I thought I was done with this goal. I’ve made my contribution, I’d thought, and after all it’s just taking up space on a list I like to keep to under 22.
No sooner had I deleted it than I received an email from a friend of a friend, just in time for Christmas.

I’ll spare you the finer details, but I thought you might enjoy the general absurdities:

there’s a girl who comes in from school and is hungry. Luckily her mother is baking a cake, and offers her some flour. The girl says something along the lines of “eeuw, no, that’s yucky”.
What about raw egg? “Yucky!”
A slab of butter? “Yucky!”
A spoonful of baking powder? “Yucky!!!”
Eventually the woman has the good snese to just make the damn cake, and when it comes out of the oven, the daughter of course delighted to eat a slice. Not yucky, yummy.

The moral of this story was, the email acquaintance went on, to remind us that although we might look around us this Christmas and feel sad for the children dying of AIDS, and wonder how a loving god could allow that to happen, we should not despair or lose faith.

No indeed, for just as the baking powder was yucky by itself but a necessary part of an ultimately delicious cake recipe, so it is with god’s plan.

The individual pieces of it might not make sense at first (aha, that’ll be the children dying of AIDS which their mothers, now dead, contracted after being brutally raped and then horrifically maimed by soldiers in certain African conflicts), but when you put all those pieces together (presumably adding in those yucky rotting corpses of people who died of famine or water borne disease or under earthquake rubble), by jove, suddenly it all begins to make sense.

Well, no, it might not actually seem to make sense, the email conceded, but luckily we have our faith in god to assure us that ultimately, it really does make sense, and that so much suffering is an unfortunate but wholly necessary part of God’s plan.

A good job really, the email didn’t go on, because if I were an orphan who had died in excruciating suffering of AIDS, only to get to heaven and discover that it had all been a preventable mistake rather than deliberate planning on god’s part, I’d probably be a little peeved.

This email was sent by someone I would otherwise describe as “normal” and “fully functioning”. She actually signed off with the sentence “hope this brightens your day as much as it did mine!”

I felt sick, to be honest.

It seems our work is far from done.

If you haven’t watched it, there’s a four hour discussion between Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Dicky Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens here. I saw the first hour last night and it’s interesting to see how the four of them interract together. Christopher Hitchens is a pompous ass as usual, but he does make me laugh.