Architectural Tupperware

Containers

Architecture is one of the ultimate cultural containers; it both represents and holds firm our society.  It is an absolute expression of who we are, our value system, our ideals, our aspirations.  It is also the thing that circumscribes our daily lives.  In this, I do want to state, I am not being an environmental determinist claiming that architecture makes us who we are.  Instead, I am making the opposite claim, that who we are determines our architecture, and that then architecture we create imposes boundaries on us.

Some might argue that art is the true container of culture: it challenges us, it embodies our ideals, it represents, and possibly abstracts, our culture; it stimulates thought and discourse.  All of these are true, but the one thing that art lacks is the connection to the practical.  By it's very nature, art is an object of ornament, not of function.  This is not to say that art is superfluous, it is very necessary, it is just that art exists for it's own sake. 

Architecture does not.  Architecture straddles the line between the practical necessities of life and the ornament of existence.  As Adolph Loos would say, "art should challenge, architecture should be comfortable."

Some might argue the opposite side, that technology is the actual container of culture: it demonstrates our knowledge; it shows our application of that knowledge; it celebrates our achievements; and in some cases, it fundamentally makes life possible.  All of these things are true also, but technology lacks the poetic.  It is missing an essential element of grace and beauty.  Technology is an object of function, not ornament.

Architecture also does not do this.  Again, it straddles the line.  It embodies the practical knowledge necessary to create buildings, but it also contains the beauty that pure engineering lacks.

Then there are those who would argue that writing, poetry and literature, are the true embodiment of culture, and in that I must agree, they are.  However, literature is just another form of architecture, in the sense that both are directly derived from the ancient art of storytelling.  (I would like to credit my friend Patrick with the concept that all art has it's root in the telling of stories.)  I am not claiming that architecture is constructed poetry or frozen music, merely that the two derive from the same source.

Writing is the architecture of the mind, buildings are the architecture of the physical.  They both employ structure, rules, form in the purpose of creating beauty.  A poorly crafted poem will collapse under its own weight just as quickly as poorly crafted building.

It is no coincidence that buildings and writings are the primary tools to dissect and understand a past culture.  They are the two fundamental sources used in archaeology to reconstruct the past.

To examine the first mode of architecture as a cultural container, I will address how architecture manifests essential aspects of society.

First I would like to discuss how architecture embodies our value systems.  As an example, I will look at the development of the kitchen over the last one hundred years and chart how it displays changes in societal roles.  I am going to use this time frame, because this is the period after the kitchen developed as a room separate from the main living space, as it had been in colonial times for all but the wealthy.  It is also after the kitchen stopped being hidden as the realm of servants for the middle classes, as it was in Victorian times.  This period is the time when the gas stove, refrigerator and indoor plumbing transformed the kitchen. 

At the beginning of the 20th century, the kitchen was typically a very small room that could only hold a small number of people comfortably.  This was true even in houses of the wealthy, as shown in Frank Lloyd Wright's Hollyhock house.  Further, the kitchen was relatively isolated from the rest of the house, segregated from the main living spaces by at least doors, if not actually by a butler's pantry.

This design showed the minimal value placed on the kitchen and more importantly, the minimal value of the women doing the cooking.  A common observation was "exiling the women to the kitchen."  This reflected societal norms of the men retiring to the parlor to discuss important matters, while the women went into the kitchen to work at cleaning up. 

In fact, the design of the house showed the sexual segregation typical of society at the time, where the men and the women typically shared space only during the meal, but were separated by the architecture both before and after.  And sometimes they were not together even then.  In my father's family, if there was not enough space at the table, the women ate in the kitchen.  The architecture limited all interaction.

As we moved into the second half of the 20th century, the kitchen began to change.  First, the kitchen transformed to celebrate both technological achievement and plenty.  While still strictly separated from the rest of the living spaces, it nonetheless began to become more of a focal point for the display of technology; electric stoves, wall ovens, dishwashers, trash compactors, a host of small appliances, supposedly labor saving devices, actually became status symbols to display in a new kitchen.  Even though socialization would not occur there, everyone had to see the new stuff in the kitchen and admire the achievement of the family who could afford it.

