Written, pencilled, inked by: Heath Parker Lail
Well, after a long sabbatical from deep thinking, let's plunge into a very deep, relevant age-old question...if God is a just, perfectly moral being who allows no evil purely for the sake of evil, how is it that innocent children perish everyday and have so for hundreds of years from diseases such as the Black Plague and from random gunshots? That is the question that is addressed in Albert Camus's excellent novel, The Plague, of which a small portion was placed in my old Philosophy textbook.
Dr. Rieux is a doctor in the novel, an agnostic who refuses to believe in a God so cruel that he punishes innocent children to death in seemingly inhuman ways, such as prolonged suffering caused by contracting the Black Plague. Father Paneloux is a priest who earlier in the book gave a rather damning sermon, blaming people's lack of faith and less-than-Godly lifestyles as the catalyst for why the Plague has come upon them. It is being used to punish those who refuse to live God-fearing lives. Therefore, both characters see things from opposite sides of the river...Rieux seeks to cure the Plague because of his love for his fellow man, and a hatred of suffering rather than out of faith in God. Father Paneloux seeks to blame sinners for this dreaded Plague that threatens to wipe them out. Yet as he watches this one particular child suffer, he falls to his knees and cries out to God that he may spare the life of this child...the end result is that the child dies after a long bout of suffering. Does this prove that Dr. Rieux is correct? That there is no God above that will deliver us when we are faithful and obidient? Or does it say that the child was not without sin, and deserved to die?
My personal faith leads me to say that the child had served his purpose in life...Rieux himself noted that he struggled longer against the Plague than most--perhaps his death was the key to unlocking the failures of the antidote which he and others were provided with. An agnostic would call this story an example of needless suffering on the child's part...why could he not die quickly, and receive little pain? After all, he was just a child. My answer to that would be that sometimes the burdens hardest to bear are put on small shoulders, as they are the only ones with faith pure enough to conquer the doubts and fears that we as adults harbor in the recesses of our hearts and minds. With many adults, we see only tasks that can not be completed...therefore completely overlooking more important, smaller tasks that require only a pure faith, one not weakended by self-doubts. We refuse to see these because we feel that they are beneath us, and we become accustomed to overlooking them, staring far ahead into the big picture instead. Thogh I myself question the big picture motives behind such things as the 6 year old who was attacked by someone she trusted, I understand that this is simply the moral breakdown of the society (personally, I think they oughta handcuff him and throw him out of a car in Orange Mound with a white hood on...but hey thats just me...) and that these things will unfortunately inevitably occur more and more often as the country moves away from it's faith-based upbringing into a more agnostic, faithless society. That is why I chose Psychology as my field of study...so that the motives of these morally empy humans can be understood, all the better to protect moral, upstanding citizens from further cruelty and violence. More later this week but--
Until then I remain...
Heath Parker Lail
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