Back on the right side of the international dateline. Just about got my head back in the right time zone, although waking up at 3:30 this morning and not being able to go back to sleep for an hour was no fun.
Also heard some less than good news about a colleague this weekend. Reminds me again about the perils of getting older. We worry about so many things and want to live as long as we can, but life reaches up and smacks some people down. Its the old paradox-bad things happen to good people and the Ultimate Power is somehow not to be held accountable for that. Not as if He has to give an account, but such blatant unfairness is just hard for my little mind to accept. I call it the Job paradox-namely trying to understand how a loving God allows such misery in the world. Particularly when, if you take the Bible literally, he had the ability to destroy Satan at any time.
That’s put me in a rotten mood. This is a subject I could write for a long time about. Unlike Christopher Hitchens, I do believe in God-but I also think the bible makes the most sense when viewed allegorically. The evil that men do comes not from a beast with horns-but from ourselves and our own failings as human beings. That as many people rise above those and somehow live in harmony is probably the most positive development that I can think of.
However there is still too much misery in the world. And people dying of diseases, that should have been conquered long ago. We find the time to spend 87 billion dollars every 6 months on destruction-yet the world cannot band together to make the world a better place. I don’t understand that anymore.
Any more than I understand folks who argue the old order-where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer- is somehow better for the world. I once accepted that line of thinking-I do no longer. If the world is to make any progress, some sort of progress of creating a minimal standard of living world wide is required. The inequality between the stable worlds and the unstable world can no longer continue. And the solution for that is not to be found in military invasions-but it has to come in some sort of flowing of resources from the haves to the have nots. I’m not sure how to do that, but if we do not, there will be no peace or progress.
People will argue that this is impossible and sheer lunacy to dream of. I’ll tell you what is sheer lunacy-that after 30 years and untold amounts of research, AIDS is still a problem in the world. That we still do not have vaccine against it. That people still have to view something as wonderful as sex as being a crap shoot with death.
That cancer is not more contained than it is. That we still sweat TB-highlighted by the news last week of the man who flew to and from France.
That we have a vaccine for HPV which works-and people are arguing against its use because it might somehow encourage sexual activity. And the people arguing this do so with a straight face.
So much misery is still in the world. Its got to change. Some would say that we have to wait for the world to come to see this go away. I take issue with that-man should not have to wait for heaven. It should be brought to this world. This world, now-not in some future time.
If somehow this is so fair, I sure would like for Him to explain it. Because as far as I can see its not.