Additionally, stoves, ovens and refrigerators increased in size to accommodate the more plentiful food that needed to be stored and prepared.  To understand this change, I have a bread dish that belonged to my grandmother that she used in the 30's.  This dish  is small, it can only hold six or eight slices of bread, and those slices would have been cut in half.  It was a way to elegantly display a small amount of food.  Today, a bread plate would be able to accommodate an entire loaf of French bread, possibly even two.

But the most dramatic shift was the change that began in the 80's and 90's, when cooking moved into the social realm.  No longer were women exiled to the kitchen, and segregated from the men, now both sexes mingled and the kitchen became a prime social space.  In the shift to the great room concept of the new millennium, the kitchen is now often the main entertaining space in the home.

This shift shows the massive transformation of attitudes.  The kitchen has returned to it's Colonial American roots, where the activities of the home revolve around the hearth, now transformed into the island.  The change in kitchens shows the change in the values of society, where it is now important for an entire family or a group of friends to share space, even when work is occurring.   

My grandmother would never have had her entire family in the kitchen, it wouldn't have been proper because it was a working room.  I would never not have my friends in my kitchen, for the same basic reason, it would not be proper, but now because it is the social room.  The transformation of the kitchen in the house shows the shift in cultural ideals.

The change in the kitchen also shows a shift in our aspirations.  In the days of strictly defined gender roles, rooms had gender determinatives.  Certain rooms were for men, most of the house actually, and certain rooms were for women, chiefly the kitchen, sewing room and the kids rooms.  At that time, societal aspirations and norms were built around the concept of a man's home is his castle.  Our architecture reflected this.

Today, our aspirations are for a non-gender segregated society.  We are  tearing down the walls of sexism, and in doing so, have torn down the walls around the kitchen.  We are reflecting the hope for an equal society through an architectural expression that creates equality in the space.  Now the whole family can be together, and work together, in the modern kitchen.

But container has another meaning, it can also mean to hold back; to contain an idea in a limiting sense.  To demonstrate this, I will stay with the kitchen.   The shift in kitchen design lagged years behind the shift in societal roles, and in fact, it is not fully penetrated even yet because there are still millions of old style kitchens across the country.  In a very real sense, the delay in the shift of the physical puts a brake on the shift of the cultural.

In homes where the kitchen still is of the design and has the separation of the old

kitchens, the patterns of life in those houses still reflects the old system of segregation.  It may be the man doing the cooking, but regardless, the genders are still separated before and after the meal.  Socialization is still fragmented by the spaces.

Even in old houses that have large kitchens, like mine, there is still an odd disjointing, where everyone crowds into the kitchen, so a choice must be made between comfort or standing around the island in the kitchen.  There is no ability for everyone to be together, but engaged in different activities as they would be in an open concept house.

In this sense, our architecture also contains culture, by slowing down its transformation.  I am not going to claim that this is a good thing or a bad thing, just that the built environment can slow the societal changes, if for no other reason than we cannot afford to rebuild our entire world every time the culture shifts.

I could use countless other architectural examples of this embodiment of culture.  You can see it in the change from the corner store to the big box store, the parish church to the large mega-church, the grand civic buildings to the modest office structures that now serve as centers of government.  Each of these changes represents a serious shift or evolution of cultural values.

The architecture becomes a lens, magnifying our society.  Though our architecture, we can analyze our entire value system and the patterns of our lives.  But architecture can also become a prison, locking us into patterns that are no longer valid, but that we are unable to change, because the architecture confines us to the old forms.

We build buildings that fit our lives at the moment, then those buildings shape the patterns of the next generation.  It is a cycle that is at once elevating and limiting, and it is a cycle that we must understand.

