Great Maps by Jerry Brotton.

In this modern era, we have learned to see maps as directional guides accurately depicting locations of, and distances between, point A and point B. But throughout history, this use has not always been the norm. Jerry Brotton is Professor of Renaissance Studies at London’s Queen Mary University. He discusses maps as “a graphic representation that presents a spatial understanding of things, concepts or events in the human world.” When one looks at Brotton’s chosen maps, one quickly sees his point. A medieval European map, circa 1300 AD, shows Jerusalem at its center, Central Asia as populated by cannibals, and Africa as a significantly smaller continent populated by mythical animals and people. It even provides a physical location for the Garden of Eden, at northernmost point in the world. Christ is represented “At the top of the map, outside terrestrial time and space.” (Brotton, pp. 58-9). This representation reveals a medieval culture where Christianity was central and understanding of other peoples or places outside Europe was limited. Brotton presents a wide array of designs from Europe to China; from Paleolithic petroglyphs knapped onto outcroppings to Google Earth. In each, he examines what the cartographer is trying to say about the world, given her social, political or cultural perspective.

While insights are important, this is a book of visual displays. It is an opportunity for the eye as well as the mind. Both author and publisher reveal an understanding of this in their selected layout. Great Maps is a colorful, high gloss, large format (10 inch by 12 inch) presentation of attractive images. Its sixty-four maps represent the aesthetic values of numerous cultures. There is even a map that hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. (Brotton, p. 232). Individual examples are given a two-page canvas, permitting the widest possible view of the topic. This view is followed by another two-page “visual tour” where Professor Brotton highlights interesting portions on the map and what they reveal. This variety and format encourages a reader to set aside time for the quiet enjoyment of a slow, relaxed perusal.

Brotton’s analysis is socio-politically progressive, as represented by some of his selections. Henry Schenck Tanner’s 1839 “Indian Territory” map was “consulted by the US Congress as they planned the various stages of Native American removal.” Today it is a useful chronicle of stolen land. (Brotton, p. 190). Edwin Hergesheimer, an abolitionist, created a US slave population map, showing the distribution of the United States’ 4 million slaves in 1861. (Brotton, p. 194). Charles Booth’s 1898 cartogram of London contains color-coding which shows income levels in the city’s neighborhoods, designed to reveal the extent of poverty. (Brotton, p. 204). David Livingstone’s 1873 Map of Africa is presented in context of the “Scramble for Africa” by European powers. (Brotton, p. 201). Many exploration maps were commissioned by businesses or governments, intending to exploit the land and resources of others. As beautiful as the maps are, they often represent less-than-beautiful aspects of human behavior.

There are some notable scholarly lapses contained in this volume.  In his discussion of Portolan Charts (illustrations for sailing that show shorelines and ports), Brotton states that it is “almost as though the technique for producing this kind of chart emerged out of nowhere.” (Brotton, p. 53). History is a discipline dedicated to uncovering the trajectory of human development. Saying that a technology appears to have emerged out of nowhere, does not substitute for the responsibility of presenting what we do know about its origins. Later, the author describes surgeon and cartographer John Snow as “pioneering the use of surgical anesthesia.” (Brotton, p. 193). This is a careless statement that leads one to believe that Snow introduced this innovation. Anesthesia has a history that pre-dates Snow by 300 years. Paracelsus first experimented with Ether on animals in 1525. Regarding Snow’s chosen substance, Chloroform, Francis Brodie Imlach was using it on patients six years before our cartographer used it with Queen Victoria. In both the example of Portolan Charts and that of John Snow, more patient research should have been employed.

The area where Brotton excels is as a tour guide for these maps. He has spent a great deal of time examining them quadrant by quadrant. His “visual tour” sections help make sense of complex designs, revealing what is important. Many of the maps do not conform to the style of a modern atlas. These can be disorienting to the novice. Brotton’s expert navigation is useful in such circumstances.

