The Problem of Evil

Opinion

December 26, 2012

The Problem of Evil

By William Murchison/Syndicated columnist The Picayune Item Picayune Item Wed Dec 26, 2012, 09:08 AM CST

PICAYUNE — The notion of the president as comforter-in-chief fits snugly with the notion of political “solutions” — e.g., gun control — to essentially moral and theological problems — e.g., schoolhouse massacres.

In a well-meant message of consolation delivered Sunday at Newtown, President Obama declared that “These tragedies must end. And to end them we must change.” He again used the word “change,” in gainsaying the idea that America does enough to protect its children. “We are not doing enough,” said the president, “and we will have to change.”

“Change” what, exactly? That would be the question, wouldn’t it? Change the laws? By instituting really tough, really meaningful gun control, whatever “meaningful” means in a nation that constitutionally protects the right to own and carry weapons? Possibly we could put a cop (with arms-carrying authority) in every school; on every bike path, every street corner. We’ve yet to hear the details.

No doubt we should forebear ridicule when the actuating factor behind the President’s call is a massacre of the innocents, Herod-style: stomach-churning testimony to - to what? Long-standing apathy toward gun control? More like longer-standing apathy, I suggest, to the presence and power of rampant evil in a world disposed to see every ill as curable, at least in part, through regulation or legislation.

It might be nice if that were the case. It is not by a country mile the case. The problem of evil actions — to which we seem half-acclimated in this progressive century of ours — precedes the invention of firearms. I could say it goes back to whatever Cain used on Abel: possibly just his non-controlled, non-regulated fingers. This is assuming the ill-fated pair in Genesis 4:8 excite recognition in our fast-secularizing world, where problems and solutions alike turn out to be present-embedded and human-made. The heavens, for growing numbers of us, hold only the stars.

Yet if humans are everything (as modern people grow more and more convinced), how come we can’t get things right? Can’t we just talk things over? Pass the right laws? Multiply the number of law-enforcing agencies and agents? What is the matter with us? Something old? Something inborn?

The desire of humans to have their own way, irrespective of ancient obligations to a Creator God, seems to be old as the hills. Theology calls it sin, and theologians over the centuries have labored to analyze and prescribe for it: not opposing laws whose aim is preventing preventable outbreaks of it, preferring this addition, nonetheless — repentance and amendment of life.

Would that approach have prevented the Newtown massacre? The killer was just plain crazy, wasn’t he? Likely so. Madness, meaning lack of reason, would seem just one more piece of evidence as to how much disorder afflicts a race — the human one — in love with its supposed ability to plan everything, control everything.

That task, especially when backed by science, seems easy enough — until the restraints expected of our sophisticated era fail to work, and small, dear, generous, wonderful children succumb to armed cruelty: just as humans, old and young, have succumbed throughout history to the worst that fellow humans can do to them.

Could it not be — maybe? conceivably? — that politics and consolatory speeches and clever laws need a foundation of realism, one which acknowledges human affairs as the huge mess they are: too big, too inexplicable for the combined power of president and Congress to “change"?

Just a few days lie between Christmas and us. It was around this time, we hear, that the Son of God came to our rescue — not to perfect everything at that precise moment, but to invite repentance and amendment of life, before offering his own life as a sacrifice. Don’t believe a word of it? The alternative is to believe another act of Congress will bring us finally to that gun-controlled paradise where the evil, the murderous and the frankly loony embrace the pure of heart. It might happen in heaven. I wouldn’t count too much on watching as politicians throw open the gates.

(William Murchison, author and commentator, writes from Dallas. To find out more about William Murchison, and to see features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists visit, the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.)

Text Only

Opinion

Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.”

March 29, 2013
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist

Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.

March 29, 2013
VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008.

March 27, 2013
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists

When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”

March 27, 2013
Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing.

March 23, 2013
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered.

March 23, 2013
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun

The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral.

March 22, 2013
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist

No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.

March 22, 2013
Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist

While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.

March 20, 2013
Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist

Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley.

March 20, 2013
More Opinion Headlines

Opinion

Search Results

The Problem of Evil

Site Map

Contact Us