Anti-Climacus

WELL: I come at the issue Norm speaks of here from a rather different perspective (what with being Christian and all), but it seems to me that the three courses he outlines for ways in which the religious can respond to catastrophe are not at all exhaustive, nor would they hit on the most common Protestant arguments in this area: I think the basic idea can be summarized shortly as the belief that for God to intervene constantly in order to prevent any ill from falling on anyone would be to deny man free will, but moreover to say that to think of things this way is to claim a status for mankind as innocent that it certainly has never done much to deserve

(as Max von Sydow says in Hannah and Her Sisters: "You missed a very dull TV show on Auschwitz. More gruesome film clips, and more puzzled intellectuals declaring their mystification over the systematic murder of millions. The reason they can never answer the question "How could it possibly happen?" is that it's the wrong question. Given what people are, the question is "Why doesn't it happen more often?"")

this isn't to rob what happens of its tragic character or (when the catastrophe involves people doing violence to other people) its moral character, but merely to say that, men being what they are, and the world being what it is, we are perpetually stuck with this sort of thing.