untitled
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 15:49:02 -0400
From: Mike Ryder
Subject: Re: Re Your messages today
To: [Family member B]
Cc: [Family member A]
Hi again,
I did a little reading and came across the following that expresses the
thoughts I tried to convey, but in far more eloquent prose.
It in the first part of a four part essay titled All Possible Worlds
. It can be found at
http://ebonmusings.org/atheism/allpossibleworlds.html
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Part 1: A World in Shadow
In a shaded jungle clearing, John Otolany watched grimly
as ghostlike men in white protective clothing lowered a small body bag
into the ground and sprayed the grave with disinfectant. He then
reached for the edge of his T-shirt and wiped away a tear.
Otolany's 5-year-old nephew was the fifth member of his
family to die of the Ebola disease. His eldest son died two days later.
"I can't cry any more," he said. "If I do, everything will
fall apart."[1]
Distraught parents railed at the heavens and demanded
answers from Italian authorities on Sunday, as they bid farewell to 26
children killed when an earthquake demolished a school.
The biggest tremor to hit Italy since 1997 flattened the
pastel yellow building in San Giuliano di Puglia on Thursday, wiping
out almost an entire generation of six- and seven-year-olds in the
small farming town.
...One woman clad in black and following the matching
coffins of twins Luca and Gianmaria wailed at the sky: "Why did God do
this to us? Why?"[2]
At Bam's cemetery, where thousands of quake victims have
already been buried, workers dug 130-foot trenches to hold bodies
wrapped in white shrouds. One woman pounded the ground with her fist.
"I was a good Muslim. I prayed to God all the time," said
44-year-old Alma Sepehr, sobbing beside a grave holding the remains of
21 relatives including her daughter, son and husband. "Why did this
happen to us?"[3]
The sea and wreckage of coastal towns all around the
Indian Ocean yielded up tens of thousands of bodies today, pushing the
toll from Sunday's tsunami past 59,000.
The apocalyptic destruction caused by the wave dwarfed the
efforts of governments and relief agencies as they turned from rescuing
survivors to trying to care for millions of homeless, increasingly
threatened by disease amid the rotting corpses.
"Why did you do this to us, God?" wailed an old woman in a
devastated fishing village in southern India's Tamil Nadu state. "What
did we do to upset you? This is worse than death."[4]
NEW YORK (AP) - Rescuers racing against the clock in a
desperate attempt to find survivors in the World Trade Center's rubble
had a new enemy Friday: rain.
"The rain made the footing a little more dangerous," said
Richard Coppo, who volunteered as a rescue worker. "We thought that
maybe the rain would settle the dust and make things better, but
actually it stirred it up."
...The rain fell off and on, often heavily, throughout the
morning Friday.
"It slowed us down a little bit," said rescue worker Mike
O'Hare. "It affected the visibility, so we weren't able to work quite
as fast."
...But at an armory, in hospitals and on the streets of
Manhattan, thousands of distraught families searched for the missing.
Almost every sentence began the same: "Have you seen..."
And nearly every plea ended the same: "If you know
anything, please call..."
...Caroline Burbank, 29, tried to keep her mind from
wandering disturbing paths. On Tuesday, her fiance, Geoff Campbell, had
left early for a conference both planned to attend at the Trade Center.
Campbell has not come home.
"You picture what the scenarios could have been. And
that's the worst. If he was scared or if he was alone when the building
went down," she said, breaking into sobs.
They had not set a wedding date. "We were just going to go
to the Caribbean and do it ourselves," she said.
"When he gets out, that's the first thing we'll do."[5]
We live in a world in shadow. It is a fact, noted by every religion and
belief system throughout history, that the human condition is defined
by suffering. Merely to exist is to experience pain, and while some of
us experience far more than others, it is something we must all face
during our lives. Perhaps even worse than the mere fact of suffering's
existence is the frustrating randomness with which it occurs, so often
striking the people who have done the least to deserve it, and our
frequent powerlessness to help the afflicted innocent.
