I grew up a Catholic, attending Assumption Hall, a Catholic school with nuns of the Benedictine order as teachers, through the eighth grade. And of course it was inculcated into me that God was all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing. The conundrum which most of us have heard, that either God can prevent evil but chooses not to, which means he is not all-good, or he wishes to prevent evil but cannot, which means he is not all-powerful, was not something I, as a believer, concerned myself with in those early years. But something similar was troubling to me.
The head of the Blessed Sacrament Church, which was associated with the school I attended, was a gray-haired eminence named Monsignor Limmer. The monsignor appeared ancient to us kids, and with his deep, baritone voice and dour expression, someone not only to look up to, but fear. Though he lived in the back of the church, we sensed that he really came from some other place, some place where ordinary humans did not go. The good monsignor would visit our classroom for ten minutes or so once every week or two, and we listened in awed silence to his wisdom about God and Christ. One day when I was in the third or fourth grade, he was explaining that God was all-good, all-powerful, and all-knowing, and I asked him why (I had a yen for the why question even back then), if God was all-good, he would put people on this earth who he knew were going to end up in hell, burning throughout eternity. The monsignor proceeded to tell me it was a good question for someone my age, but he had the answer. God gives all of us free will, the monsignor assured us, and when we come to the fork in the road where one path will lead us to heaven and one to hell, we have a choice, and God is not responsible for what choice we make. Yes, I said, but if God is also all-knowing, he knows what path we’re going to take before we take it. So, I said, I still didn’t understand how God would put people on this earth who he already knew were going to end up in hell. The monsignor coughed nervously, noted it was the end of the hour, and said we’d talk about it some other time, a time that never came. No one in Christianity, to my knowledge, can answer that question. And the reason is that it is anchored upon the unproved and contradictory premise of an all-good, all-knowing and all-powerful God, and a heaven and hell.
Since that early age of nine or ten, I have come to see one patent absurdity after another in the whole notion, so numerous they could be the subject of hundreds of pages.
I even have trouble with the whole concept of prayer, in which literally billions of people throughout history have begged God for mercy. But since God is supposed to be all-good and merciful, why would we have to beg him to be what he supposedly already is? Most of those who believe in God also believe in the devil, who they feel is responsible for all the evil in the world. I’m going to sound laughable here, and it’s nothing I’m recommending, since I don’t believe in the devil, but logically speaking, shouldn’t people be praying to the devil? One doesn’t have to beg a good being to be good, one only has to ask a bad being to be good. No? Since the devil is the bad guy, isn’t he the one we should be begging for mercy? Yet the Jesus prayer (and informal personal ones) says: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”
We of course always hear people saying, “God answered my prayers.” But I know that those who say this do not realize the import of what they are saying, because if they did, they wouldn’t think very much of God, which they do. Saying that “God answered my prayers” necessarily means two things: that God has the power to answer prayers, and more important, for the 99 percent of the other humans who pray and beg for God’s merciful intervention in time of desperate need, God told them to take a walk, get lost, he couldn’t care less. He said no. “God answered my prayers,” necessarily and inevitably means he chose to disregard the prayers of others who were begging for mercy or compassion in their lives; in fact, the vast majority of others. We have proof throughout history that if God is sitting up there deciding who gets mercy, he rejects the plea most of the time. Don’t you think people pray to be spared when they have terminal cancer? Or AIDS? Don’t you think the Jews at Auschwitz prayed to God to be spared? Maybe we have been praying to the wrong entity all along. People who believe in prayers could hardly do worse praying to the devil.
About the devil, in Christianity he is a fallen angel (Lucifer), and hence a creation of God, since God, we are told, created Lucifer and all things. Why does it seem that the devil is more powerful than God? Since there seems to be more evil, immorality, and greed in the world than good, how can God, who is all powerful, be losing the battle to Satan, someone he created?
I’ve heard that at Nicole’s funeral, one of the speakers told Nicole’s grieving survivors and friends that we can’t “question God’s will.”
