<<You described a scenario, you asked my opinion, I gave my opinion, you are insulted by my opinion.>>
Rick, I am not insulted by your opinion. Truly. It does not define me, so I could not feel insulted by it. It doesn't define other sufferers of tragedy, or signify anything about their "responsibility" for their misfortunes, either. This opinion of yours only defines you. It only signifies something about you, Rick. No supernatural leaps of faith are require to see this manifest fact.
In Tuesday's New York Times there is a front page article headlined "New Bangladesh Disaster: Wells That Pump Poison." I thought of you as I read it. I thought how comforting it must be, and how comfortable, for you to feel as you do regarding the "individual existential responsibility" of the multitudes of Bangladeshis who are suffering and dying from arsenic poisoning.
Frankly, the impression you give me is that you decide what to "believe" according to what notional construct gives you a serene feeling inside while you are engaged in musing upon it. But when the concrete reality of gratuitous human suffering is put alongside mystical Cloud-Cuckoo-land conjectures about their causes, the horrid implications of such attributions of "individual existential responsibility" become clear.
I think I will quote, or paste if I can find it in the NYT archives, some of the human detail about the situation which so many Bangladeshis have either
a) had happen to them through random, undeserved, unearned, gratuitous, tragic bad luck, or
b) been existentially responsible for, as individuals.
This is an imposition on the readers of this thread, I know. Skip my next post/s unless your heart is strengthened by the conviction that the described sufferings are God-sanctioned-- that these people have gotten what they, somehow, on a celestial level, deserve. |
