I went to Mr. X’s funeral the other day. As I was standing there, looking at all the mourning people, I overhead someone say this:
“It just doesn’t seem fair.”
I didn’t necessarily think it was unfair because fair, in that case, presupposes that we have some right to have Mr. X with us, which is just silly. He wasn’t ours. He wasn’t even his family’s. He was His. (The capitalized “H” is not a typo.) But I didn’t argue with the person because, quite frankly, that’s not the sort of thing you argue at a funeral.
What struck me about that statement is that it came from someone who has a world view the polar opposite of mine. I believe that the world has a defining Truth behind it, a driving force… in short, an active, present, personal Creator. He thinks it’s all pretty random, that somewhere along the line the world created itself and stuff happened and then more stuff happened and then we came along. It’s a theory, I’ll give him that.
What I don’t understand is if it’s all random, why does everyone seem to think that the world should be fair? Now, no one but the extremely naive will argue that it really is fair, but I haven’t talked to a single person who doesn’t on some level believe that it bloody well should be fair.
My argument is that the universal presence of this concept of fairness is evidence that someone wired us to expect the world to be fair. The problem is that, somewhere between when our mental circuitry was designed and now, the world broke. It’s been limping along ever since.
Smarter people than I have written many books for and against that concept. I just thought I’d share it because it came up at the funeral. So there you have it. For what it’s worth.
You can stop reading now.
Really.
“It just doesn’t seem fair.”
I didn’t necessarily think it was unfair because fair, in that case, presupposes that we have some right to have Mr. X with us, which is just silly. He wasn’t ours. He wasn’t even his family’s. He was His. (The capitalized “H” is not a typo.) But I didn’t argue with the person because, quite frankly, that’s not the sort of thing you argue at a funeral.
What struck me about that statement is that it came from someone who has a world view the polar opposite of mine. I believe that the world has a defining Truth behind it, a driving force… in short, an active, present, personal Creator. He thinks it’s all pretty random, that somewhere along the line the world created itself and stuff happened and then more stuff happened and then we came along. It’s a theory, I’ll give him that.
What I don’t understand is if it’s all random, why does everyone seem to think that the world should be fair? Now, no one but the extremely naive will argue that it really is fair, but I haven’t talked to a single person who doesn’t on some level believe that it bloody well should be fair.
My argument is that the universal presence of this concept of fairness is evidence that someone wired us to expect the world to be fair. The problem is that, somewhere between when our mental circuitry was designed and now, the world broke. It’s been limping along ever since.
Smarter people than I have written many books for and against that concept. I just thought I’d share it because it came up at the funeral. So there you have it. For what it’s worth.
You can stop reading now.
Really.
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