The Internalization of the Divine Supplement

Sublimation

In the previous posts I have charted the development of religion from a localized to non-localized phenomenon and the development of something I term the Divine Supplement.  I use this term to describe how something that exists in the space between the fully sacred and fully profane can substitute for the authentically Divine.  I will address this aspect of authenticity in my next post, because I want to fully lay out my framework of theological evolution before I tackle the authentic.  As you will see, authenticity is very fuzzy and morphs over time and depends on how you approach it.  For now, I want to finish the development process.

In the last post, I discussed Eliade’s terms of Theophany and Hierophany.  These terms circumscribe the two ways that we can connect to the Divine, and thereby establish the idea of the Sacred.  In a Theophany, connection is established by direct manifestation of God.  In this system, there is a physical presence, without which, the Sacred cannot exist.  This sort of system is typical of Greek and Egyptian religions, where, for example, the Gods were thought to be physically present in statuary, otherwise known as fetish objects.  

The Hierophany expands on this idea.  In this system, physical manifestation of God is not necessary for the space or action to become sacred.  Although a Hierophany can still encompass a manifest Deity, it is primarily defined by a system called an Ideal Model.  This system consists of laws, commandments, and rituals which create value, direction and purpose.  Through this development, the establishment of the sacred becomes behaviorally based, not physically based.

This is the first step of the process of internalization.  As an example, at this point in religious development, we get the Covenant.  The Jews are no longer defined by place, nor are they defined purely by heritage, they are defined by a series of actions and rituals, as laid out in Leviticus and Deuteronomy.  I should note here, that at least to the more Orthodox sects of Judaism, obeying the Law is not sufficient for being a Jew, you also must be born of a line of Jews.  But for now, I will look at the keeping of the Law as the primary requirement of Judaism. 

Unlike the other religions of the Classical World, where externalities created religious identity, for the Jews, you also needed to live by internalities.  You had to be circumcised, an externality, but you also had to keep the Sabbath, which is internal.  Even though you can be observed keeping the Sabbath, which would be superficially external, you are required to keep it even in the absence of others, which makes it a personal ritual.  This may have been the first time that an internal system defined religious identity.  It certainly was one of the earliest instances of this existing in written form.

So, as I have discussed, this is another aspect of the Divine Supplement; a religious internal identity providing connection to God, instead of a physical external connection.  This is a substitute because system of laws, which whether divinely inspired or not, are still grounded in the world of man and thus become a substitute for the physical presence of God through what is called religious experience.

I would like to explore this briefly before continuing.  In primitive religion, the initiation into the Divine Cult occurred through physical trial and Ecstasy, which is the actual experience of the Divine Presence.  Typically the initiate would be fed drugs, starved, sleep deprived, wounded or some combination of these actions to bring about an altered state of consciousness where they could receive God.  I should note here, this concept still exists in some modern religions, such as the Pentecostal ritual of Speaking in Tongues, or the neo-pagan act of suspension.  But as Eliade describes, even in the modern era, these rituals are a link to the primitive aspects of the initiatory experience.

In the more modern Representational Initiation, such as the Bar Mitzvah, baptism or First Communion, are ritual experience substitutes for the Ordeal practiced in ancient religions.  The child being baptized does not experience an actual presence of God, but nonetheless is initiated into the Divine Cult known as Christianity.  I would like to note here, cult, like fetish, is being used in the anthropological sense of the word, and holds no negative connotation.

To return to my point, I would like to chart this development of internalization. 

In a Theophany, connection to God was external, extra-personal and hierarchical.  It was external in that it required a manifest Deity.  There was a need for the Divine Presence in order for the condition of sacredity to exist.  It was extra-personal because all of the Truth was delivered from the outside, in this case, through Divine Revelation and the presence of Deity.  Finally, it was strongly hierarchical, priests were the only ones who could perform the rituals that appeased the Gods and only through the priests could salvation be achieved.  At this stage, those rituals had to occur in the presence of the Gods, which was done through their Fetishes. Further, salvation was not for the afterlife, it was an aspect of the physical world, again another externality.  The priests literally stayed the hand of the Gods, and protected the people from their Divine Wrath.