This great and terrible fact of suffering has been humanity's constant
companion. Our history as a species has been one long, slow climb up
from the darkness, punctuated by much faltering, backsliding and
frustration. For tens of thousands of years of human history, every day
was a struggle to stay alive, and even with the dawn of civilization,
little relief was forthcoming. Plagues and lethal epidemics swept
continents like wildfire. Natural disasters led to the collapse of
great empires. People lived on the edge of starvation, and a season of
bad weather or social unrest that disrupted the harvest could lead to
thousands of deaths. And as if these natural evils were not enough,
human beings have never been found wanting in either the will or the
ingenuity when it comes to inventing new ways to inflict suffering on
their neighbors. Throughout the ages, war and all it entails have been
an ever-present reality. The vast majority of people have always lived
in poverty in totalitarian societies, presided over by ruling classes
far more concerned with hoarding additional wealth and perpetuating
their own power rather than doing anything to lift up the people they
ruled. Whole civilizations have been eradicated by intercontinental
warfare, infectious disease brought by invading conquerors, and a
centuries-long trafficking in human lives that shipped millions of
people across oceans to live out a lifetime of slavery in distant
lands. Prejudice, bigotry and xenophobia used to be the order of the
day, and in many places still are. In the present day, though a
relative few in the industrialized world live in comparative luxury,
many millions more around the world are still desperately poor, still
largely uneducated, still lacking in the basic necessities of life, and
still besieged by war, disease, famine and drought.
In the battle against suffering, humanity has won some notable
victories. We are no longer nearly as powerless as we once were when it
comes to controlling our own destinies. Some of the diseases that
ravaged us in ages past have been wiped out or nearly so. The ideals of
democracy and human rights have spread across the globe, however flawed
and imperfect their implementations may be. Slavery itself has largely
been eradicated, even if its painful legacy persists. And our knowledge
of and ability to modify the workings of the human body continues to
improve, promising much greater things that seem to lie just beyond the
horizon. Still, when one considers the scope and the weight of
suffering, one is inevitably struck by how incomplete our victories
have been, how partial, and how much we have left to do. There are many
evils against which we are still completely powerless; there are many
more which we have the ability to combat, but which most of the world
still suffers from.
As an example of the former, there is a truly horrifying genetic
disorder, called epidermolysis bullosa, in which a mutation disables
the ordinary activity of a protein crucial to maintaining the strength
and elasticity of normal skin. The result is extremely fragile skin,
sometimes referred to as "butterfly" skin because it is so delicate, in
which even slight pressure or friction can produce severe blisters akin
to second-degree burns. The disease manifests itself from birth, so the
majority of sufferers are infants and children.
Massive scarring, secondary infection, loss of teeth, fingernails and
toenails, anemia, malnutrition and disfigurement are common
complications of EB. In more severe forms, blistering can occur even
within the body: scarring of the lungs may cause difficulty breathing,
inflammation of the eye can lead to blindness, and scarring and
blistering within the mouth and throat may make the sufferer unable to
swallow and require a surgically implanted feeding tube. Blistered
fingers and toes may fuse together as they heal, requiring surgical
separation. Some sufferers require a wheelchair because walking on
blistered feet is too painful. Sufferers of some forms of EB are also
at greatly improved risk of a malignant variety of skin cancer called
squamous cell carcinoma.
There is no cure for epidermolysis bullosa, and the only treatment is
to prevent blistering and infection as much as possible through
intensive daily care. Antibiotic cream must be constantly applied to
broken blisters, and large areas of the sufferer's body may have to be
wrapped in bandages that must be changed as often as twice a day.
Severe skin damage may require skin grafts. People with less severe
forms of EB can, with care, expect to live an ordinary lifespan;
children with more severe forms of the disorder almost inevitably die
while young.
As well as defects in its own operation (of which epidermolysis bullosa
is arguably not even the worst), the human body is also threatened by
invaders from without. Malaria, tuberculosis, polio, smallpox,
influenza, syphilis, anthrax, bubonic plague, HIV and other microscopic
killers have claimed millions of human lives through the ages and in
some cases are still doing so, but in terms of sheer lethality and
horror, few pathogens can compete with viral hemorrhagic diseases such
as Ebola fever. Some strains of Ebola have mortality rates as high as
90% (by contrast, the overall death rate from severe acute respiratory
syndrome, which caused such panic in late 2002 and early 2003, is
between 5 and 10%). The disease begins with high fever and muscle ache,
but rapidly progresses to vomiting, bloody diarrhea, and necrosis of
internal organs, finally leading to death within six to ten days as
sufferers bleed from every orifice in their body, including the eyes.
