Dear God...

I like this song. I really like this song. I’ve liked it ever since I bought an XTC tribute CD in college, even though I had never heard of the alt rock legends. I bought it because the CD had covers by both Sarah MacLachlan and They Might Be Giants on it. I really liked those two in those days. I had crazy love for those two. Sarah MacLachlan, in fact, did the cover of “Dear God.” I was crazy about the song. I must have listened to her version 500 times before a friend finally played me the original. You can hear it above. It’s great. Catchy. Passionate. Genuinely emotive. I get totally into it every time.It’s just that I also think it’s stupid.Look, believe in God or don’t. That’s not for me to judge. I will tell you that I do, but that’s not really my point. There are a lot of reasons for not believing in God that I can accept. The fact that there’s just no evidence. The fact that it all sounds sort of fairy tale’ish. The conflicting myths. The incongruous ways His adherents behave in this world. The way miracles just don’t seem to happen anymore. I can see a certain logic in all those reasons.

Except the one espoused in XTC’s “Dear God.” This one: I can’t believe in a God that would permit a world with this much misery.

I know where it comes from. It isn’t really an opinion. It’s an emotion. It’s a reaction. It’s a manifestation of anger. I have empathy for it. I have compassion for those so moved, but I can’t take it seriously as an intellectual position. In fact, when otherwise intelligent and compelling personalities, such as the fellows behind XTC, invest time and energy in making this particular case, I lose respect for them.

If you’re crying in a field of dead bodies and cursing God for this madness he’s permitted: fine. Have your fit.

But if you’re going to sit down and put pen to paper, think about it, and say: you know what? There’s lots of homeless people. I can’t buy this God thing. Well, I’m probably going to have to make fun of you. I don’t see how you could have possibly thought that one through to what it really means. What kind of world would you have had Him create for us?

If there were not misery in the world, then we certainly would not have free will. If there were no tragedy, there would be no point in living.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this, because it’s important. If you’re a person of faith, the view that a kind and loving God could never permit this madness in this world is seductive. But it’s also dangerous.

Let me try to explain: do you know any rich kids? The offspring of the rich?

A lot of people I know have never met that many rich people. It’s too bad. Rich people, especially the young ones, are instructive here. Look, I’m not crazy about the rich, in general, but your average rich kid isn’t so bad. Usually he’s got a bit too much entitlement and is generally naive, but he’s probably not evil. He probably wouldn’t even really know how to go about evil. Evil is tricky (trust me, I know from evil). He may have grown up with some patriarch who’s perpetuated awful, awful things to protect their wealth, but the young ones are usually blissfully sheltered from it. They don’t recognize their privilege because they’ve never known any other kind of life.

It’s not malicious.

It’s just, well, kind of simple. They have been protected from knowing any better. Do you want to be like that? Do you want to be naive?

Because that’s what XTC is asking God for above. I can’t buy you exist because if you did you would have protected me. Bad things wouldn’t happen to good people. My dad wouldn’t have left. Girls would go out with me. I wouldn’t be wearing this bizarre coat.

Imagine a whole world in which nothing bad ever happened. Where we were all able to have fun, play about, do our thing, but just before we ever really had a chance to hurt ourselves, something would intervene. We’d be saved. Get to the edge of that cliff and the angels would come from below and catch us and put us back to safety. Or, even worse, somehow we’d live in a world without cliffs. Without risk.

Is that a world we’d want to live in?

OK, fine, you say, the risk makes sense, but what about all the cruelty. What about the fact that God has put us in a world where people starve. Why did God not, you ask, give us enough to eat?

This one is a little trickier, but let me turn it back on you. Did God really not give us enough to eat? Or is the food just not making it to the hungry people?

Talk amongst yourselves. Use scratch paper if you want. I’ll wait.

Okay.

Now, if the answer you came back with is: actually, there is enough — but it’s not all in the right places, I’m going to have to agree with you. I’ll never forget when I first met this chick from Spain years ago. I volunteered to drive her on her first trip to an American supermarket (one of the Woodman’s locations in Madison). “Have you ever been to a big grocery store?” I asked her. “Oh yeah, sure,” she said. “Hmm,” I said.

When we got there, the ice cream aisle alone was more than she’d ever seen.

A whole aisle.

For ice cream.

A great man once said: I think you hear me knocking and I think I’m coming in.

And, if you said, no, there’s not enough, then maybe you’ve got something. Then again, the question is, was there always too little? There must have been enough at some point, right? At one point there was only a few hundred thousand people in the world. Now the world has something like 6 billion people in it. So even if there’s too little now, there must have been some period from when 100,000 humans grew to six billion humans in which, there was, in fact, enough. Right.

But there have always been hungry people.

Funny.

OK, so, then, our friends at XTC and my other brothers and sisters on the Left (this tends to be a favorite Lefty reason for atheism), come back and say: fine, there’s enough, and people are hoarding. God should intervene.

Well, but that brings us back to the world without cliffs. That brings us back to the world without free will.

Because, in fact, it certainly is not true that there is one person, or even a band of them out there, explicitly plotting to keep people hungry. There aren’t. Nobody makes a profit on starving people. Starving people, do not, by definition, generate a lot of income for anyone, because they are starving because they don’t have money.

So who’s hoarding?

I don’t have a clear answer, but I’m willing to bet, if you’re reading this, that you aren’t one of the starving people. I’m willing to bet, in fact, that not only do you have enough, but, in fact, if you wanted, in less than twenty minutes you could be standing in front of an aisle — yes, a whole aisle — filled with ice cream.

You live in bounty.

So are you hoarding?

A little historical aside here: Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for proving that famines are pretty much never caused by real shortages. They are caused, he found, by hoarding. It isn’t that there’s not enough. It’s that people believe there isn’t enough, start hoarding and then there really isn’t enough in the places where the people who need it can get to it. I think he’s right, only: I think he’s right for the whole world. For all of history. There has always been a famine and there has always been hoarding.

I have. You need. You can’t pay what I want, so I won’t give. That’s hoarding.

I believe in God. A kind and loving God. A God who loved us so much that he set us free. He set us free to live here, in bounty, even though he knew that with free will we would inevitably steal from each other. Even though he knows that each of us who steals loses a piece of his own humanity, his one real treasure in this life. Even though he knows, in fact, that each time someone steals, someone else’s heart breaks.

I believe in a God so kind and so loving that he was willing to set us free in a world in which he knew we would, over time, devise a system so corrupt and unfair that even the best of us might live a life of bounty and never quite be able to enumerate all the ways in which she is complicity in the robbery of her nature. A world that would so effectively distribute guilt that we’d never quite know where virtue ended and sin began.

I believe in a God so kind and loving that he was willing to set us free even though he knew we’d hurt ourselves. For no good reason at all. In a world full of cliffs. Cliffs from which we’d sometimes jump from and rise from the water in that exhilaration you can only feel when you’ve genuinely taken a risk, but, also, cliffs from which we’d sometimes just fall.

He could stop it. He could stop all the badness, but then what would we be but God’s naïve rich kids?

I think XTC made a great song here. One of the things I really love about art is that I can both be impressed by it, awed by it, and find its message flawed — even flimsy. Some of my favorite political songs are like this. Ani has a gun control anthem called “To the Teeth” that absolutely gets my blood pumping every time. Oh, and by the way, I think guns are neat.

The song, “Dear God,” is really from the gut. That’s what’s so good about it. That’s why I’m so impressed by the way they asked their question, even if I don’t think it’s a very interesting question: can you believe in a God that creates a world filled with suffering, starvation, cruelty and violence. Of course I do. A world without them, that’s the world that wouldn’t make sense.