So it was God’s will
that Simpson slaughtered Nicole? Really? When a Puerto Rican mother of three young children in New York City whom she supported all by herself, holding down three jobs to do so, was murdered out on the street by an addict to get a few dollars for a fix, leaving the three youngsters without any parent, the pastor at her funeral said, “It was God’s will.” When an eighteen-year-old black youth from San Diego who was an honor student, student body president, and champion wrestler, who dreamed of becoming a doctor, who “did all the right things and said no to all the wrong things,” was gunned down in a drive-by shooting as he left a graduation party, again, a pastor said: “It was God’s will.” When a leukemia patient whose mother in El Salvador had finally won permission from federal authorities, after a long struggle, to visit him one last time died just hours before her plane landed, the young man’s cousin said: “He tried to wait for her, but I guess it was God’s will that he didn’t want him to wait.” When a young woman who had gone to Russia to devote her life to helping some of the most desperate people of an increasingly troubled nation, the orphaned children of Russia, was found slain in her apartment in Moscow, her mother said: “God had always taken care of her. What happened was God’s will. I guess he decided he wanted her back.” But why would he want her back? To keep him company? She’s doing good things for young people in need, and the mother is satisfied that God had better things for her to do in heaven?
When, in fact, six million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust in perhaps the darkest chapter in human history, we again were told by many members of the cloth that it was God’s will. When President Kennedy was blasted into eternity by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22, 1963, again, preachers everywhere said, “It was God’s will.” The evangelist John R. Rice wrote: “The assassin’s bullet which cut down President Kennedy did the will of God.”
My question, of course, is that if it was God’s will that Ron and Nicole be butchered (in other words, this is what he wanted, or this is what he had no desire to prevent), why would anyone feel he is all-good or want to spend eternity with this type of being?
But, we are told, “God has his reasons” for permitting these atrocities. As the Reverend Rice wrote: “It was a matter of his choice. He had reasons for permitting the assassination of President Kennedy.” And, of course, the unquestioned assumption is that whatever the reasons, they are good ones, reasons that justify what he did or permitted to happen. So even though he wanted these horrors to occur, he is still all-good. No matter what happens (murder, famine, genocide, deadly plagues, etc.), don’t question God. He has his reasons and they’re all good.
On April 19, 1995, a bomb exploded outside the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, and 168 people, including fifteen children, were killed. The consensus in highly religious Oklahoma City was that there had to be a reason God chose one of the most religious areas in the nation (where nearly 75 percent of the population are regular churchgoers) for the blast. The answer was that God had put the city to the test, and it passed. “It’s like it had to happen in Oklahoma, in the Bible Belt, where people are neighbors and we do give,” a parishioner said. But though the tragedy was “God’s will,” said a minister, God still got credit. “It was one of God’s miracles that so many people survived,” he said.
But my question is: If a good and powerful God doesn’t prevent evil, why should we automatically assume that there is a good reason
for
the evil? Who tells us that when it comes to God, we must reject all conventional notions of logic and common sense and assume there is a valid and satisfactory reason for all the horrors and tragedies and misery in the world? It would seem that the only justification we would ever have for taking that position would be if God, appearing in the sky, told us that although what has happened doesn’t make sense to us mortals, it is part of a grand scheme he has for life in the universe. Wouldn’t that be the only possible sufficient cause for our belief that despite his willing or permitting the horrors of life, he is still all-good? Apart from God’s apparition in the sky telling us this, what human being can possibly convince us of this absurdity?
The myth in Christianity that God is all-good, all-knowing, and all-powerful is so ingrained in our history, civilization, and culture that it may persist no matter how much our civilization progresses. Imprinted on all of our coins and all of our currency are the words “In God We Trust.” But why? What has God done to earn this trust? Won’t someone please tell me? I know it is said that there are always 10 percent who “don’t get the word.” Maybe I’m in that 10 percent. No one, but no one, even the tyrants of history, ever bad-mouths God, even though he supposedly permits all the evil in the world to exist. I mean, if people can believe it’s “God’s will” that a building is blown up killing 168 people, and still praise him for sparing the lives of others in the building, I have a question: What’s God’s secret? Who’s his PR agent?
