Couldn't Help Noticing

Right and wrong, crooked and straight

Those of us looking for answers to friends on the question of suffering, in the light of the tsunami and the recent bushfires could do far worse than this argument from C. S. Lewis, from Mere Christianity:

If a good God made the world why has it gone wrong? And for many years I simply refused to listen to the Christian answers to this question, because I kept on feeling “whatever you say, and however clever your arguments are, isn't it much simpler and easier to say that the world was not made by any intelligent power? Aren't all your arguments simply a complicated attempt to avoid the obvious?” But then that threw me back into another difficulty.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing the universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it? ... Thus in the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist—in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless—I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality—namely my idea of justice—was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark.

A tsunami every week

Whilst we are all no doubt heartened to see the amount of aid being promised for victims of the tsunami, British PM Tony Blair has reminded us of the sombre challenge we face if we are genuine about showing compassion to the poor and suffering in our world. As Mr Blair said, “There is the equivalent of a man-made preventable tsunami every week in Africa.”

(Reported in The Independent.)

Interestingly, in the same article Mr Blair spoke of his own faith in God, and how it has not been shaken by the tsunami disaster.

(Update: the above link has expired. Read the story in the Belfast Telegraph here.)

Tsunami Relief Relief

I was one of the slightly irritated viewers who thought I was about to watch a music concert on TV on Saturday night, to raise money for the tsunami relief effort, only to sit through hours of donation readings followed by applause till I lost interest all together, muttering to myself about “rewards on earth”. Evidently I was not the only one:

But the biblical dimension of the tsunami has demagnetised the moral compass in some very interesting ways. Charity is not meant to be about blowing your own trumpet. Every kid who went to Sunday school learnt that it was more honourable to give generously and anonymously than to use others' desperation as an occasion for self-aggrandisement.

Other lessons from Sunday School, besides Matthew 6:1-4, could be learnt from the story of Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5:1-11, who lied while wishing to be seen as more generous than they were. The above newspaper article includes the sentence, “While it would seem disgustingly mean-spirited to suggest that life-saving philanthropy can in some circumstances be morally wrong, there is no getting away from the idea that good deeds sometimes come at a so overwhelmingly high that it puts an entirely different complexion on those deeds...”. I think the Bible tells us that, from God's perspective, this suggestion is not far from the truth.

My Big Fat Tsunami Prayer

Seen on the news last night, in a story covering the Tsunami Appeal Concert on Saturday night, was a snippet of an excited concert-goer saying, “When you have this many people together, and there's just so much positive energy all in the one place, well, it's just like a big fat prayer!”

Without getting into the theology of skinny prayers and fat prayers (and just what the Atkins diet can do for prayers carrying just a little too much around the Amen) or in any way undermining the generosity of so many—I did think it an interesting contrast between a bunch of people being excited in the same geographic vicinity, and the quiet prayer to the God who listens and is working out his ways, in great wisdom and power.