The Other Anger

I had mentioned in a prior post that I would talk about an anger at a particular thing that has stayed with me longer than any of my other anger issues. That is my anger at god.

I was born and raised a good Jewish boy. My family was not particularly religious though I know that I had a great-grandfather who was a marvelous cantor back in Russia. I would probably be described as a reform Jew growing up. I didn't go to temple every Saturday, but I did attend a Yeshiva for Kindergarten. I was circumcised (when I was 4, and yes, I do remember it). I went to Hebrew school and I read from the Torah for my barmitzvah. I went to Temple on Yom Kippur. I also fasted on Yom Kippur. I didn't eat bread on Passover. I followed the really big rules but ignored most of them. There was no way I was going to be Kosher, I love sausage and bacon too much.

As I got older, my minor religious beliefs waned. I started to think of myself as more of an agnostic than as a reform Jew. Did god exist? Who knows? I couldn't answer it one way or another. But out of respect to my parents, I continued to participate in the Yom Kippur and Passover rituals.

When Melissa and I got married, we had a Rabbi officiate the wedding, though we had a reform style ceremony (Melissa did not circle me 7 times). Most of the ceremony was in English but with a little bit of Hebrew thrown in.

And then we had Dylan.

How could God allow this to happen to my son? How could an omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, being do something so horrible to this beautiful baby boy. Where was the love for humanity that god is supposed to show. How could god do this to this beautiful innocent baby boy.

How could I believe in or pray to a being who would do something so horrible, so evil. After thinking on this topic for some time, I realized that there were only 3 possibilities for god.

1. God intentionally did this to my son.

If God intentionally maimed my child, intentionally made it so that he would never walk or talk or be able to show true emotion, then he is an evil horrible monster. No different than any murderer, pedophile, or rapist in all of human history. No, he is worse than all of them combined. He has intentionally maimed hundreds of millions of human beings.

Does he do so for some perverse sense of pleasure or does he do so to send the rest of us a message. If he does so to send us a message, that is like me maiming one of my children so that the rest would behave well. That would be the act of a maniac. Only a truly evil piece of garbage would do such a thing. If this is what god does, why would I ever believe in such a thing, let alone pray to it. It would be no different than praying to Hitler or Stalin.

I know what some people who read this will say. "God works in mysterious ways". That to me is just a cop out. Its like the people who defended Mussolini, because he made the trains run on time. If god is such an amazing being, he should be held to a much higher standard than the ones we humans give to ourselves. Instead, he is given no standard whatsoever. We hold people in authority to a higher standard than we do the general populous. Shouldn't the ultimate authority be held to the absolute highest standard?

I look at Holocaust survivors and wonder how they can stay religious. In some way, I can understand that. God supposedly gave us free will. Therefore he does not control the actions of our fellow man. Thus they can maintain their beliefs, because god did not do it to them, god did not want to do it to them. It was through the evil of other free willed individuals that they suffered. Therefore, God cannot be held at fault for the Shoah. Thus they can maintain their faith.

This argument doesn't work with a new born child. Dylan wasn't maimed by a negligent doctor. His mother didn't smoke crack while she was pregnant. His father didn't beat the mother to cause some sort of birth defect. Every human in his life did everything they could so that he could be a happy healthy normal child.

The only being in his life who harmed him was god. If that is the case than I can only feel hatred and scorn and venom towards someone who would do this to my child.


2. God neither has the power nor the interest in us.

This assumes that God might have been the creator of the universe, but pretty much since the big bang, has shown either very little or no interest in humanity. God simply does not care about us.

Much in the same way that I don't particularly care about the single celled organisms that might exist on my hands. When I wash them, I might be killing these single celled organisms. Do I even consider their lives or their fate for even a second? Of course not. What is a single celled organism to me and why should I bother caring about it.

So in the same way, God is so much above us, that we are simply too far beneath his notice and he simply does not care about us. The best analogy of this was the ending to the movie "Men in Black", where they show that our entire universe is just some child's marble. What is the point of praying to or believing in such a child. The child doesn't care in the least about me, so why should I care in the least about it.

Its like paying rent to an absentee landlord. The landlord neither expects the rent money or cares if they receive it or not. Your payments make absolutely no difference whatsoever. So why bother paying, or in this case, why bother praying or believing.


3. There is no God.

There never has been a god. God is a fictional creation of man to give us comfort from the things we don't understand. There is no grand creator. There is no master plan. There is no one for me to pray for. There is no heavenly being for me to believe in. There is no heaven. There is no hell. There is just the here and now.

There is no one for me to blame for what happened to my son. Shit happens. Life and the Universe is just about coincidence. Dylan having Emanuel Syndrome was just one of those coincidences.

This is the belief that I finally accepted. For me to accept the first 2 would have kept me in a permanent state of anger at a being that I could do nothing to. What would have been the point to that.

Thus once I accepted the third choice, my anger went away.

For the people who are reading this who have religious faith, who are insulted by what I have said, don't be. I am not pushing my beliefs on you. I do not expect that my words will have swayed your beliefs. I do not look down on you for your faith. If your faith brings you comfort, then I am happy for you.

So please be happy for me that my lack of faith brings me comfort...