RC-23/04/2013
On the day after Christmas, 2004, as everyone knows, a major earthquake and tsunami devastated coastal regions around the Indian Ocean, killing as many as 300,000 people outright and dooming countless others to misery, heartbreak, and early death. The charitable contributions that then poured forth on an unprecedented scale expressed something more than empathy and generosity. They also bore an aspect of self-therapy—of an attempt, however symbolic, to mitigate the calamity's impersonal randomness and thus to draw a curtain of decorum over a scene that appeared to proclaim too baldly, “This world wasn't made for us.”
On that earlier occasion, mainstream Catholic and Protestant faith received a lesser blow than did Enlightenment “natural theology,” which, presuming the Creator to have had our best interests at heart when he instituted nature's laws and then retired, made no allowance for either Satanic influence or divine payback for wickedness.
Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, proclaimed, “this is an expression of God's great ire with the world” (Wieseltier 2005). But two and a half centuries of increasing scientific awareness had made for a significant difference in lay attitudes. Now the rabbi's callous words—Leon Wieseltier rightly called them “a justification of the murder of children”—met with widespread revulsion.
Theodicy, in this altered climate of opinion, would have to take a subtler tack. Just such an adjustment was made with considerable suavity by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, in a Sunday Telegraph article of January 2, 2005:
The question: “How can you believe in a God who permits suffering on this scale?” is . . . very much around at the moment, and it would be surprising if it weren't—indeed, it would be wrong if it weren't. The traditional answers will get us only so far. God, we are told, is not a puppet-master in regard either to human actions or to the processes of the world. If we are to exist in an environment where we can live lives of productive work and consistent understanding—human lives as we know them—the world has to have a regular order and pattern of its own. Effects follow causes in a way that we can chart, and so can make some attempt at coping with. So there is something odd about expecting that God will constantly step in if things are getting dangerous.
On a careful reading, William's essay appears in a truer light as a traditional exercise in Christian damage control. “Doubt God's existence”? Hardly. It sufficed for Williams that “we are told” about the Lord's plan to allow the world “a pattern of its own”—one that, if it occasionally puts us in harm's way, does so only because the fashioning of a law-abiding cosmos struck the Almighty as the best means for us humans to achieve “productive work and consistent understanding.”
William says “Although many harsh experiences “seem to point to a completely arbitrary world,” convictions about divine mercy will remain in place, because those convictions “have imposed themselves on the shape of a life and the habits of a heart”.
When the Archbishop of Canterbury mentions “effects [that] follow causes in a way that we can chart,” he writes as an heir, however grudging, of the scientific revolution. But when he implies that some prayers stand a good chance of being answered, empiricism has given way to lore supported only by traditional authority. Some people would rather not risk the loss of treasured beliefs
Q.1 How do the charitable contributions qualify as self therapy?
a) They help victims believe that there are others like them
b)They make the donors feel involved in the misery of the victims
c)They allow people to distract themselves from thoughts of pity and fear
d)The gratitude of the victim makes the donors feel better
e)The contributions put the donors in high esteem by qualifying them as 'Messengers of God'
Q.2 Leon Wieseltier's comment about the rabbi's words being callous reveals
a)Wieseltier's change of heart brought about by his growing rational beliefs
b)The popular conception about natural calamities having become more scientific
c)The demand by the Church to explain issues with the help of scientific constructs
d)The beliefs of Wieseltier's which changed after his personal experience with the Tsunami
e)None of the above
Q.3 According to Williams, the reason for people's continuing belief in god's mercy is
a)It has become a habit
b)It is visible everywhere
c)More people are connecting with each other through this
d)It helps people get through life
e)It helps people overcome their 'sins'
Q.4 What is the author's opinion about the Archbishop of Canterbury as revealed in the last paragraph?
a)He is increasingly adopting a scientific position and therefore has attracted criticism from the church
b)He has begun to acknowledge the scientific nature of calamities because of recently gained scientific knowledge
c)He has started an alternate Christian movement which is based on scientific explanations
d)He exhibits a scientific attitude at times, but he still continues to foster the belief in divine retribution
e)He believes in the coexistence of superstitions and pragmaticism.
Q.5 A suitable title to the above passage is
a)Does God exist ?
b)Reconciling Suffering and God.
c)The Tsunami.
d)Theodicy- a remedy for the Tsunami
e)God has quit the world.