Perhaps it’s time for me to jump in here.

First of all, I want to thank Cody for giving a thoughtful response to the question I posed a few weeks ago. I also want to thank the rest of you for taking time to ponder (as I’m sure you have) the problem in question.

I’m sure there are several of you who are wondering why I—a self-professed Wiccan—am bothering with a philosophical conundrum that mostly bothers monotheists of the Abrahamic religions. And on a Neo Pagan blog, no less. I have to admit that some of this stems from a kind of masochistic fascination with the mental gymnastics involved in trying to solve such a problem.

The first time I ever heard about the Problem of Evil, I was about seven years old and my father was driving me home from church. During the service, they announced the death of a little six-month old baby, the tiny daughter of a young couple in our church. The culprit was SIDS.

I was old enough to know a decent amount about germs and diseases. Old enough even to understand that some parents didn’t care for their children as they should. But the idea that a baby could be loved so much, cared for so tenderly, and still die—without catching so much as a cold—utterly confounded me.

How could something like this happen? It wasn’t fair. What was more, it seemed to contradict everything I had been taught about God, not to mention the natural order of the universe. I had been singing “Jesus Loves the Little Children” in Sabbath School from the time I was three years old. And what the song said, and the related story in the New Testament seemed to indicate, was that Jesus and, vicariously, God especially loved children. If adults had good reason to believe that God would protect them from the ills in the world, then we kids should have nothing to worry about. But a baby was dead, dead for absolutely no reason, and while I had not been raised to believe that God “calls His people Home” (read: kills them) it seemed like he hadn’t done an awful lot to stop it from happening either. If he would let a little six-month old girl die of nothing, that didn’t bode well for a seven-year old girl who often got in harm’s way.

My interest in this problem goes beyond a little girl’s wish to feel safe again. Setting aside evil and the theist definition of God, this problem is really about what makes a deity worthy of our reverence. What sort of divine beings should we be worshipping—if any?

It is interesting that Cody brought-up the Greek pantheon. In their hay-day, the Golden Age of Greece, there was more than a little debate as to whether or not the gods ought to be worshipped. This dialogue plays out most clearly in the plays of Euripides and Sophocles. These two playwrights were contemporaries. They more than likely knew each other and we know that their plays competed against one another at the yearly festival dedicated to Dionysus.

It is well known that Euripides was not a fan of Greek religion. He saw the gods as being sub-human—the perpetrators of acts so vicious and depraved that the majority of humans seemed saintly by comparison. Aphrodite was unfaithful to her partners and oversexed; Hera was jealous to a murderous extent; Zeus and most of the other gods made a fearful habit of raping women and killing whomever they pleased. Why, asked Euripides, should humans worship a group of beings who engage in behavior that most humans would never tolerate from one another?

He explores this question in a number of his tragedies, perhaps the best example is his play Orestes. During the play, characters note at several points that while the gods are powerful, this does not seem to make them very good or even rational. While some characters attempt to defend the gods, even Apollo’s explanation for the gods’ actions (he says that the Trojan War was a much needed solution for an over-population problem) falls very flat. To Euripides, being divine didn’t get buy you a “free pass to everything.” He expects the Divine to earn his respect. If humans were civilized enough to live by codes of decency and honor, then the gods ought to do so, too.

Sophocles, on the other hand, was a pious believer. The gods were the gods—superior in every way—and if you were dumb enough to think that you understood things better than them or that you could oppose their will, you were dead wrong. This view on the gods is most evident in his famous Theban Cycle which tells the story of King Oedipus and his family.

