Wednesday August 25, 2010
Life isn’t always fair
By Jim Taylor
From what I’ve read, none of the major religions promises us that life will be fair. And yet we humans seem convinced that it should be.
Experience tells us that it is not. Recent events – from the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile to the floods in Pakistan and China – suggest that disasters happen to innocent victims who did nothing to cause the loss of their homes, their possessions, their health, their lives. Closer to home, cancer strikes. Car accidents happen. People get laid off….
Are these things fair? Probably not.
Granted, we do sometimes contribute to our own misfortunes. Smoking, for example. Wearing ostentatious jewellery on a Caribbean beach. Gambling that rising prices will pay off a risky mortgage…
Even then, we’re likely to feel that life has not been fair.
Bred in our bones
I remember, as a child, protesting that another child had received a bigger piece of MY birthday cake. “It’s not fair!” I whined.
My mother didn’t tell me that life wasn’t fair. She just said, “I don’t like to hear that.”
Now my grandchildren utter the same protest when one of them seems favoured with a bigger ice cream cone, better presents, or a longer bedtime story.
My daughter replies, less diplomatically than my mother, “Tough. Get used to it.”
Nobody taught me that life should be fair; nobody taught my grandchildren it should be fair. The desire for fairness seems to come out of our bones, somehow – more a gut instinct than a reasoned response.
That gut instinct may be our most powerful motive for charity. We want to do what we can to make life more fair for those who have become victims.
But it is not genetic – not in any evolutionary sense, anyway. Injured animals do not – as far as human researchers can tell – complain that life has not treated them fairly. Certainly, they experience pain and disability. But they take their new condition as a given, and get on with life as well as they can.
Unclear origins
When I flip through my Bible, I see little about life being fair. Indeed, over half the Psalms lament the unfairness of their existence – why should God’s chosen people keep getting shafted?
There’s a lot in the Bible about justice. But punishment may wait until the third or fourth generation. Both the faithful and unfaithful suffer exile. The rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.
The closest doctrine to fairness is, in fact, a limitation. “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth” was intended to restrict excessive retaliation; you may not slaughter an entire tribe to avenge a single assault.
Perhaps that’s fairness.
But then Jesus promises forgiveness to those who repent, regardless of their sin. That’s hardly fair, victims would protest — we lost our daughter, and he gets off without punishment?
Life was certainly not fair to Jesus – unless you think he deserved what he got for upsetting religious applecarts.
So where do we get this conviction that life should treat us fairly?
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
My musings about urban design struck a chord with Joan McConnell. “Couldn’t resist responding to your Soft Edges article this morning,” she wrote, “to tell you about the privilege our family had of living for thirty years in an area of Winnipeg known as Wildwood Park. In 1947-48, a developer named Hubert Bird built an area of homes around a central green space with no front streets or roads (only back lanes). The green park-like space had communal walkways and playgrounds and all the houses faced that area. (The concept was based on an earlier community design in New Jersey.) Our children walked or cycled to their elementary school through the centre of the park where no cars were allowed. We knew our neighbours well — our children all played safely together in the playground areas where there was no car traffic.
“It was a brilliant community design, though not without its flaws. You had to have a car if you lived there, because it was not in an area well-serviced by public transport. However my experience of thirty years in that neighbourhood would support everything you said about community life being strongly affected by the amount of green space and the safety from traffic to enjoy it.”
Joan also included a reference to a website showing the Wildwood Park community layout and some current pictures. www.mrta.mb.ca/Trails/wta/maps/WildwoodPark.pdf
Jean Skillman wrote about the effect of heavy traffic on roads in northern BC and Alberta (she and her husband had just returned from a trip to the Yukon). After musing about the effects of our addiction to petroleum fuels, and the dangers of high-speed highways, she added, “I agree that green space is essential, and I think that wild green space is essential for humans and other creatures to be healthy. Chopping green space up into compartments that are discontinuous is not a good thing, as it puts up barriers that divide communities, sort of like the wall in Israel or the Berlin wall of former years.”
Michael Dack challenged me: “So, Jim, do you have an alternative plan? We’re not going to rip up all our streets and reposition our houses. How can we make the best of what we’ve got?”
If I understood George Monbiot and the studies he cites, I don’t think they’re expecting us to change our present structures. Rather, they’re hoping that new developments can be more human-focused, rather than auto-centric.
Lyle Phillips wrote, “You are so right about us selling our soul to the automobile.” Lyle described his efforts to go for a walk (in Surrey, near Vancouver). “I found it very difficult that day as the roads had been cleared for the vehicles but the snow had been piled on the sidewalk. Homeowners in Surrey are required to clear their sidewalks but the city doesn’t around parks and the hospital doesn’t around its buildings. Just one more example of where automobile is king.”
Susan Price agreed that green spaces matter, but she had concerns about people abusing nature: “The ‘don’t stray from the path’ mentality of parks people is not just for human safety & liability avoidance, but to protect the environment from damage by the folks out to enjoy it, so it will be preserved for more to enjoy — the impact rapidly becomes disastrous with thousands upon thousands of annual visitors allowed to roam freely, trampling and picking plants as they go.”
Finally, Ronnie Nesbitt missed the column that my dog wrote about training humans, and wondered how to access it. All of my columns for about the last ten years, are archived at http://edges.canadahomepage.net/
Down the right-hand side of the page, you’ll find the columns, collected by month. Click on the appropriate month, and click on the “Next Page” button at the bottom the page to work your way through columns for that month.
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NEW PARAPHRASE AVAILABLE
I write paraphrases so that I can understand the Bible. And one of the most bewildering books, for me, has been Revelation.
Then one day my minister suggested that I was reading it wrong. I was concentrating on the prophecies, the interpretations of the visions, the explanations of the symbols. I should be reading it as a verbal painting.
Without most of the speeches and proclamations, Revelation turns into a massive visual tapestry, an epic narrative. In most of my paraphrases, I have tried to replace archaic metaphors and images with more modern ones, and to replace desert based illustrations with some that we who live in more northern climes might find more familiar. I have not done that this time. I have simply excised the blather that gets in the way of John’s magnificent panorama of rebellion and victory.
I’m offering this paraphrase of Revelation on the honour system, the same way as my other paraphrases (except for Psalms, which you have to order through the publisher). If you want to examine my paraphrase of Revelation, just write me. I will send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. If you decide you want to keep the paraphrase, you send me a cheque for $5 Canadian; if you decide it’s not worth that much, just delete the file and send nothing.
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TECHNICAL STUFF
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I write a second column each Sunday, called Sharp Edges, which tends to be somewhat more cutting about social and justic issues. To sign up for Sharp Edges, write to me directly, at the address above, or send a note to [email protected]
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PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. Or, if you wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
For other web links worth pursuing, try
- Charlene Fairchild’s United Online site,
- David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page
- The Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity home page
- Alan Reynold’s weekly musings, punningly titled “Reynolds Rap,”
- Wayne Irwin’s “Model T Websites.” a simple (and cheap) seven-page website for congregations who want to develop a web presence
- Alva Wood’s satiric stories about small town attitudes and bumbling bureaucrats are not particularly religious, but good fun anyway; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
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