February 5, 2023

While I actually haven’t personally heard anyone blame God when they lost a close one in a tragedy, it’s a timeworn message in fiction novels. The protagonist wails against God when tragedy occurs or sometimes we read the words of an atheist shouting, “Where was God when the tsunami (earthquake, cyclone, hurricane, mass shooting, etc.) killed thousands? If there was a God, wouldn’t He have stopped this?”

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 The truth is, God is an unlikely scapegoat and if one reads the Bible, especially the Old Testament, one would give Him the benefit of the doubt.

I confess to not being a regular reader of the good Book, but several years ago, before I became immobile, I was a lector at my church and I paid more attention to the passages I had to read. The Catholic Mass usually has the first reading from the Old Testament, the second from New Testament, in books such as the Acts of the Apostles, and the third is the Gospel, read by the priest. One Sunday, I read this passage from the Book of Wisdom:

Do not court death by your erring way of life, nor draw to yourselves destruction by the works of your hands. Because God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being, and the creatures of the world are wholesome; There is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of Hade on earth, For righteousness is undying.

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These words stunned me and I used them in a column that I wrote for the New York Sun. I had concluded that sin and death came to the world in the Garden of Eden and thus, it was the serpent a.k.a., the Devil, who was responsible.

At the time I wrote it, the Iraq War was raging and there had been jihadist terror activity with its leaders claiming that they were not afraid to die because they loved death. I also surmised that those who loved death were heeding Satan’s demands.

I also received an email from a supporter who said that he couldn’t find such a book in his Bible.

Further research revealed that the Wisdom of Solomon is included in the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Bibles, but not in the Protestant ones. Wisdom and the first and second Book of Maccabees were removed by the Protestant churches in the 1500s. 

Needless to say, the hate mail that followed was quite significant, but as a conservative pundit, I was used to it. I once started grading these critiques in the range from nasty to scary and the most hateful ones came from — surprise — feminists!  Allegedly, the Protestant churches determined that these books were not inspired by God. Nevertheless, to me, it meant that Eve was the proverbial Pandora unleashing the evils of the world including death because she couldn’t resist temptation. We women have been paying for her sin ever since. According to the Book of Genesis, God said to her:

“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
    and he will rule over you.”

Gee thanks, Eve, I said during the labor pains of my six children’s births.