Dear Lord, can atheists
suffer with the problem of pain?
Or are you necessary for that?
Do you exist
so that we might scream at you,
reject,
and come to disbelieve in you?
Can we weep in lamenting
without you?
Because nothing is wrong
without you.
You are the ingredient
necessary to make the mess.
You are the prerequisite of sadness,
of sobs in pillows at night.
So I need you, Sweet Lord,
if I want to scream at sky
that things shouldn't be this way.
That is my prayer
and judgment.
Each needing you to listen
and exist.
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Richard Beck
Welcome to the blog of Richard Beck, author and professor of psychology at Abilene Christian University (beckr@acu.edu).
The Theology of Faƫrie
The Little Way of St. ThĆ©rĆØse of Lisieux
The William Stringfellow Project (Ongoing)
Autobiographical Posts
- On Discoveries in Used Bookstores
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On the Principalities and Powers
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- A Restless Patriotism
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- A Boredom Revolution
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- "Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?"
- "A Home for Demons...and the Merchants Weep"
- Tales of the Demonic
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- "All That Are Here Are Humans"
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Experimental Theology
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- Empathic Open Theism
- The Victim Needs No Conversion
- The Hormonal God
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- The Satanic Church
- Mousetrap
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Gospel According to Lady Gaga
- Your God is Too Big
From the Prison Bible Study
- The Philosopher
- God's Unconditional Love
- There is a Balm in Gilead
- In Prison With Ann Voskamp
- To Make the Love of God Credible
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- Advent: A Prison Story
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- The Prayer of Jabez
- The Prayer of Willy Brown
- Those Old Time Gospel Songs
- I'll Fly Away
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- Where the Gospel Matters
- Monday Night Bible Study (A Poem)
- Living in Babylon: Reading Revelation in Prison
- Reading the Beatitudes in Prision
- John 13: A Story from the Prision Study
- The Word
Series/Essays Based on my Research
The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes
The Theology of Peanuts
The Snake Handling Churches of Appalachia
Eccentric Christianity
- Part 1: A Peculiar People
- Part 2: The Eccentric God, Transcendence and the Prophetic Imagination
- Part 3: Welcoming God in the Stranger
- Part 4: Enchantment, the Porous Self and the Spirit
- Part 5: Doubt, Gratitude and an Eccentric Faith
- Part 6: The Eccentric Economy of Love
- Part 7: The Eccentric Kingdom
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Blogging about the Bible
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- The True Troubler
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- The Lord Saw That She Was Not Loved
- The Subversion of the Creator God
- Hell On Earth: The Church as the Baptism of Fire and the Holy Spirit
- The Things That Make for Peace
- The Lord of the Flies
- On Preterism, the Second Coming and Hell
- Commitment and Violence: A Reading of the Akedah
- Gain Versus Gift in Ecclesiastes
- Redemption and the Goel
- The Psalms as Liberation Theology
- Control Your Vessel
- Circumcised Ears
- Forgive Us Our Trespasses
- Doing Beautiful Things
- The Most Remarkable Sequence in the Bible
- Targeting the Dove Sellers
- Christus Victor in Galatians
- Devoted to Destruction: Reading Cherem Non-Violently
- The Triumph of the Cross
- The Threshing Floor of Araunah
- Hold Others Above Yourself
- Blessed are the Tricksters
- Adam's First Wife
- I Am a Worm
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- Let Them Both Grow Together
- Repent
- Here I Am
- Becoming the Jubilee
- Sermon on the Mount: Study Guide
- Treat Them as a Pagan or Tax Collector
- Going Outside the Camp
- Welcoming Children
- The Song of Lamech and the Song of the Lamb
- The Nephilim
- Shaming Jesus
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- The Exclusion and Inclusion of Eunuchs
- The Second Moses
- The New Manna
- Salvation in the First Sermons of the Church
- "A Bloody Husband"
- Song of the Vineyard
Bonhoeffer's Letters from Prision
Civil Rights History and Race Relations
- The Gospel According to Ta-Nehisi Coates (Six Part Series)
- Bus Ride to Justice: Toward Racial Reconciliation in the Churches of Christ
- Black Heroism and White Sympathy: A Reflection on the Charleston Shooting
- Selma 50th Anniversary
- More Than Three Minutes
- The Passion of White America
- Remembering James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman
- Will Campbell
- Sitting in the Pews of Ebeneser Baptist Church
- MLK Bedtime Prayer
- Freedom Rider
- Mountiantop
- Freedom Summer
- Civil Rights Family Trip 1: Memphis
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- Civil Rights Family Trip 3: Birmingham
- Civil Rights Family Trip 4: Selma
- Civil Rights Family Trip 5: Montgomery
Hip Christianity
The Charism of the Charismatics
Would Jesus Break a Window?: The Hermeneutics of the Temple Action
Being Church
- Instead of a Coffee Shop How About a Laundromat?
