Previous - 17. Lemonaide
Getting to the crux of the problem
This is from p122 of the Schocken Books edition of The Sunflower from 1997, the section by Robert McAfee Brown,... If God forgives such deeds, does not that likewise strain to the breaking point any contention that the universe of God's creation is a moral universe? A malevolent deity might be placed in charge of such arrangements but surely not a god of mercy and compassion...
p123 1. I do not believe we can supply an answer to the first question [of Elie Wiesel], "Where is God in all this?" -- a question on the lips of character after character in Wiesel's novels...
What follows is a lot of dancing around the issue but really avoiding the reasonable questions he's raised. This is almost the reverse of a Straw man rhetorical device -- he's raised an argument he can't really touch but pretends he has refuted it with a few brave words.
Either God is an integral part of this story or "God" is not a part of our story at all. If "God" is viewed after the Hindu interpretation as a mix of light and darkness, then there is less of a problem. If "God" is viewed as man's greatest creation, then, again, there is really no problem as He (or They if you choose to separate out the darkness in the form of Satan) must reflect human nature in all its variations.
It seems to me that this is also more of a problem for Christians than Jews as the Old Testament God is really not all that "Moral," in the way we think about it today. The God of Moses had no qualms about genocide. (Though the God sanctioned genocide that followed Moses' death was at least more rational and efficient than that practiced by the Nazis.)
The Dalai Lama has the most sensible attitude to this moral question -- because, I think, he is coming from a very different metaphysical place. As his story of the Tibetan monk makes clear, he is less interested in the actions or guilt of Karl than he is in his own state of mind.
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