AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 12

HOT TOPIC
suffering assumes that the ultimate purpose of
nature is to provide for the good and comfort
of humanity. While the planet can provide
for our good, any number of natural events —
including COVID-19 — clearly demonstrate
that it is under no constraint to do so. Therefore
theodicy’s view of nature is somewhat reductionist
— another problem.
The Problem of Reductivism
Theodicy argues that God cannot exist
as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent
due to the existence of evil. But the God of
Abraham, Jesus, and Mohammed (chronologically
speaking) is far more complex than that,
as is the question itself. Ultimately, theodicy is
less about the presence of evil and more a consideration
of the nature of God. Specifically,
it’s a question of how God’s goodness interacts
with God’s power.
The problem with the idea that an omnibenevolent,
omnipotent, omniscient God
would, perforce, create a world without
suffering, is that an all-powerful being
doesn’t do anything “perforce.” Now anyone
who’s spent time in a Black church knows
that “God is good all the time.” But God isn’t
constrained to goodness, because that constraint
would limit God’s power. Goodness,
for God, is a choice. God is perfectly good
because God is making that choice continually,
again and again without fail. When we say that
humanity is made in God’s image (Gen 1:26), it
is not a matter of faces, fingers, and toes (and
certainly not genitalia); rather, we exist in the
image of God through our ability to — among
other things — choose. The challenge posed
by Christianity, for instance, is to choose as
God chooses; to choose goodness and choose
it perpetually (Matt. 5:48). Free will — agency
and intention — makes us responsible for our
decisions and the goodness or evil of the consequences
that follow. And for theodicy, that is
the central problem.
The Problem of Abdication
In reality, there is no such thing as natural
evil. We may not like tornadoes, earthquakes, or
pandemic viruses, but the fact that we or other
animals can suffer due to them does not make
them evil. Equally, animals cannot be blamed
for eating other animals if the morally preferable
alternative would be for them to starve.
Conflating human suffering due to
natural phenomena with human suffering
inflicted by other humans under the general
category of ‘evil,’ obscures a single, crucial fact:
that the vast majority of the time, when people
suffer, we suffer at the hands of other people. By
laying that at the feet of God or any other conveniently
intangible scapegoat, we abdicate responsibility
for our own actions, a rhetorical
move that is not only deeply immoral and
logically flawed — it just doesn’t help.
Theodicy Take 2
So let’s try this again from the top: God is
omnipotent. God is omniscient. God is omnibenevolent.
Being all of these things, God gave
people the ability to choose, and we choose, in
some instances, to put the greed of a few over
the suffering of millions; to hold the good of the
economy, an imaginary construct created by
people, more sacred than the lives of the people
whose labor and consumption make it run. And
sometimes we choose to do something even
worse — and something unthinkable happens.
Why Bad Things Happen
Jordan Neely didn’t die because God lacks
power, knowledge or goodness. He also didn’t die
because of mental illness, aggressive behavior, or
because he had it coming. He died because Daniel
J. Penny wrapped his arms around his neck
and squeezed while some assisted and others
watched for more than 15 minutes.
Similarly, after 3 years of COVID-19, the
development of vaccines and treatment drugs
and the proven effectiveness of masking and
social distance, the astonishing rate at which this
virus continues to spread, mutate, and kill is not
nature’s evil, it’s ours. Crowing to CBS News about
the end of the federal state of emergency, White
House COVID-19 Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha said
that nearly every COVID-19 death is now preventable,
stating that it’s clear, “from a very large-scale
kind of cohort data … that if you're up to date on
your vaccines and you get treated, death numbers
are exceedingly low.” However, he said this while
promoting the removal of vaccine requirements
for federal employees and international travelers
while city and state rollbacks end requirements
just about everywhere else. Who then is responsible
for the surge to come? And what natural
disaster is to blame for so many nations lacking
access to vaccines for COVID-19 as well as flu,
pneumonia, and a host of other illnesses?
It’s terrible when banking crises and
economic downturns lead to slashed wages, lost
jobs and closed businesses. Though the global
economy is a beast of our own making, not every
large scale financial hiccup can be predicted
— like the advent of a global pandemic. But
the way we treat those who are hit hardest by
those events and the way we structure society
to position certain communities at the front of
every disaster are entirely up to us.
When government funds go to large
companies while families struggle and landlords
fill courts with petitions for evictions, is it so hard
to imagine that the the lack of compassion that
we show to each other might result in some of us
losing our homes, going hungry, losing hope and
becoming depressed? We might find ourselves
on a subway train, angry and ranting to a group of
people with their own problems, their own fears,
and their own reasons to be mad. And when that
happens, who is responsible for what happens
next? When we can admit that we are the only
answer to that question, and act accordingly, we
will have taken a big step towards keeping the
list of names that Jordan Neely just joined from
getting any longer. AC
Stop Asian Hate protest by Jason Leung
120 aphrochic