- A Million Boring Little Things
- A Prayer for ISIS
- "The People At Our Church Die A Lot"
- The Angel of Freedom
- Washing Dishes at Freedom Fellowship
- Where David Plays the Tambourine
- On Interruptibility
- Mattering
- This Ritual of Hallowing
- Faith as Honoring
- The Beautiful
- The Sensory Boundary
- The Missional and Apostolic Nature of Holiness
- Open Commuion: Warning!
- The Impurity of Love
- A Community Called Forgiveness
- Love is the Allocation of Our Dying
- Freedom Fellowship
- Wednesday Night Church
- The Hands of Christ
- Barbara, Stanley and Andrea: Thoughts on Love, Training and Social Psychology
- Gerald's Gift
- Wiping the Blood Away
- This Morning Jesus Put On Dark Sunglasses
- The Only Way I Know How to Save the World
- Renunciation
- The Reason We Gather
- Anointing With Oil
- Incarnations of God's Mercy
Exploring Preterism
Scripture and Discernment
- Owning Your Protestantism: We Follow Our Conscience, Not the Bible
- Emotional Intelligence and Sola Scriptura
- Songbooks vs. the Psalms
- Biblical as Sociological Stress Test
- Cookie Cutting the Bible: A Case Study
- Pawn to King 4
- Allowing God to Rage
- Poetry of a Murderer
- On Christian Communion: Killing vs. Sexuality
- Heretics and Disagreement
- Atonement: A Primer
- "The Bible says..."
- The "Yes, but..." Church
- Human Experience and the Bible
- Discernment, Part 1
- Discernment, Part 2
- Rabbinic Hedges
- Fuzzy Logic
Interacting with Good Books
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- The Road
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- How Much is Enough?
- From Willow Creek to Sacred Heart
- The Catonsville Nine
- Daring Greatly
- On Job (GutiƩrrez)
- The Selfless Way of Christ
- World Upside Down
- Are Christians Hate-Filled Hypocrites?
- Christ and Horrors
- The King Jesus Gospel
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- The Bible Made Impossible
- The Deliverance of God
- To Change the World
- Sexuality and the Christian Body
- I Told Me So
- The Teaching of the Twelve
- Evolving in Monkey Town
- Saved from Sacrifice: A Series
- Darwin's Sacred Cause
- Outliers
- A Secular Age
- The God Who Risks
Moral Psychology
- The Dark Spell the Devil Casts: Refugees and Our Slavery to the Fear of Death
- Philia Over Phobia
- Elizabeth Smart and the Psychology of the Christian Purity Culture
- On Love and the Yuck Factor
- Ethnocentrism and Politics
- Flies, Attention and Morality
- The Banality of Evil
- The Ovens at Buchenwald
- Violence and Traffic Lights
- Defending Individualism
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- The Varieties of Love and Hate
- The Wicked
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- The Moral Emotions
- The Moral Circle, Part 1
- The Moral Circle, Part 2
- Taboo Psychology
- The Morality of Mentality
- Moral Conviction
- Infrahumanization
- Holiness and Moral Grammars
The Purity Psychology of Progressive Christianity
The Theology of Everyday Life
- Self-Esteem Through Shaming
- Let Us Be the Heart Of the Church Rather Than the Amygdala
- Online Debates and Stages of Change
- The Devil on a Wiffle Ball Field
- Incarnational Theology and Mental Illness
- Social Media as Sacrament
- The Impossibility of Calvinistic Psychotherapy
- Hating Pixels
- Dress, Divinity and Dumbfounding
- The Kingdom of God Will Not Be Tweeted
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- On Snobbery
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- Hypocrisy
- Everything I learned about life I learned coaching tee-ball
- Gossip, Part 1: The Food of the Brain
- Gossip, Part 2: Evolutionary Stable Strategies
- Gossip, Part 3: The Pay it Forward World
- Human Nature
- Welcome
- On Humility
Jesus, You're Making Me Tired: Scarcity and Spiritual Formation
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option
George MacDonald
Jesus & the Jolly Roger: The Kingdom of God is Like a Pirate
Alone, Suburban & Sorted
The Theology of Monsters
The Theology of Ugly
Orthodox Iconography
Musings On Faith, Belief, and Doubt
- The Meanings Only Faith Can Reveal
- Pragmatism and Progressive Christianity
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- Kingdom A/theism
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- god
- Wired to Suffer
- A New Apologetics
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- High and Low: The Psalms and Suffering
- The Buddhist Phase
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- The Bait and Switch of Contemporary Christianity
- Theodicy and No Country for Old Men
- Doubt: A Diagnosis
- Faith and Modernity
- Faith after "The Cognitive Turn"
- Salvation
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- A Beautiful Life
- Is Santa Claus Real?
