How faith failed Steve Jobs: 12-30-11

It always pains me to hear stories of people -- especially kids -- who shut down on religion because clergy and other religious leaders provide stupid answers to their questions.

I get upset both at people providing the answers and at the people asking them -- the latter because they quit searching for better answers.

The most recent example of this to come to my attention was in a book I got for Christmas -- Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Not many pages into the book he writes this:

"Even though they were not fervent about their faith, Jobs's parents wanted him to have a religious upbringing, so they took him to the Lutheran church most Sundays. That came to an end when he was thirteen. In July 1968, Life magazine published a shocking cover showing a pair of starving children in Biafra. Jobs took it to Sunday school and confronted the church's pastor. 'If I raise my finger, will God know which one I'm going to raise even before I do it?'

"The pastor answered, 'Yes, God knows everything.'

"Jobs then pulled out the Life cover and asked, 'Well, does God know about this and what's going to happen to those children?'

"'Steve, I know you don't understand, but yes, God knows about that.'

"Jobs announced that he didn't want to have anything to do with worshipping such a God, and he never went back to church." (Later, he did study Zen Buddhism.)

Now, let's be fair to the doofus pastor. He was trying to respond to what theologians call the questions of theodicy -- which essentially is this: Why is there suffering and evil in the world if God is good and all-powerful? Theodicies seek to defend God in the face of suffering and evil, but, in the end, all theodicies fail to one extent or another. Theodicy, thus, is the open wound of religion. There is no fully satisfying answer to that core question of evil, and because of that many people have simply abandoned faith in God.

But just because there is no fully satisfying answer does not mean there's no answer at all, especially for a whip-smart 13-year-old. For one thing, you begin by explaining that people have been puzzling over that question forever and that although some people have come up with some helpful answers, none of them completely makes sense to everyone. Instead, Jobs's pastor came off as an arrogant, condescending, simplistic know-it-all.

There should be remedial seminary for such people.

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THE INEVITABLE SEARCH FOR MEANING

There is something poignantly and painfully honest in this piece by a former Catholic who seems to keep having lapses of disbelief -- or at least a yearning for some kind of faith now that she's relinquished it.