From the book ‘The God Who Weeps’ by Terryl and Fiona Givens:
. . . .By the nineteenth century, there was a growing resistance to this divine tyranny and cosmic injustice. Two forceful examples come not from theology, but from two of the greatest novels of the era. The protagonist of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn goes through an agony of indecision, faced with the chance to help his friend, the slave Jim, escape his bondage. But, given the laws of the land, and a culture that had little difficulty reconciling slavery and Christianity, Huck fears that by so doing he would offend God. “It would get all around,” he fretted, “that Huck Finn helped a [slave] get his freedom. . . . The more I studied about this the more my conscience went to grinding me, and the more wicked and low-down and ornery I got to feeling. And at last, when it hit me all of sudden that there was the plain hand of Providence slapping me in the face and letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven. . . . Well, I tried the best I could to kinder soften it up somehow for myself by saying I was brung up wicked, and so I wasn’t so much to blame.
At last, he decides to do the “Christian” thing, and turn the slave in. He writes a note betraying Jim, followed by one last pang of remorse. “It was a close place. I took [the note] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowd it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then I says to myself: ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.” So Huck chooses damnation over the God he was raised to worship.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the agnostic Ivan makes a similar choice. A sensitive soul, he is wracked by pain at the harrowing accounts he has read of little children who suffer at the hands of savage overseers and cruel parents. He is dissatisfied with a God whose only response to their pain is to punish evil overseers and cruel parents. “What do I care for avenging them?” he cries. “What do I care for a hell for oppressors? . . . I want to forgive? . . . I want to embrace it. I don’t want more suffering. . . . and so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man, I am bound to give it back as soon as possible. And that I am doing. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return him the ticket.” Any God who’s only response to pain and suffering is to inflict more pain and suffering, is not a God Ivan can worship.
Our first point is that if Gods such as Moloch, or the God of some Christians, exist, they do not deserve our reverence or our love. We, just as Huck or Ivan or countless others, would be justified in saying, “No, I will not bow to such a God.” At the risk of our own eternal annihilation, we would resist. We would not say, with Augustine, that existence under any conditions—including an eternity of undeserved torment—is more to be valued than non-existence. We do not concede that a god who creates us, or the entire universe for that matter, is beyond reproach or question by virtue of his power alone. We certainly do not accord earthly parents unchallenged prerogatives over their own children, even if they sire, rear, and nourish them. ~Terryl and Fiona Givens, The God Who Weeps (R.R. Donnelley, Crawfordsville, IN, 2012), 17-18 (continued)
