Greetings, loyal minions. Your Maximum Leader will make a confession. In front of you all he will admit that he hasn’t read his loyal minion Bill’s web site in about a week. He could make all sorts of excuses for this, but there aren’t any really. Normally he reads the blogs of all his “Loyal Minions” daily… Sorry Bill…
That apology said, your Maximum Leader did want to nitpick on something Bill wrote just recently. Bill wrote a thoughtful and lengthly exposition on suicide recently. There is a lot there to comment upon. Especially since your Maximum Leader disagrees with a number of Bill’s conclusions. But your Maximum Leader will focus on one part of Bill’s essay in this post.
Bill writes:
The logic is “Thou shalt not kill” and if one kills oneself, it is sinful. But this is a very absolute proscription. It requires that a person in agony beyond any normal comprehension [it does exist, I’ve been there, bk] with no hope of alleviation must continue to suffer until they die without outside intervention. To take this position and blame God for it is to make God a partner to torture. This is totally incompatible with a benevolent God. However, if God cannot or will not violate the laws of nature to relieve this suffering which must grate against the omnibenevolent side of His nature, then He becomes by default a party to torture. In such a conflict, brought on by the very nature of the omnipotent God, the choice to end one’s life voluntarily seems hardly to be a sin, but rather the resolution of a difficult problem. By my reasoning, suicide under such circumstances is not a sin.
Your Maximum Leader will disagree with this particular passage - but perhaps not for the reason one mght think.
Why do we believe in an omnibenevolent God? Bill’s point above only holds true if one accepts that God is omnibenevolent. Why do we suppose that He is?
Excursus: It is funny that your Maximum Leader should focus on this point. He has an ongoing discussion with a particularly devout friend of his that always boils down to this point. If that friend is reading this (which is doubtful) take heed… All the stuff that follows is old-hat to you.
Your Maximum Leader for many years was caught up in the problem of evil. He looked at, accepted, then rejected, many answers to the problem of theodicy. Eventually he came to think that evil exists because God Himself allows it to exist. There is suffering, intractable pain, disasters, and all other ills because God allows them to exist.
One can try to construct the various arguments to try and preserve the concept of an omnibenevolent God; but at some point - as Bill points out - you always make God complicit in some “unsavory” proposistions. Most devout people have issues with making God complicit in suffering. But where do we stand if we accept God’s acceptance of evil and suffering?
Sometime it may be much easier to accept that God is beyond our poor human ability to define. Our attempts to define Him are nothing but limitations on God’s nature, limitations we impose on Him in an attempt to understand Him. But God is ultimately beyond our understanding. His purpose in setting about creating everything is beyond our understanding. Perhaps the existance of evil and suffering is also beyond our understanding.
To get this back to Bill’s points on suicide… As harsh as it is to say, perhaps God has a purpose to our suffering. A purpose which is not for us to understand.
Just something to think on.
Carry on.
