Job, can you make a really big fish?

If you've known me for a while no doubt I've pestered you with POE. Not the poet, but the Problem of Evil, the question that asks, "Why, if God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and all-good, why is there suffering in the world?"

There isn't sufficient time to go through all the answers, but I have yet to read a theodicy that satisfies or frustrates for its contradictions or absurdity. From free will to predestination, to arguments that say God is not omnipotent or a child God engaged in "soul-making" (Irenaeus), to Plantiga's "free will defense" and multiple universes. Nothing answers. Nothing satisfies.

Finally someone's written an entire book on...well, you can check it out:



Dr. Eherman was also interviewed on Fresh Air recently. You can click here to listen.



Useless Virtues

At midnight in the backyard hot tub,

pleasantly drunk, three old friends argue

One more time the meaning of The Book of Job.

Floating in brothel-scented foam

Under California constellations, it is easy

to picture the Man of Suffering, the whirlwind,

Dead cattle, the warehouses of the snow--

especially the warehouses, which have vast

Quartzite double doors, where helicopters

of ethereal whiteness enter and vanish, hauling

Neither suffering nor glory, but only another

disgusting winter day for Moscow or Trenton,

Stoic taxis rusting through generations

of storm-sown salt. It is about the moral

Evolution of the idea of God. It is about

the survival of its own obdurate narrative,

Which could rescue even us nonbelievers

from easy sentiment. It is about nothing

Except the incommensurability of everything,

the shitty drama of pain that stretches

From Behemoth down to the structure of the atom.

Nobody agrees. Even God refuses to be God

But breaks down in a windy turbulence.

More wine. And the three of them lean back,

Waching lights sign the absolute sky, where,

as though all human consciousness were forming

One vast, slow thought, the dream of the Cambodian boy

on a red-eye flight to Dallas interweaves

Baseball, temple bells, roadkill, cemeteries, bread,

sexual ambiguity, and a poster of Pol Pot nailed

To the wall of a compound, monsoon-faded, laced

by bullet holes. The image comes through

This clear, this real: a yellow-and-black spider

makes its decisive way across the vacant left eye

Of the dictator, which has been precisely punctured

by a round from a surplus M-16. Meanwhile,

the 737 that cradles this sleeping boy reclined

in its blue-striped seat threads darkness between

Los Angeles and Albuquerque, vapor trail

a strand of invisble web joining the strafed

Face of the moon and an H-bomb test site.

Everyone on the plane is sleeping, even the pilot,

Like God, oblivious at the switch, and all the people

oblivious to his oblivion--otherwise

They would wake up screaming sensibly.

But everything riding the sky tonight is silent.

Leviathan tortures Orion bloodlessly, and the great

Eagle Nebula, screwing stars out of twisted nothing,

Is twenty-three trillion miles of decorum. Still

the cattle are dead, the children are dead,

The body is pierced with cankers, and, on every horizon,

snow masses its chronic obedience.

T.R. Hummer
Useless Virtues