Which brings me back to my daughter’s brush with death and the loss of her high school friend and classmate. And the “why” of it. One of the things we talked about in the immediate aftermath was the question of why some bad people – murderers, rapists, and other people who don’t seem to deserve many extra breaths on this earth – get to live while a good, young man died…?
There was a book published a while back entitled “Why Bad Things Happen to Good People” and I wish I could say I’ve read it, but I haven’t. It was recommended to my ex-wife after her mother passed away unexpectedly from a brain aneurysm in 1995. The most frequent struggle with a tragic death or loss is the “why” question – and most of us turn our eyes heavenward and plead with a God we vaguely recall being taught as all-knowing, all-powerful, and entirely benevolent. WTF are you doing up there? we ask when our loved one is taken too soon. This question is (in my opinion) the product of an entirely undeveloped metaphysics. (For those who think I’m using a big word unnecessarily, I’m merely using the precise one. Metaphysics is defined as “1. the branch of philosophy that deals with first principles, esp of being and knowing; 2. the philosophical study of the nature of reality, concerned with such questions as the existence of God, the external world, etc…. [from Medieval Latin, from Greek ta meta ta phusika the things after the physics, from the arrangement of the subjects treated in the works of Aristotle].” And there’s our old friend Aristotle, popping up again…)
The Greek mythology gave us a view of the world in which Man had absolutely no free will. Period. Oedipus Rex is a terrible story because the guy is essentially cursed from birth. He’s not a bad guy. Didn’t do a thing wrong, but he was destined to kill his dad and sleep with his mom – no matter how hard he tried to avoid that fate. His attempts to avoid the prophecy – when he hears of it and flees his adoptive parents, whom he thinks are his birth parents – leads him to run into his birth father (King Laius) and in the first recorded case of road rage (chariot rage, I believe it was called), Oedipus kills his dad (in self-defense) in a dispute over the right-of-way at an intersection. He then solves the Riddle of the Sphinx, saving the city of Thebes, and gets Jocasta – the widowed Queen of Thebes as his bride (that would be his mom, for those keeping score at home). I’m going to return to the idea of predestination, fate, and free will momentarily, but I want to tie it in to Christian theology because they’re not all that far apart. We tend to think of ancient Greek mythology as being just “off the deep end” on this kind of stuff, and modern theology to be so much more sophisticated, but let’s compare Oedipus to some of the dominant religious doctrines of today.
(Continued in Part III)…