Alex Sayf Cummings Aneurysms, Best of, philosophy, religion

Poof Foundness, or How We Love a Landlord Hex

If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty He would be able to do what He wished. But the creatures are not happy. Therefore God lacks either goodness, or power, or both. This is the problem of pain, in its simplest form. The possibility of answering it depends on showing that the terms ‘good’ and ‘almighty’; and perhaps also the term ‘happy’ are equivocal: for it must he admitted from the outset that if the popular meanings attached to these words are the best, or the only possible, meanings, then the
argument is unanswerable.

C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (1940)

The creatures are not happy, people. They’re not happy. Okay?

When I was a young girl, I fell in with a bunch of Christian psychos. This was a symptom or side effect of me deciding to go to the nearest state university in North Carolina, where the Campus Crusade for Christ and the College Republicans were the main show in town. I was proselytized by guys with frosted tips and engaged in seemingly endless debates in the dining hall about the ontology of reincarnation with guys with frosted tips.

For a red-blooded Arab-American transgender socialist, this was a disappointment. I thought college was supposed to be fun, not going to your annoying friend’s Freewill Baptist youth group. How was my degenerate right-wing high school actually cooler than college?

But I also met people who were what we could only call Christian apologists, in the best sense of the term. I didn’t know what apologetics was, but I met some actually kind of sophisticated young people who had rehearsed everything from St. Augustine to C.S. Lewis and knew how to parry every postmodernist or secular argument with a Biblical counter-attack. (In fact, they were the most postmodernist people of all, aware that everything was relative and your “viewpoint” was the only thing that mattered.) As a result, I read C.S. Lewis and Bertrand Russell and others because I wanted to understand what these people were saying. The Problem of Pain, even if I don’t agree with its conclusions, is one of the most interesting philosophical works that I’ve read.

That time seems long ago, but it’s still with us as we live under a Gilead-style government, and no one seems to have any idea what is happening. At no time in my adult life has the general culture felt so adrift and not knowing where to go — where is the trend of things? Mostly, it seems bad. But the unsinkable and unfathomable depths of culture often bring us surprises — there are things bubbling up under the tides of the sea that you have no way of knowing about until they crest the water and come roaring forth. As friend-of-the-blog Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said, “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”

I wonder what happened to my erstwhile Christo-fascist so-called friends from college. Hopefully they’ve watched Malcolm in the Middle and got radicalized. Inshallah. In any case, here are the week’s reading recommendations from our editors:

  • Devin Thomas O’Shea and Andrew Hartman on Karl Marx in America (LARB)
  • Racism storm overshadows US Open as Naomi Osaka joins criticism of Ostapenko’s “no education” comment (Independent)
  • Nancy Fraser on Capitalism’s Crisis of Care (Dissent)
  • Gabriel García Márquez on the Magic of Juan Rulfo (LitHub)
  • India’s ‘apple basket’ reels from climate change (Nikkei Asia)
  • Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government (NYT)
  • I’m Thinking of Ending Things Is an Impossible Adaptation Achievement: Charlie Kaufman’s Netflix opus turns an unadaptable book into an ethereal experience. (Inverse)
  • A Dark Money Group Is Secretly Funding High-Profile Democratic Influencers (Wired)
  • I Am an AI Hater (Moser’s Frame Shop)
  • Weapons‘ secret weapon Amy Madigan is ready to talk about Gladys, those prequel reports, and why we’re obsessed (Entertainment Weekly)
  • ‘Weapons’ Crossing $200 Million, ‘Materialists’ Hits $85 Million Globally (Variety)
  • Real Reality Bites Hours: Loving the World of NYC Dating Hell in Celine Song’s ‘Materialists’ (ToM)
  • The Weil Conjectures Rewards the Intellectually Adventurous (Texas Observer)
  • Texas University Boards Abolish Faculty Senates, Create Toothless Councils (Inside Higher Ed)
  • Car Seat Headrest’s Will Toledo on Chronic Illness and His “Scholarship of Faith” (Exclaim!)
  • How Tea’s Founder Convinced Millions of Women to Spill Their Secrets, Then Exposed Them to the World (404 Media)
  • Trouble with the Brothers: Booze, Divorce, and Madness in the American West (ToM)