Brotton, Jerry. Great Maps. New York: DK Publishing, 2014.

Biology and Genocide Prevention. From Wiesel to Burundi.

“People wanted to understand…what had paved the way for Auschwitz. Explanations alternated with theories involving everything from politics to mass psychosis; none proved adequate…Twenty-five years later, after the reckoning, one feels discouragement and shame. The balance sheet is disheartening...Nothing has been learned; Auschwitz has not even served as a warning. For more detailed information, consult your daily newspaper” (Wiesel, pp 6-9).

When I read the above commentary by Elie Wiesel in December of 2015, Burundi had recently devolved into a crisis of ethnic conflict and genocide. Clearly we have not learned as much as we need to, in order to avert such atrocities. Much of our inability to change our approach to these situations results from continuing to believe outdated ideas about human nature. Ideas that existed in 1965 when Elie Wiesel first wrote those, disconsolate words.

In the early 1960s, our approach to human nature was psychological. Behaviorism was the dominant school of thought. The world was understood as alterable through education, cooperation, rational policy and positive reinforcement. Since then, our scientific community has come to respect the force of our own biology. A biology that has permitted us to survive and proliferate by selfishly using, consuming or murdering anything that was not us. We evolved, over millions of years, from a mindless organism with a mouth, to a creature with a complex brain. We used that brain in service to our goal of reproduction: creating tools; creating beliefs and ideologies that explained and supported what we were doing. To those of the Judeo-Christian tradition, whose cultures most successfully dominated Western politics and world empires during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, God placed us on this earth and gave us dominion. Nature was to be tamed. Inferior peoples were to be conquered so that we might either eliminate the inferior culture or, if we were feeling benevolent, permit those inferiors to live under our authority and benefit from our superior ways.

But Wiesel was a memoir writer and a philosopher, not a biologist. He did not see that we are two prehensile toes away from being that baboon-like ancestor who climbed down from the trees, evolved to stand and began to use its hands to fight for its life. Though our biology is not all that we are, in the context of genocide it is the best explanation I have found for our behavior. Our failure to come to terms with our animal nature, a discomfort we have felt since Darwin took us out of Eden and placed us on a continuum of mammals, has permitted genocide to occur many times before and since the Holocaust. We keep thinking that we can civilize ourselves beyond a biological impulse that existed far before civilization. When we learn of an attempt to eradicate a people, our response is to educate and communicate sensitive plans for rehabilitation. But it happens again because the one thing we don’t do is face what we are. If we could add knowledge about our biological nature to our understanding of ourselves, we would have one more piece of information with which to work.

Perhaps then the world would be willing to take measures to tame our inner animal. Endless dialogue with murderers, or carrot-and-stick diplomacy, might take a second place to immediate protective action. Perhaps the UN would authorize the creation of a rapid response force that could go anywhere in the world it was necessary to defend a threatened people.

We are both our intellectual and our biological natures. Education has worked wonders in Germany concerning the Holocaust and cultural sensitivity, but this is after the fact of genocide. Asking the Khmer Rouge of the 1970s to hold hands around a campfire with urban Cambodians for a sing-along would not have worked. What did work was the violent intervention of the Vietnamese Army. Education can come afterward.

A UN force dedicated to such a tactic in Burundi could have halted their genocidal course. But can we overcome our own selfish genes enough to agree on this approach? A majority of world nations would have to agree to spend a great deal of time, resources and money on such a project. Additionally, this project would endanger the lives of individuals (soldiers) within one’s own primate troop to save the lives of those in another. The question is: Are we up to such a challenge?

Wiesel, Elie. One Generation After. New York: Schocken Books, 1982.

The Proud Tower. A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914 by Barbara Tuchman.