In the Simpson case, God (if there is a God) not only permitted the butchery of Ron and Nicole, but seemed to be working overtime to ensure that the killer, Simpson, would get off, that justice would be thwarted. If anyone was ever in the corner of a murderer, it was God with Simpson. He didn’t just permit an atrocity to be committed. Like a perverse force at play, he seemed to be conspiring to see that Simpson walked out of court a free man, and with a smile on his face, Simpson getting every conceivable break imaginable, from beginning to end. And apparently Simpson knew. As I wrote earlier, on the night of the not-guilty verdict, Simpson, at his victory party, smiled broadly and held up a Bible in his outstretched right hand. This, from the October 4, 1995, edition of the
Los Angeles Times
: “O.J. is free and God deserves the thanks. That was the message—delivered with unbridled cheer and relief—that came pouring forth from the Simpson family Tuesday as his celebrated trial came to a climactic close. ‘God is good, see?’ said Tracy Baker, O.J.’s niece. ‘I know that praying to God is the answer,’ Simpson’s mother Eunice said. ‘Me and my family want to thank God, without whom, I don’t know where we’d be,’ said Simpson’s son, Jason.”
Simpson’s daughter, Arnelle, said to her brother in the courtroom when the jury returned its verdict, “We did it, Jason. God got us through.” And the very first words Johnnie Cochran used in his post-verdict news conference were: “I want to thank God.”
When it comes to theology, I am too confused to be anything but an agnostic. But if there is a God, as there may very well be, the deist philosophy, which holds that after creating the universe, God bailed out, indifferent to that which he created, would seem to do less violence to the accepted principles of logic and common sense. At least the deist philosophy is free of inherent contradictions.
The root cause of the Simpson verdict
Perhaps the most important and all-encompassing question to be asked about the Simpson case is: What was the main reason the mostly black Simpson jury bought the defense argument that the
LAPD
had conspired to frame Simpson? I’m confident I know the answer. How confident am I? Well, I’m not positive. I’m not as sure as I am that a crooked tree will leave a crooked shadow, but I’m certain enough to give ten-to-one odds, even though I’m not a gambling man. I’m even more sure that what I’m about to tell you, though it takes no intelligence at all to reach the conclusion I have, has not yet been mentioned by anyone commentating on the case, despite the fact that millions upon millions of words have been written and uttered about the Simpson case since the verdict. There’s one other person who I think knows, and that’s Johnnie Cochran, although it’s just possible that he himself was not aware of the misleading nature of what he was arguing. I’m confident he did know, however, and that it was his duplicity on this point, which went over the heads of the prosecutors without their even feeling the breeze, that contributed mightily to the verdict in this case.
In a few, shorthand words (which I will elaborate on), Cochran argued a police frame-up to the black jurors from their experience of police brutality, two completely different types of police misconduct, and the prosecution failed to point out and illuminate for the jury this extremely important and critical distinction, one that was instantly obvious to me. Though the jury never thought about the distinction (I’ll show you later that even the black prosecutor, Darden, did not), the latter type of police misconduct, police brutality, is common, and the former, police frame-ups, exceedingly rare.
Virtually every black person living in the ghetto, and perhaps even most of those living outside the ghetto, has either had a bad, dehumanizing experience with a white police officer at some time in his or her life or is aware of some member of his or her family or a relative who has. It’s been a part of the black experience in this country for centuries. In the article I wrote on police brutality a few years ago, I said, “In the minority communities, I sense a fire in the systems of the masses, a fire that can only be extinguished by justice.” What I was talking about, of course, was the small but virulent strain of Los Angeles police who not only manhandle and mistreat members of the minority communities (Mexican-American as well as black), but in many instances go far beyond that. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that many minority citizens of Los Angeles and other large cities have been murdered by this element.