Life Matters

If a puppy was born with a badly deformed heart, so it was in pain and distress, if it needed a long series of major operations to have even a chance of growing up, most people would sadly take it to the vet to be painlessly put down, I suspect. It would be seen as a mercy.

I have known two babies born with badly deformed hearts. Both suffered pain and distress and went through a long series of major operations, without a great chance of success. So far, both have made it through: they are battlers. In their short lives they have known far more than their fair share of suffering, but they have also known much joy and love.

Should they have been put down at birth, or even before? I suspect most of us would strongly feel they should be given their chance at life, although some high-profile figures might disagree. Somehow life is important and its quality depends on more than just lack of pain and life's significance lies in more than just its length.

Good Friday is a day when Christians remember the suffering and death of Jesus, we believe for the sake of the world, so that all who put their trust in him may have fullness of life, forever.

I think this has relevance to the suffering that goes on in the world; although no way would I claim a complete answer to this venerable question (recently brought up by Stephen Fry and treated by the media as if it were a new thought).

Why do we live in a world where children are born with deformed hearts? I don't know, but I do believe that their lives matter, and that surrounding them with all the love we can matters, and that their parents are heroes who should be celebrated.

Why do we live in such a world? One answer is that God is either incompetent (or at least not omnipotent) or evil. This is slack logic: these may be two options, but they are not the only two. One other that strikes me is that any alternative may be worse.

Why did the parents of these babies allow them to go through such distress? Because they believed that their lives mattered, and they did whatever they could to allow their child every chance to experience life and love and joy. They could have wiped the slate clean and started again, but they chose not to. That individual baby mattered.

Our lives matter to God: that we find love and joy and meaning is, I believe, his priority. Rather than wiping the slate of the world clean, he gave his son to live with us and to die for us, so that we might have every chance to find that love, joy and fulfilment. Every loving parent knows that there is a price to be paid for their love; sometimes that price is hard to bear. God, through Jesus, paid the highest price, because he loves us and because our lives matter to him.

There may be all sorts of other reasons for the suffering in this world. I don't know, I am not God. But I do know that faith is about trust.

I trust that God is good and loving, and that life is in him. And life matters.

Why War?

We are heading toward the centenary of the beginning of the First World War, a particular lowlight in a century marked by war and massacre.

Looking back at the violence of the 20th century, it strikes me how much of it was characterised by a toxic mix of nationalism and ideology, and how little it had to do with religion.

The First World War was fairly unambiguously nationalist and imperialist in origin, whilst the second seems to have been triggered by a more complex brew. On the one hand there was German national feeling, battered after WW1 and bearing grudges over the post-war loss of Germanic territories; on the other there was fear of communism, fear and hatred for 'the other' - particularly, but not exclusively, 'The Jew' - then there was a striving for discipline and order, represented by a powerful fascist ideology, and a bizarre mix of Aryan and Wagnerian mythologies.

Meanwhile, in the Far East, causes seem to have been more simply about nationalism and access to resources (traditionally the other main driver of imperialism).

In between these 'world wars' you had the Bolshevik takeover in Russia, with its ideological civil war followed by mass famine as their policy of Prodrazvyorstka destroyed the battered agricultural system; then under Stalin the famines and purges continued as ideology and tyranny ran their course.

After the Second World War, the Cold War marked the continuation of ideological and imperial conflict, much of it through proxy wars in Korea and Vietnam. Meanwhile the Maoist revolution in China followed the path of Russia's revolution through civil war, mass famine and extensive purges.

I am only aware of two major outbreaks of violence during the century where religion was one of the main causes, both in the late '40s: the Partition of India in 1947 and the founding of Israel in 1948. Both of these events had violent repercussions which continue to this day, and both had a strong religious element. Both also had a strong ethnic and nationalist element: religion and nationalism can be just as toxic a compound as ideology and nationalism, it seems.

There is a list of 20th-century battles on Wikipedia, which gives an idea of the continuous level of conflict during that troubled century.

Granted that my knowledge of 20th-century history is not exhaustive, I do still find it strange that the 'new atheists' - the likes of Richard Dawkins - continue to link war with religion. With a couple of exceptions, here was a whole century of essentially non-religious violence, much of it explicitly atheist.

Why war? Because people are prejudiced; often they are ignorant and demonise 'others'; they are all too ready to follow leaders who tell them they are right and others are wrong; and because, by and large, people prefer to function as part of a local ethnic/racial community, rather than as part of worldwide humanity.

Most religions attempt to work to a bigger picture, which could be immensely helpful in enabling people to live together in peace. Sadly, all religions are composed of fallible, flawed people, as are all ideological groupings. We could just wait for God to fix it, or we could try to work with God and spread peace and justice in our own small ways, wherever we are, and whoever we are with. It's our choice.

Postscript: There is an interesting post on a similar theme over on the BeThinking blog.