The Proud Tower is Barbara Tuchman’s depiction of the western world between 1890 and World War I. In her introduction, the author claims that “The Great War of 1914-18 lies like a band of scorched earth dividing that time from ours…we have been misled by the people of the time themselves who, looking back across the gulf of the War, see that earlier half of their lives misted over by a lovely sunset haze of peace and security. It did not seem so golden when they were in it. Their memories and their nostalgia have conditioned our view” (Tuchman, pp. xv-xvi).  Instead, we should see this period less romantically; as a time like any other, with its conflicts and its optimism existing side by side.

Tuchman’s chapter topics are highly selective, magnified and engrossing. The chapter list is brief and enigmatic enough that it should be displayed so the reader may see if she is interested: 1) “The Patricians,” is about the British aristocracy which continued to rule that country between 1895 and 1902. 2) “The Idea and the Deed,” is about the anarchists of Europe and the USA between 1890 and 1914. 3) “The End of a Dream,” discusses the change in US foreign policy from one that promoted worldwide democracy as an alternative to old world colonialism, to one that militaristically promoted US imperialism in the Western Hemisphere and the Pacific. 4) “Give Me Combat,” is about France’s internal division over the Dreyfus Affair. 5) “The Steady Drummer” is pervaded by humor and irony as the worlds militaristic powers meet for two Peace Conferences, where the goal is to show the public their commitment to peace while accomplishing nothing that might restrict their militaries. 6) “Neroism is in the Air,” presents Germany as an advanced culture in terms of art (especially music), science and industrial progress, but hints at the qualities that lead to the Great War. 7) “Transfer of Power,” portrays the political triumph of the Liberals and the commoners over the Patricians in Britain between 1902 and 1911. 8) “The Death of Jaures,” compares the hope of Socialism, (that workers would preserve world peace by refusing to fight a world war), against the reality of Nationalism.

These topics are interesting unto themselves, but hardly form a cohesive narrative of the period or even offer a summation. Tuchman is aware of this discord. In explanation, she states “I realize that what follows offers no over-all conclusion, but to draw some tidy generalization from the heterogeneity of the age would be invalid. I also know that what follows is far from the whole picture. It is not false modesty which prompts me to say so but simply an acute awareness of what I have not included. The faces and voices of all that I have left out crowd around me as I reach the end” (Tuchman, p. xviii).

Despite faults one may find with this book’s selection or cohesion, one will see a rare open-mindedness. Barbara Tuchman had a talent for presenting a balanced historical view. She was able to write sympathetically about people and groups with whom she felt no political or cultural affinity. In The Proud Tower, she depicts, with equal non-judgmental insight, both the British aristocracy and the western anarchists (two groups whose values she did not share). Her dispassionate portrayals permit readers an unprejudiced access to worldviews and cultures, that appear as if they are written by an insider of the milieu described. While Tuchman’s contribution to the study of this period is far from comprehensive, it is delightfully insightful and impartial.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Proud Tower.  A Portrait of the World Before the War: 1890-1914. New York: Bantam Books, 1989.

Shining and Other Paths, edited by Steve J Stern.

The Shining Path, or Sendero Luminoso, was a Maoist revolutionary movement born of Peru’s university system. It was the creation of Professor Abimael Guzman who, with fellow professors and students, saw communism as a potential liberating force for Peru’s impoverished underclass. They began by addressing the plight of highland, Quechua-speaking “Indians,” who labored long hours in poverty under a centuries-old, colonial, hacienda system. In that system, a “patron” owned the land and exercised such complete control that he was permitted to physically punish his workers. Organizing an army in the province of Ayacucho, Guzman and his cohort initiated retribution against patrons and corrupt local government bosses. The Peruvian military responded with violent attacks on Sendero villages and cadres, which began a war that lasted from 1980 to 1995 and claimed almost 70,000 lives. In the end, what defeated the Sendero Luminoso was an inflexible party dogma. By demanding that all regional produce go to the party, that traditional tribal leadership be abolished and replaced by their hierarchy and that children be conscripted for military service, they lost the support of the people they had come to liberate. The communists could not tolerate disloyalty to the party. Their response to resistance was assassination and massacre. Though the initial years of the war were dominated by Peruvian Army annihilations of Quechua-speaking communities, “by around 1988 it was the Shining Path’s massacres that populated the map of regional death” (Stern, p. 147). The military saw an opening, began arming highland (Serrano) communities, and expelled the Maoists with that support. Today, there are still a few bands of Sendero Luminoso, but the threat of revolution has passed.

