I submit that there is a profound humanistic value in this world.
It lies under the veneer of creation, between the gaps of humans and every other living thing.
Honestly, I think this all folds back into the problem of evil…
“Evil” is a profoundly human idea.
It brings with it a lot of assumptions and a lot of problems – a lot of human problems.
Lions and lambs and rocks and sticks and plants and bacteria are not hung up on such things.
Understand: We are back to that puff again.
You have to decide for yourself, if you want to know the truth.
Are we essentially nothing? And if so, what is evil anyway? Or is there more?
Whenever the Poles appeared on the screen—always as prisoners of the Wehrmacht—the audience would shout, “Kill them! Kill them!” Auden was utterly taken aback. “There was no hypocrisy,” he recalled many years later: these people were unashamed of their feelings and attempted to put no “civilized” face upon them. “I wondered, then, why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value.” On what grounds did he have a right to demand, or even a reason to expect, a more “humanistic” response? His inability to answer this question, he explained, led him by a circuitous yet sure route back to the Christian faith in which he had been raised.
-Alan Jacobs, The Year Of Our Lord 1943 (Amazon)