As we move forward into the early Hierophanies, which I will term Priestly Hieropanies, connection to God shifts somewhat.  It remains extra-personal and hierarchical, but it is now both internal and external.  In this stage, Truth is still divinely delivered, and the intercession of the priest is necessary to find salvation, but now we have systems of ritualized behavior to establish the Sacred.  Some of that behavior is external, such as the rituals of the temple, the laws of dress and the physical markings required of devotion, such as circumcision.  However, some behaviors are now internalized.  We are introduced into the idea of the Unclean, the abomination and the pure, all of which define the internal religious life.  

These notions create the Sacred Space, not only in the temple but in the soul as well.  It is important to note here that salvation has become Salvation, and we are introduced into the idea of the immortal soul that receives reward or punishment for deeds done while in the flesh.  At this stage, Salvation still requires the hierarchy of the priest to intercede with God to save the soul; Salvation cannot occur without it.  Also in this type of Hierophany, the priest also continues to guarantee salvation, the staying of God’s Wrath, turning His eye from the people.  

At the next stage, we come into a system that I will call an Internalized Hierophany, which has the characteristics of being internal, subjectivist and egalitarian.  Although some external trappings may exist, such as religious services, much of the system relies on internalizations; for example, accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior.  This is an internalization without any external cue at all.  Only God can know what is truly in a person’s heart.  In some sects of Christianity, and in Islam, the internal is the single most important thing to mark a person as a believer.  There is little to no ritual for conversion beyond accepting Deity into your heart.

But this Hierophany is also subjectivist.  Although there are some Divine Truths, the most important aspect of being Sacred is being Good.  Although we might not like to think so, good is an utterly nebulous and subjective thing.  If you ask ten people what makes a person good, you will likely get ten different, but equally valid responses.  Just as evil is utterly dependant on context, so is good; an act that at a certain time could be right or wrong could be completely different in another situation.  The same thing could be said of being Righteous, or any of the other terms that describe adherence to faith.  It is no longer a public display; religion becomes a private experience, which is the hallmark of the internal.

Finally the Internalized Hierophany is egalitarian and by its very nature it must be so.  When there were externalities, there could also be a priest to intercede, because a priest could observe the forms and rituals that displayed the entry into the Sacred.  In an Internalized Hierophany, there are no outward forms to display, and no way for the intercessionary priest to determine adherence to the Law.  When you are the only person who can determine your tie to the Sacred, you must pray for yourself.  You become your own key to Salvation.  Further as God becomes an internalized experience, there is neither salvation, nor any need for it in the first place.  God moves from a physical to a purely spiritual presence and, as such, no longer directly acts in the physical world.  This is the John Spong view of Christianity, where God is a very personal, internalized process.   

With this, I have outlined the three models of religion.  Understand, I am dealing with idealized models here; the real world expressions of these systems are much messier.  For example, Catholicism still contains physical manifestations of Deity through the miracle of Transubstantiation and yet believes intent, not action defines what is a sin.  Evangelical Christianity relies strongly on extra-personal Truths revealed by God, but are internalized through the experience of being “Born Again.”  The models are never pure outside of a thought experiment, but they do provide a framework for understanding.

Now that we have looked at how the Sacred can be created, and models of doing so, I would like to examine a further implication of this.  We have created what Douglas Hofstadter would term an isomorphism, where two complex systems can be mapped onto each other.  He expanded the thought from a purely mathematical model to one that can be applied more broadly to all sorts of theoretical frameworks.  We are created by God and then we create God in our image.  More specifically, we create rituals to make the Sacred, and then the Sacred circumscribes our lives.  Put another way, did we write these crazy stories, or did these stories make us crazy?

This isomorphism is fascinating.  We have set up a system, through either a Theophany or a Hierophany to be able to create the Sacred.  This Sacred Experience defines our connection to Deity and we can build the entire chain of connections in this way.  Here we are on very solid ground, well trod by theologians, anthropologists and academics.