Shining and Other Paths is an anthology of history and analysis discussing the rise and fall of the Sendero Luminoso. It’s five parts cover 1) The history of oppression and resistance that gave paved the way for the failed revolution; 2) The war in the highlands and Quechua life during this period; 3) The destruction of reform efforts by both the Shining Path and the Peruvian Armed Forces, 4) The different roles and political stripes of women during the war; and 5) The legacies of this war.

Frequently, an anthology will attempt to cast a wide net, representing voices of as many different political perspectives as possible. An editor covering a nation experiencing revolution, might choose to present articles written by government, revolutionary, native, reformist and reactionary individuals, to present the full spectrum of opinions. This book is distinctive in its single-point political perspective. Its writers are uniformly of a liberal-progressive stance that is to the Right of the Shining Path and to the Left of the government. Their concern is entirely with the well-being of the Quechua-speaking population, the poor city-dwellers and the Peruvian reformers, all of whom were the main victims in this conflict. According to a report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (CVR), out of a national death toll of 69,280 people, 75% spoke Quechua as their native language.** To put this in perspective, 80% of the population speaks Spanish. Only 20% of the population speaks Quechua; yet they accounted for three-fourths of the casualties.

Shining and Other Paths is a compendium of thoughtful essays elucidating the destructive impact of the Maoist revolutionaries, and the government forces, on Peruvian society. But in many ways, this volume is a both a product and a victim of history. The Shining Path lost. It is this fact that informs the analysis recorded therein. If the revolutionaries had been successful, US leftist analysis would appear more conciliatory. After all, when the Vietnamese Communist Party was victorious, many of its wartime atrocities against perceived traitors and resistant communities in the countryside were forgotten. The rigorous demands and conscriptions imposed on farming communities by the Viet Cong were seen, by many sympathetic western scholars, as a necessary evil to create the conditions for victory and the overcoming of oppression. The Peruvian authors of this volume would also represent events differently. Within a nation where a successful revolution has occurred, a different, cleaner perspective on the events is taught in the schools and advanced to the public. Few US citizens are aware of British claims that US revolutionary soldiers scalped wounded Redcoats at Concord. The excesses of any revolution are sanitized in a campaign of honoring the “visionaries” who supported revolution and a public agreement of national forgetting. Shining and Other Paths is an insightful guide to the failures and injustices of its subject organization. But the reader must not forget the events and political agendas that inform this book’s conclusions. The writers represent views far more aligned with those of Peruvian reformers, who were assassinated by the revolutionaries, than with any other group. The Sendero Luminoso could not have gained a foothold in Ayacucho without initial Quechua support. They did speak to the aspirations of some disenfranchised Serranos. Some gave their lives for the Sendero view of the future and supported the Maoists even in defeat. I wonder what they would have said.

**"CVR. Tomo VIII. Chapter 2. "El impacto diferenciado de la violencia" "2.1 VIOLENCIA Y DESIGUALDAD RACIAL Y ÉTNICA"" (PDF). pp. 131–132.

Stern, Steve J. (ed.) Shining and Other Paths. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005.

Islamophobia, the Red Scare and Donald Trump. Inspired by Reading Murray B. Levin.