- The Feeling of Knowing
- Practicing Christianity
- In Praise of Doubt
- Skepticism and Conviction
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Holiday Musings
- Everything I Learned about Christmas I Learned from TV
- Advent: Learning to Wait
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 1
- A Christmas Carol as Resistance Literature: Part 2
- It's Still Christmas
- Easter Shouldn't Be Good News
- The Deeper Magic: A Good Friday Meditation
- Palm Sunday with the Orthodox
- Growing Up Catholic: A Lenten Meditation
- The Liturgical Year for Dummies
- "Watching Their Flocks at Night": An Advent Meditation
- Pentecost and Babel
- Epiphany
- Ambivalence about Lent
- On Easter and Astronomy
- Sex Sandals and Advent
- Freud and Valentine's Day
- Existentialism and Halloween
- Halloween Redux: Talking with the Dead
The Offbeat
- Batman and the Joker
- The Theology of Ugly Dolls
- Jesus Would Be a Hufflepuff
- The Moral Example of Captain Jack Sparrow
- Weddings Real, Imagined and Yet to Come
- Michelangelo and Neuroanatomy
- Believing in Bigfoot
- The Kingdom of God as Improv and Flash Mob
- 2012 and the End of the World
- The Polar Express and the Uncanny Valley
- Why the Anti-Christ Is an Idiot
- On Harry Potter and Vampire Movies
Omnipotent and benevolent? And all manner of things shall be well?
O what thorny theological knots with which we bind ourselves...
Brilliant. BTW, I had a whole semester class on "The Problem of Pain" and kept asking myself--do things get better if we REMOVE our belief in God from the equation? My answer: not really.
This is not only my favorite of your poems, it's now a favorite of mine of all poems I've come across.
Just read this Hopkins' poem for class. Is it legal to post a whole poem? If not, my apologies, but it makes such a nice companion piece to "Theodicy."
Carrion ComfortNot, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee;Not untwist — slack they may be — these last strands of manIn me Ć³r, most weary, cry I can no more. I can;Can something, hope, wish day come, not choose not to be.But ah, but O thou terrible, why wouldst thou rude on meThy wring-world right foot rock? lay a lionlimb against me? scanWith darksome devouring eyes my bruisĆØd bones? and fan,O in turns of tempest, me heaped there; me frantic to avoid thee and flee? Why? That my chaff might fly; my grain lie, sheer and clear.Nay in all that toil, that coil, since (seems) I kissed the rod,Hand rather, my heart lo! lapped strength, stole joy, would laugh, chĆ©er.Cheer whom though? the hero whose heaven-handling flung me, fĆ³ot trĆ³dMe? or me that fought him? O which one? is it each one? That night, that yearOf now done darkness I wretch lay wrestling with (my God!) my God.
It's grotesque and provocative. It's true and false. Do we scream at God, or at our own failure to reconcile? Is God the source of our pain, or the balm for it? How on earth can we ever find resolve attempting to fit an Absolute in our relative lives? Or, to fit our relative lives in an absolute? There is pain there, and there is pain in a total rejection of SOME absolute. That's my experience, anyway.
"He needs to learn that he can't take the world on his shoulders."
The comment's irony--from a christian boss I had in college about a fellow christian employee--has lain on my mind like oil on water for thirty years, being half true and half false, and deriving its halves from separate points of view.
Your little poem shook those halves enough to mix them, I think:
For if tears for the world depict a God's-eye view, doesn't Jesus emerge as the divine response in human form? And if Jesus emerges as the divine response in human form, am I not a sinner? Yes, and yes.
"That is my prayer and judgment."
Thanks, Richard.
This is the best argument for atheism I have ever read
Experimental, but not theology!
http://www.energon.org.uk
Except for the fact that it's a poem.
gorgeous.
I was thinking of becoming a Christian again, but after reading this I have decided I better not. Thanks.
Yes, because we all know nobody ever uses a poem to try to make an argument.
And I was thinking of becoming an atheist, and decided not. Thanks.
Okay, then let me hear the argument I'm making. What is it exactly?
I like this.
