[tragedy] to protect, control or cope

Control or free will - the old dilemma

When faced with an immediate tragedy closeby, it's understandable that one would feel this:

I, on the other hand, would wish for someone to explain to me why, if there is a loving god, he allows them to happen.

It's also not callous to say of the deaths in war:

... the scale becomes so great in war, plague or natural disaster that our minds cease being able to envisage it ...

One such person to whom this happened was Matt Frank, an Iraq war veteran who served in the US army as a Specialist Scout.

Don't know how close you are to the scout's role but I did a short stint on an exercise and it's not something you'd wish for in RL.

You're the vanguard, the most vulnerable of all and your reflexes need to be razor sharp.

I feel especially bad for what happened to him:

It was me or them, and if I had anything to say about it, it was going to be them. I filled with a rage that I still cannot explain.

I felt my eyes swelling as my heart beat faster and faster, my arms burning from constantly wrenching the gun from target to target, my pores spewing sweat.

I caught him [an armed insurgent] out of the corner of my eye when he was already half way across the street, I quickly swung my gun over, started to fire just before he came into aim, walking the rounds into their intended target; but just as the rounds were about to fall upon him, he made it to the other corner.

As the Iraqi had made it out of my field of fire, my gun strafed into a rickety trailer parked right at the corner. Now falling out from behind this trailer was the body of a teenage boy.

This incident, amongst all the other incidents in his tour of duty, messed Matt Frank up completely in his mind.

It seems almost wrong, in the face of this, to try to offer an explanation of why a loving god would allow this. I can only offer an analogy.

I walked to school from age 6 and it was a conscious decision on my parents' part to allow it. I was the most insistent, feeling it was shameful for a Big Boy to be nannied along to school.

One day I was walking home after school and a bicyclist shouted at me from behind on the path, knocked me over and the bicycle went over me. I remember thinking at the time that I was glad it wasn't a car on the road.

Had my parents been negligent? Could they have prevented this accident? Were they wrong to allow me this freedom? Have I grown up pretty independent and self-sufficient?

I suppose they could have driven me to school everyday and collected me afterwards, never allowing me a breath of fresh air or the freedom to run, explore and ... well, live. Yes, they could have done that, wrapped me in cotton wool and prevented absolutely anything happening to me.

I would have died and they knew it.

There's another analogy for G-d.

A kid is at the water's edge with his toy sailboat. He holds it so it doesn't tip over and walks it along beside the beach, making whooshing sailing noises, losing interest after ten minutes because that was not what it was designed to do.

So he gets up the courage to release the boat and it tears off with him following. It tips over but comes back up again, takes a wrong turn but corrects itself, then a big wave hits and suddenly the nose heads out to the deep water. Quickly he taps it back on course but is loathe to do so.

The whole point was to see how it sailed, as a mother watches her child take those first steps on his own.

Tipping boats are not dead teenagers but it seems to me we can't have it both ways. To avoid the scenario in the top photo, the only other way is Free Will - freedom to choose for ourselves and technical tweaking to our organism, mainly from our parents, to let us make it through most of the time.

It's not a concept which would be any too popular in the face of such atrocities but it seems to me the overriding issue is not so much to protect and prevent but to enable the capacity to cope.