Oedipus is born with a grizzly destiny: He will murder his father and marry his mother. In an attempt to avoid this horrifying future his parents, the King and Queen of Thebes, have the infant Oedipus taken off to die of exposure on a hillside. But the servant they charge with this task doesn’t wait to make certain that Oedipus actually dies. He wanders off, leaving the baby’s fate to the gods. A short time later, a shepherd finds Oedipus and takes pity on him, bringing the child to the childless King and Queen of Corinth. In time, Oedipus grows up and learns of his prophesied fate. He also tries to take every precaution to see that the awful predictions do not come true and runs away from home, unaware that he is adopted. In his wanderings, Oedipus kills a man who will not move out of his way on the road. He also defeats the Sphinx, freeing the city of Thebes from the monster’s grasp and winning him the hand of their recently widowed queen.

While audiences would be expected to have sympathy for Oedipus and his fate (he is cursed, gouges out his own eyes with his wife/mother’s brooch, and is cast out of Thebes), they would also have viewed it as just punishment for his crime of hubris (second-guessing or thinking oneself to be equal to the gods). Sophocles did, too. The gods were not to be questioned, they were to be properly served and petitioned. They were higher beings.

So, what do we expect of our gods/goddesses? What makes them worthy of our reverence? Is it simply enough for them to be gods, or do we need for them to exemplify certain types of behaviors and codes of honor? Maybe it’s the idea of gods—strong authority figures that will fight for us, spend time with us, and teach us the secrets of the universe—that we love. Or maybe what we really need is to use them, in all of their caricatured glory, as a mirror to see into ourselves. To confront our deepest flaws and make peace with them or, to get a better look at our finer qualities and allow ourselves to see the potential for greatness within us.

As a panentheist, there is a very real way in which worshipping a deity constitutes worshipping myself. As Joseph Campbell observed, “Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us.” Maybe this is part of why I am a little bit wary of the notion of worship. I live my life, I am there every time I have done something that I knew to be wrong or said something particularly cruel to a person who probably didn’t deserve it (if these things can be deserved). My point is, I know that I am not terribly admirable. If I were a deity, I would probably be Our Lady of Good Intentions or, perhaps, the goddess of procrastination. I certainly wouldn’t put the management of the universe in my own hands. Like Euripides, I want Deity to be much better than I am. I long for a perfect world where suffering is a foreign concept and humanity is no longer psychologically capable of inflicting the kind of senseless harm that we so often do.

On the other hand, this is the world and the universe that we have and as imperfect it is, it is also incredibly beautiful. And whether I like it or not, a tiny portion of that universe is in my hands. I am a part of the Divine and what I say and do here has very real consequences. More often than not, this knowledge fills me with a kind of subdued terror. It means that I have to own what I do. That there is not really a third party that I can turn to and say “Why did/n’t you do x?” It means that every time I interact with other beings or my environment I am a kind of ambassador of the Divine to itself.

At the same time, I am only one part of a much large whole. There are limits to the extent of my influence, problems too big for me to fix alone or even with the help of others. It’s at times like those, when I know that I am in way over my head, that I want the God of my childhood: Someone who will see my distress and, being filled with at least as much decency as the average human, attempt to help me. In reality, it is seldom that simple.

I have a close relationship with several deities whose stories I know front to back. I have even had two classically mystical experiences and numerous religious ones. Given this, you might think that I would have some insight into the Divine but, I can say with all confidence that I really don’t. In fact, the more contact I enjoy with the Divine and the longer I try to understand it/them, the more incomprehensible it all seems to become.

I suppose this is my roundabout way of saying that I have come to think of my interaction with the Divine in general more as, well, interaction and less as worship. I have a hard time considering deities as superior to myself because I know that somewhere in them is a piece of me and—as I mentioned earlier—I know that I am not worthy of such adoration. But, I do treat them with reverence and respect. Respect because, even as ideas in someone’s head, they are a true force to be reckoned with. Reverence because of the incredible impact that they have had on myself and countless others throughout the ages.

Well, I think I’ve rambled on long enough. Hopefully some of it made some kind of sense. Now, it’s time to let me know what you think. What makes your deity/ies worthy of reverence/worship? Have any more insights on the Problem of Evil?

Bright Blessings!
~LitheWolf