Wednesday POD

Movies, films, besides Poirot episodes - - not the plot but the layout is always about the same, I guess that's the way Agatha Christie wrote them, so one or two Poirot films from Time to Time is sufficient (I like that frequently the detestable character is the one murdered, but Who Done It is always a surprise) - - my favorite is WW2 films, or WW1 films may be second. Last night watching "The Longest Day" but Linda called "goodnight" from the bedroom about half way through, so I closed my laptop and went to bed, may resume or start over, maybe later today. 

Or maybe not, there's a POD for this morning: we are going out grocery shopping for a few items. Kristen and Malinda are coming for noon dinner tomorrow, and Linda is making a chicken Alfredo dish from scratch. I like very thin pasta such as angel hair spaghetti that easily and fun twirls onto a fork, and in my little stock of pasta in the pantry I have a bronze cut linguine from Italy that we will use. This morning's venture is for a rotisserie chicken from Sam's, and the creamy pasta sauce recipe calls for cream and some other items, a chunk of parmesan cheese to grate. Maybe I'll get back to my movie today, or maybe another Time, who can say.

The only thing I didn't like about the half of the film that I've watched so far is the character cast as Rommel, who's everybody's only WW2 German hero. Well, maybe Manstein, but not so much. Popular, "the desert fox", Field Marshal Rommel was a lean, clean cut officer and IDK, Werner Hinz cast in the film may have been a movie star, but he's a heavy Rommel and not so charismatic.

Rommel's fame continued, in fact the Navy of West Germany had a destroyer named for him. He was popular during the Third Reich, and then later as well, in my opinion because he was implicated - - I think not convincingly but later everybody liked the idea and put him on a pedestal - - in the plot to assassinate Hitler and died because of that stupidly, carelessly, egoistically executed exercise in futility then unspeakably evil vengeance. That's a different story, you can read Rommel's son's account of it, or a documented history of it, or watch a film.

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Clearing my computer desktop this morning, I came across a short essay I'd saved and forgotten. It's around theodicy, the perennial issue of "if God is all loving and all powerful why is there evil and suffering in the world?" The answer to the question of theodicy is that the people who agonize over this issue, including Rabbi Harold Kushner to an extent ("When Bad Things Happen to Good People"), are unwilling to back up, examine, and revise their own thesis, but no matter. At any event, before I moved the essay to the Trash bin I thought I'd publish it without comment:

GUEST ESSAY How to Pray

How to Pray to a God You Don’t Believe In

May 2, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

Credit - Philippe Rullaud/Hans Lucas, via Re dux

By Scott Hershovitz

Mr. Hershovitz is a philosophy professor who has written a new book about children and philosophy.

The world is awful at the moment. Millions have died of Covid-19. Authoritarianism is on the rise, abroad and at home. And now there’s war, with all the death, destruction and dislocation that entails.

In dark times, many people seek refuge in religion. They hold fast to their faith.

But darkness also drives many people away from God. My older son, Rex, is one of them. He’s studying for his bar mitzvah, but he doesn’t believe in God. He told me that one day, when we were taking a walk.

“Why not?” I asked.

“If God was real, he wouldn’t let all those people die.” He was talking about the pandemic, but he could have been talking about the killing of civilians in the Kyiv suburb of Bucha or any number of other atrocities he’s been exposed to in his short life.

“Why do you say that?”

“God is supposed to care about us,” Rex said. “That doesn’t seem like something you’d let happen if you cared — and could stop it.”

This is the “problem of evil.” It’s an old philosophical question. Rex had never heard of it, but it’s not uncommon for kids to rediscover ancient arguments on their own. They’re thinking the world through. And if you think about God (who’s supposed to be all-powerful and endlessly empathetic), the existence of evil poses a serious puzzle: Why does God let us suffer?

People have proposed many answers, but most are poorly reasoned. For instance, some say that good requires evil — that it can’t exist without it. It’s not clear why that would be true. But the bigger problem is that if you take that view, you call into question God’s omnipotence. It turns out there’s something God can’t do: create good without evil.

But also: If good requires evil, maybe just a little bit would do. Is absolutely every evil in the world essential? Why can’t we have a world that’s just like this one — except without that twinge of pain I felt last Tuesday? What kind of God can’t soothe my sciatica? My physical therapist, Tony, makes my back feel better, and he doesn’t even claim to be a deity.

He is a hero, though (at least to me). And some say that’s why God allows evil in the world. He doesn’t care about pleasure and pain. He cares about what pleasure and pain make possible — compassion, redemption and heroic acts, like Tony mending my back. To get those goods, though, God has to give us free will. And once we have it, some of us abuse it.

This is, historically, the most influential answer to Rex’s question. But I don’t buy it. Why can’t God create only those people who would use their free will well? Why can’t he wave Paul Farmer through and keep Vladimir Putin out? He knows in advance how each of them will act — if he’s really omniscient.

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