Jumping the gun a bit there, because the quote I'm thinking of come just before that line: "There, I've run rings 'round you logically!" And the chop-logic of that comic sketch ("Lions don't molt!" "Penguins do!") is the subject of this long and edifying quote via TC:
People thought for a long time that the course of the history of suffering could be changed, in the modern process of emancipation, by man's assuming responsibility for his own fate. Self-redeeming, self-emancipating man was to take the place of the redeeming God; man instead of God was to direct the course of history. But, as we have seen, it is more questionable than ever today whether scientific-technological evolution or even political-social revolution could of themselves bring about a decisive turn in mankind's history of suffering. Certainly the suffering have changed but they have not thereby become less. And, instead of God, it is now man who is charged with being a perpetrator of misdeeds and thus compelled to justify himself; instead of a theo-dicy there has to be an anthropo-dicy. But, compelled to justify himself, emancipated man attempts to exonerate himself, to find an alibi and to shift the blame with the aid of a variety of excuse mechanisms. He practices the art of showing "that it was not him." As if he were responsible only for the successes and not for the failures of technological evolution. As if all blame, and all failure could be laid on the transcendental ego (Idealism) or on the reactionary, counterrevolutionary class enemy (Marxism). As if there were no one responsible for the suffering of history, but only man's environment or his genetic pre-programming, or his instinctive urges, or quite generally individual, social, linguistic structures.
But should not emancipated man, in view of the equivocal results of emancipation, face the question of his guilt and thus also the question of his real redemption - and not merely his emancipation? Redemption and emancipation both mean liberation. But emancipation means liberation of man by man, it means man's self-liberation. And redemption means liberation of man by God, not any self-redemption on man's part. As the word "redemption" was for a long time overtaxed and emotionally overburdened, so too is the word "emancipation' today.
Since the most common use of the "question of evil, pain, suffering" is to use the dissatisfying lack of an answer that is satisfying, an answer that answers the question and relives pain against the assertions of the Christian, Jewish and other religion I think it's fair and even mandatory to ask if the results of posing those questions under alternative farmings are at all satisfying in the way demanded of religion. If the answer does not do what is demanded an answer that might be given by religion also fails to do, the framing that delivered as little or less than the answers made on behalf of religion can't, then be held to have yielded a success. If those answers deliver less or far less or nothing, then they have certainly been demonstrated to be less successful than religion has.
Theodicy (the term, not the concern), as Kung outlines earlier, is the creation of Leibniz trying, rather like John Milton a few centuries earlier (and with far less poetry), to explain the ways of God to humanity. I've never been a fan of Leibniz' project because, like most attempts to find a grand unifying theory that sweeps away all objections, it just becomes the source of objections instead. No good deed goes unpunished. Time wounds all heals; that sort of thing. The problem is basic to the question: if there is evil in the world, is it from God, or from us? And what do we consider evil? Disease, which prompts us to develop cures? We have become the dominant species on the planet in part because we have figured out medicine (well, to some extent, but better than any other species). Of course, being the dominant species, we are destroying the planet to make it useful to us. Word from Brazil is that thanks to the chaos in society due to the corona virus, rain forest clearing is proceeding at a rapid pace. That is the single most useless and destructive form of agriculture we've ever come up with. Well, right behind what we did to the American West. Buffalo herds were once so large they covered what are now states, entire. When you think of the American west you think of desert and dirt. That's what's there now. But the buffalo weren't eating dirt. If you turned the land back over to them today, what would they live on? In Brazil, the soil under the rainforests is good for rainforests. For agriculture, its' not good for much, which is why more land has to be cleared constantly; the cleared land gives out within a season or two. Is this God's fault? Or ours? God told us to be fruitful and multiply and be stewards, husbands (husbandry, anyone?), responsible for, the earth. What did we do?
Is that God's fault?
The favorite shibboleths are pain and suffering and disease. Until the 19th century, though, pain and suffering were simply the human lot. The Native Americans had the basis for aspirin long before Europeans did, which might be a cosmic joke on the "favored" status of Christian Europeans, but beyond that, human ingenuity figure out anesthetics and analgesics. And then we could complain that God didn't make us comfortable enough in a state of nature, or cure all the pains and suffering our drugs wouldn't cure. Same thing with suffering in children. Until children began to live into adulthood and adulthood lasted long enough to make grandparents commonplace (rather than simply ancestors), it was the lot of children to die. I know of a family plot in a small town in Texas that tells a terrible story: a man who outlived all this children, and his two wives (the second died in childbirth, the infant soon after). You can read that history in the tombstones, all placed in the 19th century. Even with civilization life was, by modern standards (i.e., post 1940's, when penicillin was discovered and modern medicine began to exist) in the 19th century nasty, brutish, and short. Graveyards opened in the 19th century usually have quite a few burial plots for children. It's quite rare, now.
Is this to say this is the best of all possible worlds, or that we're all whingers? No; it's to say the questions are wrong. We love the wrong question, because it displaces responsibility from us. As Kung says:
He practices the art of showing "that it was not him." As if he were responsible only for the successes and not for the failures of technological evolution. As if all blame, and all failure could be laid on the transcendental ego (Idealism) or on the reactionary, counterrevolutionary class enemy (Marxism). As if there were no one responsible for the suffering of history, but only man's environment or his genetic pre-programming, or his instinctive urges, or quite generally individual, social, linguistic structures.I know it sounds like Donald Trump, especially in those first two sentences; but it is part of the human condition that I am always treated unfairly, and you just were unlucky and who wants to hear you whine anyway? The question is never "Why is there suffering in the world?" but "Why am I suffering in the world?" The implicit basis there is "I don't deserve it!", and no, you probably don't. No one deserves cancer or the death of a child; but these are the conditions that prevail. If you want to preach the gospel of Joel Osteen, that God is going to reward you if you just permit it, then the flip side is you must not have permitted it, because look where you are now. Can you really divorce your actions from their consequences and lay the blame on that catalog Kung ends the quote above with? If people are suffering, are you doing anything to alleviate their suffering? Do you bear the burden with them? Do you comfort them, visit them, care for them? Or do you complain about how unfair it is, which is to say, how unfair it is to you?
Of course we never ask about the suffering that has always been in our power to eliminate: poverty and want and need. We've been told since the time of Moses how to deal with that; but we don't want to. That suffering we're perfectly fine with, and we tell those below us on the ladder, be the rungs economic ones or class ones or whatever ladder and rungs we devise, we tell them to mind their place and accept their lot because God wants them there (Great Chain of Being, also a product of the era of Leibniz) or because they deserve to be there (lazy poor!), or we just ignore that they are there, and keep our windows rolled up when we're stopped near overpasses. Their suffering is earned! Our suffering is a crime against us. If we worked on that suffering, instead of worrying about the next thing that's going to make us suffer (we just know it will! It's so unfair! I pay my taxes!), maybe we'd worry less about questions of theodicy, and a bit more about questions of justice.
But what fun would that be, right? It might even put a burden on us. That's so unfair!
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