In April of 1919, US postal officials discovered thirty-six bombs had been mailed to prominent politicians and industrialists throughout the United States. On June 2, 1919, a more successful effort through the mail produced eight explosions across the US. (Levin, pp. 32-4). These bombings were presented to  the public as a foreign-inspired Bolshevik plot. (Levin, p. 1). The public was understandably alarmed. A number of politicians used the opportunity to initiate the nation’s first Red Scare. Thousands of foreigners were deported. Offices of radical organizations were raided by federal agents. (Levin, pp. 52-3). Conservative politicians like Attorney General Alexander Mitchell Palmer (the individual who ordered the raids) attempted to increase their personal power. Palmer used the publicity to launch a bid for the Presidency of the United States. (Levin, p 72).

Sound familiar? Replace Bolshevik with Islamic, and Palmer with Trump, and you have the USA in 2015. Have we learned so little about fear? Do we automatically revert to an irrational defensive posture which violates the rights of citizens and improves the circumstances of demagogic conservative politicians? Though I am sure that I could write an article of popular opinion, excoriating Trump for his fear-mongering, the truth is that Trump would not be successful without an ignorant public who is unaware of their history, their prejudices and themselves. It’s easy to point at Trump and say that he is the problem. But these epidemics of fear occur periodically in the United States against some foreign or “un-American” source. It results in our putting safety before human rights and oppressing a class of people. This time the target is Muslims.  Yes, there are some terrorist attacks occurring by some Muslims. But a large section of US citizenry, in one of its characteristic fits of anxiety, is failing to properly assess the risk. Saying that we should prevent Muslims from entering the country because of terrorism, is like saying that we should keep library cards out of the hands of Southern Baptists because they’re just going to burn  the  books; or that we should keep white teenage boys out of high school because they’re just going to go crazy and shoot-up the place. The large majority of Southern Baptists, white teenage boys and Muslim Americans are law-abiding, rational people. Far more rational than Trump’s noisy minions.

What is needed is a dispassionate discourse, not an emotional reaction. And this is what we should be demanding of our politicians. It has been said too often that terrorism relies upon fear to win. Too often because so many citizens are not listening and the message bears repeating. If you react out of fear, they win. The losers will be innocent citizens, our Bill of Rights, and you. If we can take a collective breath and begin examining the many reasonable options for curtailing violence, we will be able to produce a plan that balances civil liberties with safety. 

We must tread carefully. We must fully examine each proposal designed to prevent attacks. If, in  the process of securing the safety of our nation, we undermine the Constitution and  violate our laws, there will be no America as we know it, to defend. For example, we currently have a no-fly list for people whom we suspect could perform terrorist acts. If this limitation is fully vetted, and found to be constitutional, then the list may have other useful safety applications. Logically, if an individual is such  a danger to the US populace that their freedom to travel by  air has been proscribed, then it is reasonable to prevent their access to the purchase of firearms, with which they could cause more public harm. The aforementioned is a limited, cautiously contemplated limitation on individual rights. It may not stand-up to intelligent dialogue; but there should be a dialogue. Compared to the infringements proposed in some quarters that we prevent further immigration by Muslims, or curtail internet access for everyone, this proposal at least not a fear-based, bigoted reaction to outsiders. But, whatever our solutions will be, they must be approached with an attitude of calm and a method which respects due process. This collective breath is square one of an intelligent conversation. The next moves determine our freedoms for the near future. Lets avoid another Red Scare.

Levin, Murray B. Political Hysteria in America. The Democratic Capacity for Repression. New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers. 1971.

The Guardian of Boston. William Monroe Trotter by Stephen R. Fox.

William Monroe Trotter was an early Twentieth Century radical for the cause of racial equality. Of course, what was radical in 1910 is accepted wisdom in 2015. Among his most memorable activities were his conflict with Woodrow Wilson over segregation in the federal departments of government, his agitation against the film “Birth of a Nation,” his organizing with The Niagara Movement (precursor to the NAACP) and his reporting from the Paris Peace Conference.