Since the virus that causes Ebola fever is spread by direct contact
with blood and body fluids, this is in effect an especially insidious
way for it to come into contact with new victims and thereby assist in
its own propagation. Although Ebola has largely subsided at present,
the animal species that acts as its natural reservoir between outbreaks
is unknown, and so there is no way of knowing if and when it will
return.
Or consider parasites such as the guinea worm. This creature, found
mainly in sub-Saharan Africa, infects people's bodies when they
unknowingly drink water containing its tiny larvae. Once inside the
body, the larvae, which are unaffected by stomach acid, drill through
the intestinal wall and migrate into the body cavity. Over a period of
about a year, the worm grows and matures, eventually reaching lengths
of up to three feet. The adult worm takes up permanent residence
somewhere just under the victim's skin, usually in the lower limbs,
where it causes swelling, an extremely painful burning sensation, and
huge blisters. To relieve the pain, sufferers often seek refuge in the
water, where the blister bursts and the worm wriggles out of the wound,
releasing millions of larvae and starting the cycle over again. Short
of surgery to remove the worm, the only way to treat sufferers is to
catch the worm's head when it emerges and very slowly extract it from
the body by winding it around a stick - a process which can take days
or weeks, while all the time the sufferer is in intense pain. The
lasting effects can include months of incapacitation and permanent,
crippling disability.
These small assailants - mutated genes, parasitic worm larvae, deadly
viruses - are not humanity's only enemies in the natural world. We also
suffer from evil on much larger scales. The December 2003 earthquake
that virtually destroyed the city of Bam, Iran and killed more than
25,000 people, or the catastrophic December 2004 Indian Ocean
earthquake whose ensuing tsunamis claimed over 150,000 lives and left
millions more homeless throughout Southeast Asia, are still vivid and
painful in humanity's memory. But such tragedies are only the latest in
a long history of devastation wrought on our species by natural
disasters.
On the morning of November 1, 1755, a massive earthquake, with an
estimated magnitude of around 9.0 on the Richter scale, struck just off
the shore of Lisbon, Portugal. Over a period of about five minutes, a
series of tremendous jolts rocked the city, bringing buildings crashing
down and entombing tens of thousands in the rubble. Many of Lisbon's
magnificent cathedrals collapsed, killing thousands of worshippers who
had gathered for morning mass on the Catholic holiday of All Saints'
Day. Witnesses wrote of gigantic fissures that tore open the ground in
the heart of the city and huge clouds of dust that darkened the sky.
As the jolts subsided, many panicked survivors of the quake rushed to
the docks for safety, seeking refuge from falling debris and fires.
They were met by the sight of the waters rapidly drawing back,
revealing sunken cargo and shipwrecks lying on the bare harbor bottom.
But moments later, the water came rushing back in the form of a
fifty-foot-high tsunami spawned by the quake, sweeping away and
drowning thousands more. Even then, the destruction had not ended; the
last and most crippling blow to Lisbon came in the form of fires that
raged out of control for over three days afterward, destroying almost
everything that the quake and the tsunami had not already leveled.
Thousands of original books, manuscripts, and artwork in the city's
museums and libraries, including original paintings by Titian,
Correggio and Rubens and priceless records of the voyages of Vasco da
Gama and Christopher Columbus, were destroyed by the fire. In all, over
100,000 people lost their lives.
Examples such as these could be multiplied beyond counting. There are
genetic disorders that afflict every function of the human body,
infectious diseases and parasites that attack it at every point of
vulnerability, natural disasters that can affect every community on the
planet, and above and beyond all this, human beings throughout history
have perpetrated every imaginable kind of horror and cruelty against
each other. However, numbing the reader's conscience further with all
this tragedy serves no purpose. Instead, the question must be asked:
Are these horrors really the handiwork of a kind and loving god?
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