"I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away." From Outer Dark, by Cormac McCarthy
This is from the parable of The Creation. It is not possible for The Creator to be God of THIS creation. Such a "creator" begs the question of what was At the Beginning -- what created The Creator? -- and abandons us at what obviously should be The End of the erstwhile business. We are AT the "gone away" been done.
Believers who cling to this parable are perhaps not coming to terms with the depth, the extent and variety, of the unkind things that have been done among men. The belief that any God worth its station in any pantheon of divinity would stand for THIS "creation", this abomination, can only stand upon idiocy or blindness.
Such a belief is itself a form of indifference, a kind of sin. Like Prussians pretending that the Third Reich was not loading Jews and Gypsies and lawyers into cattle cars assigned and logged into any of 1200 camps built for unpleasant dying. Like Saudi princes pretending that Saudis did not train and fly pirated aircraft into the World Trade Center. Like all of us who try to pretend that innocents have not been tortured on our watch, the tyrants using our money and our indifference.
We try to get rid of evil, expel it. But it is recremental. It is quickly re-absorbed even as we identify it. The Creation is wallowing in its dross.
AMERICAN INDIANS. The Death Pit in Minnesota with 70 men women and children thrown in alive to die. The 76 girls strangled and buried in Cahokia. The spits for cooking "man corn" at the great houses of Chaco Canyon.
ReplyDeleteAnd the pattern of mistreatment of natives by the immigrants. The trade in diseased blankets, the Custer-blustering annihilations and Wounded Knees, the record of treaty-breaking, and starve-outs.
Glad to include both the "old" and "new" worlds' sins! Both of them contain Believers who Beliefed the Creator. Both of these worlds, and the whole world which became new upon its discovery, have examples of Believers. And all Believers try to be Pure, but in purifying, become filthy.
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