Religious Idiots. They Don't Notice All The Cruelty In A World A Good God Would Never Have Created.

Mark Shea:

Wesley Smith writes about I-1000 and the euthanasia movement.

One of the stupider things the New Atheists and secularists behind stuff like euthanasia movement often do is talk as though they just discovered suffering and pain. They babble that the creation account in Genesis is the work of children who fancy that the world is a pink and white nursery in which a good God sees to it that nothing painful occurs, but now we older and wiser moderns have discovered things like the Holocaust and other horrors and so God is thereby proven not to exist. We are on our own and the best we can do is pull the plug to prevent pain from happening.

It occurred to me over the weekend how daringly revolutionary and rebellious the ancient Jews were against such bullshit. They lived in a world not one whit less difficult than our own. It was, recall, a world without anesthetics. It was a world in which cruelty, accident, natural disaster, war, famine, plague and poverty were even more up close and personal than anything we plump Washington suburbanites experience. They temptation to them, as to us, was to give in to despair and regard the world as a torture chamber with a few pleasures to be snatched at before checking out. Most of their neighbors did exactly this and it is expressed in the monstrous religious traditions they developed to express this fundamentally despairing view of the cosmos. It was a cosmos ruled by monstrous gods who might be placated if you did something utterly disgusting like throw you baby in the fire. It was a cosmos in which the most you could hope for was the chance to throw yourself on your sword rather than be made sport of by your enemies.

In all this, the Jew rebelliously say, "It is very good!" They assert a sort of counter-rebellion against the prince of this world and declare that as bad as it seems, the world--indeed even the creatures worshiped as gods by their enemies--is good. It's an expression of a sort of ontological courage that requires the help of grace to pull off, since it's so far beyond anything presented to us by our senses.

Euthanasia is a kind of cowardice and treason to the flag of the world. "It is good" is the truth of things--confirmed to us at long last by the Resurrection.