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A side thought
Feb. 18th, 2009 07:07 pmGod as Writer is an image I love. It resonates with me very strongly. That's one of the reasons I love the D'niverse. And this thought just occurred to me while I was batting the ball back over the net for ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
catsittingstill: what good would a writer be who only wrote about nice things happening to nice people in a nice world? Good grief, *I* can do that. It's possible to make a career writing that kind of thing, if you write for kids or are P G Wodehouse, but by far the majority of good stories are those in which there is conflict and suffering, in which the odds are stacked against the characters and the struggle seems completely unfair. The characters, caught in the middle of the story, might curse the name of the author, might wonder how the being who created them could possibly be so cruel as to allow such things to happen to them, and might not understand why other characters might feel the urge to worship the unknown source of their existence. And they might well be right. But if they claimed to know that there was no such entity, they'd be dead wrong.
I'm not advancing this as a serious answer to the Problem Of Evil, nor is it a belief to which I would wish to subscribe. (I'd prefer the purpose of the universe to be something to do with us, not something to do with selling copies or winning the Celestial Booker Prize.) It's just a thought, and it is, I think, as plausible as anything else that's been advanced.
catsittingstill: what good would a writer be who only wrote about nice things happening to nice people in a nice world? Good grief, *I* can do that. It's possible to make a career writing that kind of thing, if you write for kids or are P G Wodehouse, but by far the majority of good stories are those in which there is conflict and suffering, in which the odds are stacked against the characters and the struggle seems completely unfair. The characters, caught in the middle of the story, might curse the name of the author, might wonder how the being who created them could possibly be so cruel as to allow such things to happen to them, and might not understand why other characters might feel the urge to worship the unknown source of their existence. And they might well be right. But if they claimed to know that there was no such entity, they'd be dead wrong.I'm not advancing this as a serious answer to the Problem Of Evil, nor is it a belief to which I would wish to subscribe. (I'd prefer the purpose of the universe to be something to do with us, not something to do with selling copies or winning the Celestial Booker Prize.) It's just a thought, and it is, I think, as plausible as anything else that's been advanced.