Image by secretagent007 via Flickr
I have mentioned my profound admiration for Steve Jobs and
what he has accomplished for us all and for the world and I will be buying his
authorized autobiography just to learn more about the man since he was such a
very private person during his life, very little is known about his private
life.
One excerpt from his autobiography made public, stands out
to me, it is about his views on religion. The little detail that was leaked was
that he did attend church on a regular basis as he was growing up but then he
saw a picture on the cover of LIFE Magazine of starving African children and
never went back to church again.
We have been seeing the same images basically on a constant
basis whether its children starving to death with flies all over their tiny
bodies or children with limbs cut off by rebel armies, etc.
While this may sound strange to many, it is quite familiar
to me and to the many people that study religion and the anthropology of
religious beliefs and practices.
I have always maintained and many scholars agree, that
religion is part of our human DNA and has evolved side-by-side with other human
attributes but for someone like Jobs and many others, religion and especially
the concept of an all powerful and all loving God becomes absurd when viewed
against a backdrop of abject human suffering and misery, especially when inflicted
on the very young.
Mother Theresa, at the end of her life, also confessed that her
God does not exist because if he did he would never let such suffering and
misery exist.
There are many books out on the market currently that
address this very issue and I am about to take a course in the subject of “Why
Evil Exists”.
If I was to break down the arguments, the conclusion has to
be that we as a people invented God in the image we wanted him to have and with
attributes we wanted him to posses. This all powerful, all merciful and always
loving God has become our father figure, someone that watches over us at all
times.
The problem is that the God of our imagination cannot exist
and function in our real world that is filled with suffering and misery because
the attributes we imbued him with do not allow such suffering and misery to
occur.
Many Christian theologians have tried to explain this
conundrum and seeming incoherence by blaming our suffering and misery on the
devil or on mankind that has free will and therefore chose to do evil. These
arguments do not hold up when the suffering and misery are caused by natural
disasters that could only occur as part of God’s will.
Christianity has painted itself into a corner with no
rationale way out.
The Jews invented a God that is powerful but also
vindictive, cruel and blood thirsty among his many attributes. But also being
all powerful, how could he ever allow the Holocaust to happen.
Here the Jews also painted themselves into a corner but
their excuse for centuries was that bad things happened to them because they
were somehow “bad” and needed to be punished. This explanation only satisfied
for awhile and after the Holocaust, many who survived the barbarism concluded
that the God of the Jews did not exist and if he did, he was a worthless God.
Many Jews keep Jewish traditions but are not religious.
I could go on and on in this vein but back to Steven Jobs;
my admiration grows the more I know about him.
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