EthnAlln

Thanks for the good wishes. Sorry I was irony-impaired with my response.

Probably Mark Twain made the point better than I can (of course). He described a Christian praising God's creation while swatting a fly and suggested that perhaps the prayer ought to be modified to take account of some exceptions to the general excellence of the universe.

It does seem strange to me that God would build a world so intricate, far beyond the power of human beings to understand and leave defects in it that kill human beings at a young age for tens of thousands of years before human ingenuity finally finds a way around it. Mark Twain wondered about this in connection with hookworm, and I just wonder about it in general. Not that it's any mystery from my point of view: It's just the way the world is. But for those who think this world was created by an all-wise, all-loving being who is particularly concerned with human beings, it seems to me it ought to be a problem. If these "defects" (as we human beings can't help seeing them) were really "built in" by the creator of the universe, who are we to try to thwart his plan, unless he means for us to struggle against it? To what purpose, is hard to discern, since no one even knew what genes were until the twentieth century. All those thousands of generations of people suffered needlessly against a killer they didn't even know about.

We both have the same reservations about human "progress." One of the effects of modern medicine and hygiene is that we live longer and begin to think that the summum bonum of a life is to have a long one. (Life I mean. I'm afraid some guys will interpret that last sentence another way.) But of course, it isn't. Are we now happier than the peoples who lived in North America before the Europeans came? Are we freer? I'm not sure. I'm sure we understand a lot more science, and science (to me) is delicious; it's what I live for. But I often feel that industrial civilization was best described by Thoreau: "To get his shoestrings he speculates in herds of cattle." We sacrifice much of our youth in school in preparation for a career and much of our adulthood laying up a pension for our old age. Well, I'm past all that and now live parasitically on those who are still paying Medicare and Social Security taxes. But, as I've already revealed, I definitely have intimations of mortality. Might I have done better to live like that old grasshopper, just for the present? Before this gets too moralistic, I'd better haul up and end this derail.

EthnAlln

Good points. In fact, Jonathan Edwards thought lightning rods were a bad thing and would bring God's wrath upon Massachusetts, since they were thwarting his rightful punishment of sinners.

And of course Jerry Falwell and many others thought it was wrong to find medicines for treating AIDS, since it was obviously God's punishment for sodomy. Some attitudes never change.