Left for Dead on the Road to God
Breaking the Covenant of Co-Dependency with Yahweh
“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?
— Nietzsche, The Gay Science
To justify catastrophic suffering (e.g., “The Holocaust” TM) is never a good idea. It is a trap laid down by the long-distance (and sometimes close-range) lamentations of “This should never have happened!” (or “Never again!”).
But the fact remains that it did happen, and to that degree does not need “justifying,” any more than a hurricane or a tsunami (or Yahweh) needs justifying.
The words “should not” are loaded with unnatural additives of presumption and demand, things that Objective Reality has little time for. To say that a tree should not fall on us if we attack it from the wrong angle with our chainsaw is to pass the buck from where it most clearly needs to land: our own accountability.
Without full accountability for our actions, there is no possibility of autonomy; if we want freedom, we first have to take responsibility.
To whom or to what exactly are we saying that something that we find offensive should not have occurred? To God? Or to men?
In the latter case, the perpetrators of any given atrocity invariably have their counter-arguments for why it should have happened, or as Jean Renoir famously put in (in La Règle du Jeu): “The truly terrible thing is that everybody has their reasons.”
In the former case, as Job found out, God does not have to answer to anyone (which is what makes God God).
What we are really saying when we decry some collective or personal catastrophe as “wrong”—ontologically as well as morally wrong, as if the result of some cosmic error—is that we did or would not want it to happen to us. Nothing more.
And yet, all of our fictions, from the Tanakh and Greek myths on down, entertain and instruct us with accounts of just such atrocities; without them, such stories would not interest us.
The idea of a retributive God is the idea of a transcendental system of cause and effect. It argues that all suffering (evil) is the consequence of sin. This is potentially an empty and vicious circle, however, since one could just as easily argue that all sin is the consequence of suffering.
“Misery made me a fiend,” wailed Mary Shelly’s monster.
What we do to and with our bodies has consequences. It is not rocket science or theological mystery.
There is no need to suggest any kind of “retribution,” or any mysterious external agency at work. Eat too much or too poorly, and you will get indigestion. Persist in bad posture or lack of exercise, and your body will develop problems.