The main instrument for Trotter’s opinions was a newspaper that he founded in 1901 with George Forbes, called The Guardian. Publications created by and for African Americans were few, and played an important role in both informing and organizing the populace.  This newspaper was founded primarily in response to the accommodationist politics of Booker T. Washington, and remained a thorn in the side of this famous educator throughout his career. Trotter, as editor, hounded Washington for his unwillingness to address lynching (Fox, p. 27), segregation (Fox, p. 34) and the loss of voting rights for southern African Americans (Fox, p. 36). When Washington’s influence was eclipsed by the rise of the NAACP, African Americans finally had a superior advocate for their rights.

If Trotter had limited his criticism to Washington, history would have vindicated his perspective. “But he had the strong man’s flaw: his bulldog tenacity could often become a prickly stubbornness…Compromise was not flexibility, but cowardice. Other men were either manly or unmanly, with him or against him. These qualities made him an admirable spokesman for the protest tradition, but hamstrung his personal relationships.” (Fox, pp. 64-5). Trotter was unable to accept that a movement is a body with many organs that function for the well-being of the entire organism. As a result, he eventually alienated almost all of the important radicals whose perspectives he shared. WEB Du Bois, Archibald Grimke, George Forbes, Clement Morgan and William Ferris, all were one-time allies who deserted Trotter. This is a sad and frustrating theme in the book: while African Americans are losing many rights, facing a resurgent KKK and enduring an increase in lynching, Trotter is wasting movement energy on infighting.

Stephen R. Fox, for his part, does a heroic job of reporting on this important but difficult figure. He does his best to balance the editor’s valuable work and his difficult personality. But even the most saintly biographer cannot avoid editorializing about such flagrant personality deficits, as when he parenthetically discusses the activist’s “larger problem of subordinating his ego sufficiently to admit mistakes and remain on good terms with anyone whom he did not control.” (Fox, p. 118). At least one cannot accuse Fox of hagiography.

Despite William Monroe Trotter’s personal flaws there is much to recommend him. He put forth the then unpopular (now accepted) idea that African American organizations should be run primarily by African Americans in order to  empower them. Even the NAACP of his time had a majority of white men on its board. As a Harvard graduate from a well-off family, he had the opportunity for material comfort. But he “relinquished a comfortable, respectable existence” for a life that “brought him poverty…For over thirty years he genuinely put his people’s welfare above his own. And the tragedy of his life is that he died without much assurance that his dedication had been worth it.” (Fox, pp. 281-2).

Fox, Stephen R. The Guardian of Boston. William Monroe Trotter. New York: Atheneum, 1970.

God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question--Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman

Bart D Ehrman provides a carefully considered, insightful, perspective on the Bible. It is a document which he has spent a long time examining. Ehrman has been a biblical scholar and a professor of religion for over thirty years. He has written 27 books, primarily on topics related to the Bible. Since 1988, he has taught at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. But he does not believe in God. He defines himself as an “Agnostic.” This is a definition he chose not because the word “Atheist” is repugnant to him, but because he thinks that it is more accurate to say that he cannot disprove the existence of God. (One cannot disprove the existence of unicorns either, but that doesn’t mean we need to quibble over the possibility of their existence.) The professor’s purpose in writing this book is to have a population that questions and understands what is written in the scriptures. He’s not out to make atheists. After all, he is married to a churchgoing Episcopal woman and teaches students, the majority of whom are believers. Professor Ehrman’s view is that “the Bible lies at the foundation of Western culture and civilization…the Bible informs our thinking in more ways than we are inclined to allow” (Ehrman, p. 14). Its ethics and ideas have profoundly influenced Western civilization for better and worse. Even today, citizens of Europe and the Americas express thoughts (sometimes direct phrases) that are found in the Bible; often without being aware of their source. So, for Westerners, knowing what the Bible says permits them to be more conscious of factors that have shaped and continue to form, the societies in which they live.

