When It's Bad to Be Good

Some of the greatest atrocities have been perpetrated in the name of the good. Certainly the Inquisition was one of these. In The Grand Inquisitor section of The Brothers Karamazov Dostoevsky describes the condition of Christ being brought before the Grand Inquisitor for sacrilege though it was Christianity that the Inquisition was supposed to be protecting. Goodness can become a juggernaut, a tsumani in which initial objectives may be lost in the whirlwind, the inertial force of the movement itself. Max Weber distinguished between a sect and a church, with the sect representing the institutionalization of extemporaneous fervor. It’s like that with adherence to the cause of Goodness, whose original principals may be lost in the bureaucracy that's left in its wake. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" goes the old homily and Goodness is supposed to be the best good intention. When Armageddon comes as a result of a nuclear device being dropped to thwart evil, what will we be able to say about the triumph of Good? You might say that Goodness can only be defined as a process, a means rather than an end, as a way of deterring those who would commit destructive deeds under the banner of Goodness. But Goodness itself is elusive. It’s a public relations device that creates a sanctimonious, self-congratulatory air around  its adherents and that buys them immunity from detection or prosecution. When Bad Things Happen to Good People was a bestselling book about how misfortune can befall even the most well-meaning of people. But sometimes it's just bad to be a goody two shoes.

Atheists of the World Unite!

Photo of Susan Jacoby by B.D. Engler

“Atheists of the world unite,” is the message Susan Jacoby conveys in a Sunday Times Review piece (“The Blessings of Atheism," NYT, 1/5/13). “It is primarily in the face of suffering…that I am forcefully reminded of what atheism has to offer…I do not have to ask, as all people of faith must, why an all-powerful, all-good God allows such things to happen. It is a positive blessing, not a negation of belief, to be free of what is known as the theodicy problem.” Howard Kushner’s When Bad Things Happen to Good People was a bestselling book that dealt with a similar problem and came to a different conclusion. Writing from personal experience, the author, a rabbi, dealt with how he maintained his faith in God after his son died from progeria, a condition which produces premature aging. Kushner went on to deal with similar issues in a later volume, When All You've Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough. What is interesting in Jacoby’s piece is that she invokes Robert Green Ingersoll, a famous l9th century agnostic and freethinker who was much beloved by Walt Whitman and who Whitman once described as being Leaves of Grass. The picture Jacoby draws of the agnostic or the atheist is not the cynic, empiricist and victim of the kind of "disenchantment" that Max Weber would later describe as limiting natural human impulse towards finding metaphysical connections between things. Jacoby attempts to bring atheism and agnosticism out of the closet so that its followers can be encouraged to congregate and provide each other with the kind of solace that Ingersoll did in his many graveside eulogies. “We need to demonstrate that atheism is rooted in empathy as well as intellect,” Jacoby writes. “And although atheism is not a religion, we need community-based outreach programs so that our activists will be a recognizable to their neighbors as the clergy.”