming - that God was insufficiently praised and begged on their behalf - and that those who thrive are singled out for divine favor."

I think it is a bad logical jump to assume that asking God for deliverance (and thanking him when it comes) implies a judgment on those who do not. We ask people for help all the time, and when we get it, we say "Thank you" because it is bad manners not to. Whether others have asked - even whether they have received help without asking or been denied it despite pleading - affects neither our tendency to ask nor our good manners in giving thanks afterward. There is simply no connection to the evil thought that hard luck cases who did not ask "had it coming to them."

I believe that Zorn is aiming this charge at the wrong religion. His column seems to have in mind the benevolent God of monotheistic religions (Christianity in particular), but it is Buddhism, not Christianity, that teaches the karmic balance of good rewarded and evil punished. For example, when Professor James Beverly asked the Dalai Lama if he thanked the Buddha for the good things in his life, the leader of Tibetan Buddhism said:

"Frankly speaking, my own happiness is mainly due to my own good karma. It is a fundamental Buddhist belief that my own suffering is due to my mistakes. If some good things happen, that is mainly due to my own good actions, not something related to a direct connection with Buddha" (Christianity Today, June 11, 2001, pp. 69-70).

I am as disgusted as Zorn by such a doctrine. It strikes me as heartlessly cruel to those who suffer, and it seems to offer a self-justifying guilt-free conscience to those who have simply had good luck. But this kind of teaching is completely foreign to a religion whose Messiah was tortured to death despite his innocence. In the world of Jesus and his followers, it has long been understood that the innocent suffer all the time. Just read the gospels. When news reports came that Pilate had slaughtered worshippers, or that a wall had collapsed in Siloam, killing 18, Jesus made a point of saying that the victims were no worse than anyone else (Luke 13:1-5).

2) Zorn seems to feel that the sheer number of fatalities - the scope and degree of the tragedy - is enough to justify speaking up at last about the challenge such suffering offers to faith. He writes, "[M]y silence has its limit. And well over 150,000 victims in one ghastly upheaval is well over it."

But why? Tragedies such as the Indian Ocean tsunami may bring sudden awareness of human suffering, but didn't we already know that unbearable suffering is going on all the time, every minute of every day? In the time it has taken me to write this page, I know that 4-year-old girls have been raped, children orphaned by AIDS have starved, accident victims have been paralyzed, despairing souls have taken their own lives, and hundreds of thousands, if not millions, have groaned in physical pain. But I have always known that - haven't you? The fact that we are not constantly attentive to the background noise of human pain (who could be?) does not mean that we have not till now factored it into whatever view of the universe we hold. I am not saying that since suffering is so ubiquitous we should regard it as inconsequential - I am just saying that the tsunami crossed no threshold that has not already been crossed a thousand times over in the minds of thinking people.

Zorn quotes the title of a column in a foreign periodical: "Waves of destruction wash away belief in God's benevolence." Did they really? If people believed in God's benevolence while knowing full well (as everyone does) that countless children starve, but stopped believing in it as soon as killer waves hit the shores, then I contend that their original belief was so shallow and unthinking that it is hard to see how they ever truly believed in God's benevolence at all! I do not recognize the validity of a faith that calmly swallows a thousand holocausts a day but stops suddenly at a 150,000-casualty tidal wave and says, "Now that's going too far."

3) Zorn asks, "[W]hat does it mean to trust God or have faith in God when in seconds on a sunny day a crushing wave from the deep can snatch a loved one literally from your grasp and drown him? Trust that it's all a part of some bigger plan that mere mortals cannot begin to access or comprehend? Faith that, in the words of the old gospel song, 'we'll understand it all, by and by'?"

Well, to answer the rhetorical question, yes, it means precisely that, and other things as well. Trusting God means trusting him in matters of life and death - your own and others'. I would say that any faith (Christian, Hindu, atheistic, Islamic - whatever) that has no place for understanding that your little boy can be ripped out of your arms and drowned is a faith not worth having. Because such horrible things do in fact happen, and everyone has to deal with it. Zorn's question needs to be put the other way: "What does it mean to trust that there is no God when a wave can suddenly snatch away your loved one? Trust that it is all a part of the grand universal meaninglessness? That there is no reason, and that there never can be a reason for hope and comfort - no future redemption, no joy at the end - just a fear that fate can snatch you just as suddenly, and some day certainly will?" I do not doubt that it takes emotional courage to maintain faith in such meaninglessness. But I cannot find it less sensible to believe in Ultimate Reason (despite constant suffering) than to believe in Ultimate Chaos (despite our instinct for purpose.)

4) Zorn seems to regret a sarcastic comment he made to a tsunami survivor who had thanked God, confessing that he himself was "viewing this staggering tragedy from the safety and comfort of a desk nearly 9,000 miles away." The fact that Zorn himself was not directly affected by the tsunami is a point worth dwelling upon.

A friend of mine grew up in a Jewish neighborhood with a number of Holocaust survivors. He saw that, contrary to expectation, the older generation that had actually lived through the horror of concentration camps still believed in God, while many of their children, raised in suburban comfort, were atheists. While this observation is strictly anecdotal, it does confirm a paradox I have noticed myself. It just isn't the case that those who have suffered terribly lack religious faith while those who have easy lives embrace it. If there is any correlation, it works the other way - and perhaps understandably so. True victims must believe in God; those who suffer relatively little can afford to dabble in the luxury of unbelief. Many such unbelievers seem to express a self-styled noble sympathy for all those great masses of suffering humanity. It is as though (pardon the uncharitable thought) they regard it as a brave and moral thing to refuse to believe in God - it's the least they can do to support their poor suffering brothers. But given their privileged position, they may want to think twice about proselytizing for an atheism (or Zorn's "indifferent agnosticism") that, if embraced, would rob those who truly grieve of the only hope they have.