God’s Problem is a methodical, chronological examination of the Bible’s many answers to the question “Why Do We Suffer.” Ehrman takes the reader from the views of the Prophets on this subject, through those of the apocalyptic Jewish sects, to the appropriately final Christian apocalypticists. This author combines a good biblical scholar’s full understanding of the text, with the incisive mind of an individualist Agnostic who is not afraid to question its wisdom or consistency. For example, Ehrman reveals the views of the Prophets who lived during a time when Israel and Judea were Jewish kingdoms. People then were distressed by famines and attacks from neighbors. They asked why they were suffering. The Prophets, almost universally, answered that the people were being punished by God for disobeying his laws. The Prophets assured that God would re-embrace his people when they returned to his laws. Conversely, after Israel and Judea fell, many Jews were being persecuted by their conquerors for maintaining their religion and obeying Jewish law. So why isn’t God returning to his people, as promised, to re-embrace them? When this generation of Jews asked why they were suffering, the apocalyptic Maccabees answered that God’s cosmic enemies and their earthly minions were battling God and harming his people. The book of Daniel, written at this time, assured that God would send a Messiah who would vanquish the Lord’s enemies and establish a heavenly kingdom on earth. So the answer of the Prophets, that God causes suffering as punishment for disobedience, directly conflicts with the apocalyptic Jewish answer, that God’s enemies cause suffering as retribution for obedience to God. These contradictions make clear that the Bible is not inspired or channeled from a Supreme Being. If it were, answers would complement each other, rather than contradict each other. Instead, the Bible is a compilation of writings by different people, at different times, answering the question based upon their situation. Ehrman’s method is to present in each chapter a different biblical answer to why people suffer, then expose the inadequacy of the answer in a final assessment.

In discussing the ways that God punishes his people, our theologian expresses his difficulty in accepting this behavior of God. He criticizes universal punishments like the Great Flood, where God drowns all of the innocent babies on the earth because people have become sinful. He criticizes the individual punishments meted-out on specific wrongdoers, like when God kills the infant of King David and Bathsheeba for their betrayl of Uriah. Clearly, God’s moral actions do not sit well with Professor Ehrman.

Though the writer is capable of complex biblical analysis and extensive, rational contemplation, regarding the question of suffering, his main criticism of the inadequacy of biblical answers derives directly from the compassionate impulses which drove him from belief to Agnosticism in the first place: today’s conditions of suffering and God’s resounding absence. Ehrman is grief-stricken by the overwhelming suffering endured by God’s alleged children: If “the God who created this world is a God of love and power who intervenes for his faithful to deliver them from their pain and sorrow and bring them salvation…Why are babies still born with birth defects? Why are children kidnapped, raped and murdered? Why are there droughts that leave millions starving…If God intervened to deliver the armies of Israel from its enemies, why doesn’t he intervene now when the armies of sadistic tyrants savagely attack and destroy entire villages…If God [fed] the hungry with the miraculous multiplication of loaves, why is it that one child…dies every five seconds of hunger?” (Ehrman, pp. 5-6). Ehrman has many religious friends and students who have posed answers based on the Bible. The most common answer is that God gave humans free-will and humans use that free will to do evil. The professor has two answers to that question: 1: “If God gave people free will as a great gift, why didn’t he give them the intelligence they need to exercise it so that we can all live happily and peaceably together?” (Ehrman, p. 13). 2: “If suffering is entirely about free will, how can you explain hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes and other natural disasters?” (Ehrman, p. 229).

Whether one responds to Professor Ehrman’s well-reasoned analysis of the Bible’s answers, or to his personal anguish over today’s conditions of suffering, one will respond. The question of why we suffer leads one on a thought-and-emotion-provoking journey that, at some point, most thinking and feeling westerners exposed to the Bible will undertake. Inviting Bart Ehrman along on this trek, will help to clear-away some of the fog on the path.

Ehrman, Bart D. God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question—Why We Suffer. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.