Emptiness
That obliges me, myself to choose and invent
Blank canvas that gives me despair and hope
In unequal measures on different days
Do those with a God/Gods/Religion
Or just a satisfaction with the emptiness
Know doubt?
Know excitement?
Without you I would feel
I was trying to breathe into a sheet of ice
Or walking forward into a wall;
I couldn't move.
Because nothing can happen without you.
Anybody else get the feeling that all of Bill's posts could be visually summarized by this look?
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/bill-maher-npr-federal-funding-169334
who should I blame for my suffering?
who should be called to account for my pain?
to whom should I sue for redress
for my body's inevitable decline
for the death that surrounds me
for the death that reminds me
that my own death is nearing, nearing, nearing,
continually closer than it ever was before?
who taught me to blame?
from whom did I learn to accuse?
was it a great accuser, a divine accuser
from whom I have learned to forget the present
from whom I have learned to ignore this moment
with constant concern for a future that does not yet exist?
why do I find fault with the way the world works
why do I desire a person or Person to fault for the natural failure of life over time
for the faltering breath of every living thing since the beginning of all living things
why do I blame; why do I fault;
for what bitter end do I try to accuse?
a moment, this moment, is mine, and yours
and this moment too, and the next one
this one, is precious to me,
is beautiful to experience, especially,
if I spend it in love or beauty or kindness,
if I spend it, this moment,
with abandon,
no hoarding, no saving, no straining for a future unfulfilled,
but spent in the now,
in the only moment that exists for me and for you,
until this moment,
or this one,
takes over and offers something new,
can this be enough?
even in pain, or discomfort, or sadness,
can this be enough?
perhaps blame is the illusion that obscures the beauty of the moments we have
“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.” Mark Twain
Ouch!
I still check in once in awhile, even though I left Christianity a year or so ago. I lean towards deism-yet I believe I am becoming more agnostic. You will be happy to know I do not want to "de-convert" my family , friends , you or your fans. They still need to believe in an afterlife and theistic god. Such cultural beliefs provide relief from the fear of death.Your past series on Becker was enlightening as terror management theory has long been an interest to me!
I am glad I caught your latest poem and I empathize with your struggle, Richard. If I may, I would like to reduce your beautiful poem to its core essence : "God, I cannot reconcile my Christian belief in your existence with natural disasters, violence, and selfishness-all unaffected by prayer. Have we invented your existence to cope with the brutal reality of our existence?" Please correct my interpretation if assumes too much.
It's a poem, so it's open to an particular and individual interpretation.
But for me the core essence isn't about reconciling the existence of God with suffering but, rather, the necessity of God's existence to call suffering "a problem."
Note the first lines (emphasis added):
Dear Lord, can atheists
suffer with the problem of pain?
Or are you necessary for that?
Richard, in less poetic terms, I've heard this same theme from William Lane Craig. Christian apologists complain that atheists cannot argue the "problem of pain", because without a God, there is no theological problem of pain.
To which atheists simply sigh, smile, and say, "exactly."
I think that's the case, though not being an atheist I'd hate to presume, that there is no "problem" with the cosmos.
And to be clear, the poem doesn't have atheism in the crosshairs. It's a reflection from the inside of the faith. Because, as you point out, atheists agree with what I'm saying here, smiling and saying exactly.
That helps to clarify, thanks.
A real Psalm. The key seems to be the lines "because nothing is wrong without you." It's a peculiar reality that the world seems equally problematic with and without God - and what that reveals to me is that God is not the variable that needs to change.
I'm an atheist who comes to your site because I enjoy reading your posts. I feel like they are deeply thought-out and spiritually truthful parts of you coming out on the page, and a lot of wisdom. So I'm coming not to combat your poem (because that would be silly - it's your poem, you can say whatever you want) but instead to ask: why do you feel like atheism comes from a place of no emotion? Our scema is still human, the frailty and suffering is not lost just because there is no God to ease the pain of suffering. To me, it makes it more intense because there is no place of spiritual balm, of eternity, to look forward to laying down the burdens.
Am I reading your poem wrong? I really do enjoy your work, but since this is coming from a different line of thought than I usually see here, I'm not sure I'm understanding it.
The title of the poem should be your hint. Theodicy is the theological effort to deal with the "problem" of pain. The poem is asking a question: is seeing pain as a "problem" a form of religious belief?
Here's another way to approach what I'm doing. I'm playing with an inversion. Classically, theodicy works with a sequence that goes like this: You believe in God first and that belief creates a problem (the problem of pain). But might the reverse be true? You experience pain as a problem which means you believe in God.
Thank you for your response. I think I was not seeing the problem of pain - I honestly didn't realize that was a thing until now. I will think about that for a while.