Over at the Confabulum, Conor Friedersdorf reminds us to remind ourselves of how lucky we are. While I’m always up for some meta-gratitude, I was more immediately reminded of Daniel Larison’s brilliant post from a while back about theodicy and "the pornography of compassion":
" . . . If you are relying heavily on agriculture that depends on favourable weather and freedom from blights, as people for most of history did, and you are exposed to the ravages of famine or plague without the protections of extensive food surpluses or medical treatment, the irrationality of blasphemy and doubting God’s benevolence becomes much clearer. At the same time, enjoying plenitude and wealth allows those with the most advantages the luxury of worrying not so much about the suffering that they experience, since they tend to experience relatively little, and worrying a lot more about suffering elsewhere. Questioning God’s benevolence in this context becomes akin to the “pornography of compassion,” as Dr. Fleming has called it, in which people feel obliged to make a great display of how much they care about suffering on the other side of the world–in this case, they care so much that they feel obliged to curse God. With the exception of natural disasters, which are the things that you might think would cause more doubt than human cruelty, complaints against God for things that we do to each other are really quite bizarre.
. . .
As modern life has become in many respects easier, more comfortable and more secure, perhaps many moderns find the freedom that God has permitted them to be overwhelming and bewildering and their complaints against God are framed in terms that might be used for complaints against their fellow men: “if God really loved us, He would intervene and fix everything.” If you really cared about other people, you would want to meddle in their affairs to an obnoxious degree."
Read the whole thing, as they say.
