There’s a lyric in Paul Simon‘s “Slip Slidin’ Away” that’s always rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe you know what I mean and maybe you don’t…”God only knows, God makes his plan…the information’s unavailable to the mortal man.”
To which I would reply, “What information would that be exactly?”
We’re all familiar with the Christian sentiment about how we mustn’t condemn God for orchestrating horribly cruel fates for so many millions of people, and that we can’t hope to know or understand the grand scheme…oh, yeah? You think?
If you want to conceive of God as some kind of magnificent multiversian…an all-seeing, all-knowing, semi-sentient being with a personality and a deep voice not unlike the one that Charlton Heston converses with during the burning bush scene in The Ten Commandments…if you insist upon that kind of definition of God then you’ve no choice but to accept His absolute indifference to human suffering. Which he impassively lays on at every turn. With relish.
He doesn’t give a shit, in short, and the most frequently deployed tool at his command, as Aeschylus reminded, is “pain that falls drop by drop upon the heart.” Boy, does it ever!
All of this reminds me of a wonderful scene in Rabbit Hole (’10), about a couple grieving over a deceased young child. Nicole Kidman and husband Aaron Eckhart are in a group therapy session, and listening to a couple who’ve also lost a child. They’re sharing the notion that God has a plan and He needed their child so he could have an extra angel in heaven, blah blah, and Kidman just shoots that shit down like Sgt. York. Perfect.
“Life is a comedy written by a sadist” — Woody Allen.