FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - DOES GOD PUNISH REPROBATES ON THIS EARTH?

Rant Number 599 9 September 2014 God & the Wicked Does the Creator punish the wicked? Sure. In the next world. At the Last Judgment. But…in this world too? Some folks are certain. When comedienne Joan Rivers died, they exulted online. ‘It served her right!’ During the Israeli onslaught on Gaza she had opined Palestinians ‘deserve to be dead’. A nasty remark. Therefore gloaters declared her sudden death constituted divine punishment. Well, was it? First, because Rivers died after her unfeeling utterances it does not mean she died because of them. Night comes after day but day does not cause night. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, as David Hume taught, is an egregious logical fallacy. Second, direct divine causality is never to be ruled out a priori. Still, Rivers was not a young and healthy woman. During her life she had undergone over 700 plastic jobs, turning her face and body into an almost horror movie figure. At last she died after surgery, aged 81. Why invoke God when medical science may provide natural explanations? If a wife beater for years smokes 60 cigarettes a day and then pegs out suddenly of lung cancer or heart failure it seems superfluous, cumbrous to bring in the Supreme Slayer. Natural causality suffices. (You could even contend God was kind to Joan: he spared her a long and protracted decline into senility.) Third, if the Almighty really was behind the old lady’s demise, many a thoughtful believer might argue it indicates Heaven has curious priorities. Why should God choose to strike down a foul-mouthed, tasteless showbiz person and not the culprit in chief, PM Netanyahu? Or the Israeli pilots who bombed Gaza civilians? Or President Barack Obumble who arms Israel and defends and nurses its warlike deeds? Similarly, why hasn’t the Lord of the Cosmos yet zapped former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for his many crimes? For H.K.’s role in the bombing of Cambodia, the Turkish invasion of Cyprus and the Indonesian genocide in East Timor? It would make plenty of moral sense. Instead, Kissinger, a sprightly 91 year old, runs an international consulting firm and postures as a world statesman-sage. How odd of God to let the old rogue get away with it. Surely Kissinger rather than Rivers, no? Such paradoxes are not new. Indeed, they troubled the Psalmist: ‘I have seen the wicked in great power, and spreading himself a green bay tree’, Psalm 37, v. 35. Evil doers are contrasted with the godly and the pious, with those who walk in the law of the Lord and on it meditate day and night. Don’t fret, the speaker hastens to reassure the faithful. The sinful, despite their boasting and arrogance, will perish. They ‘soon fade away like grass and wither like the green herb’. Well and good but…meanwhile? Why do the wicked and the reprobates so often flourish on God’s earth? It is all very well for the Psalmist to croak that ‘transgressors shall be destroyed’ – yet he admits here and now they prosper. Fourth, there is the question of what God’s will actually is. Naturally, it was mostly Muslims who took offence at Rivers’ anti-Palestinian tirade. Israelis didn’t. Are they very callous? Or is the point perhaps that the will of Israel’s Lord is not identical with that of the Rabb of the Qur’an? You can’t expect the God of the chosen people not to side with his favourite people, can you? Yet the Bible shows the designs of the God of the Jews were often ambiguous, or at least not always morally pellucid. Kings like Ahab and his foul Queen Jezebel paid for their crimes. Jezebel was thrown out of a window while Ahab’s blood was licked by dogs, as foretold by the Prophet Elijah. Very edifying. Yet one of the most evil rulers of ancient Judah was King Manasseh. An idolater, he desecrated the Jerusalem Temple by erecting idols inside it. To propitiate the pagan deities he even burnt his own sons in sacrifice (II Chronicles 33). Alas, God did not strike him down. Actually, Manasseh had a long life. He reigned for 55 years since aged 12. By contrast one of his successors, the good and faithful King Josiah who ‘did what was right in the eyes of the Lord’ by smashing idols, cleansing God’s Temple and keeping all divine ordinances, had a relatively short-lived reign, dying at the age of 39. God had other plans, it seems… Muslims and others who have discerned God’s finger in Joan Rivers’ end presumably feel God cares much for the Palestinians. But why didn’t God exhibit a similar care when it came to the thousands of Bosnian Muslims slaughtered by Serbs at Srebrenica? Heaven did not destroy the perpetrators. Yet the same Divine Power supposedly took revenge on a foolish oldie for making a cruel remark. You could of course retort that God’s ways are not man’s ways. That it is pointless, even impious to try to explain or comprehend them. Fine. Be humble then. Don’t go on to pretend to know with dogmatic certainty that he punished Rivers or anyone else for what she said. Joan Rivers was an exceedingly funny, hilarious comedienne. The priest much enjoyed watching her acts. She erred badly about Gaza but if the Creator of the cosmos, the awesome Judge really were to obliterate all those who say or think stupid things, streets would be strewn with bodies. Revd Frank Julian Gelli