However, we can flip it around, which is a very different way to look at it.  If we do this, the rituals, processes, rules and forms create for us our notion of the Divine.  We can map one system directly onto the other; the only difference is the order of development.  We can look at these rituals, Laws and forms and through them develop the notion of God.  In this case, we are not a reflection of the Divine; the Divine is a reflection of us.

This broaches the subject of authenticity.  Which side is the authentic, the Divine Experience or the Human one?  This is the subject that I will pick up on in the next post.

St Barts Cathedral, New York City

The Divine Supplement

Substitute

In my last blog post, I introduced the concept of the Divine Supplement, which I briefly described as an object that represents God, but is not of God.  In creating this term, I am abstracting from  Rousseau’s idea of the Dangerous Supplement.  I am not literally reframing his argument to religious terms, instead, I am paralleling it with this term.

The Dangerous Supplement describes an inferior thing that becomes more significant than the real phenomenon that it is a substitute for.  Rousseau initially came up with this theory because he recognized that masturbation could become a damaging replacement for sex.  He later evolved the idea into the concept that writing was the dangerous supplement to speech.  Writing, in Rousseau's philosophy, was removed from direct connection to thoughts, and therefore a poor substitute for the speech, which was more directly connected to the mind.  In terms of Rousseau, the Dangerous Supplement can be broadened to explain any situation where the less authentic thing becomes superior to the more authentic one.

This idea creates a framework for the Divine Supplement, which, as I have introduced, is where a semi-sacred object can become a substitute for the authentically Divine.  I will address the issue of the authentically Divine in another post, because it is too complex to present in a brief space.  For now, I ask the reader to accept the idea of authentic Divinity.  This concept first appeared in human history in the Book of Joshua, where the Tribes of Israel, who lived on the east bank of the Jordan River, erected a substitute altar to connect them to the true altar in the Tabernacle.

This altar was a representation of the true one, but still had the spiritual power to bind the people to God.  As such, it was the first religious object in history that was not truly sacred, and yet it was also not profane.  I am using the word profane in Eliade’s sense of the word, where the profane means that it gives man no pattern for his behavior.  The Sacred, according to Eliade, is the space where man “conforms himself to the Divine” and it demands from him a certain defined response.  An example that Eliade uses to describe the sacred is that of Moses and the Burning Bush, where Moses halts and removes his shoes.

By this definition, the altar in the Tabernacle was truly sacred space, because it housed the Ark of the Covenant, which in turn housed Yahweh.  Further, that space was the only location where the priests could perform the rituals to invoke their Deity.  From the encounter between Moses and Yahweh, up until the events in Joshua, Jewish ritual and consequently, connection to God, could only occur in the Tabernacle.  After Joshua, connection to the Divine could occur at least in some form through the substitute objects of the replicated altar. 

This concept would revolutionize religion in the Western World.

As I stated in the last blog post, it detached God from a specific location or object and allowed religion to become a non-localized phenomenon.  In fact, none of our modern religions could exist without this dislocation.  If it had not occurred, the Jews could never have maintained their faith outside of the Holy Land.  Further, neither Christianity nor Islam could have become world spanning religions, because there would have not been an ability to connect to the Abrahamic God away from the places where His presence was made manifest.  All three religions would have been bound inexorably with the Promised Land.  (And since Mohammad was from Makkah not Israel, he may never have become a Prophet because he would not have been a part of the Abrahamic Tradition.)

But the impact was even more profound than just that singular idea of deities without borders.  It also allowed for religious experience to occur through objects that came from the hand of man rather than God, and it allowed those objects to connect people back to God.

Prior to this, the only genuinely sacred things were the Fetish Objects of the religions.  As I stated before, a fetish is an object that houses the spirit of Deity, and is an actual physical manifestation of the Divine.  In Judaism, the prime fetish was the Ark of the Covenant, which not only held the fragments of the Tablets given to Moses, but also was the physical dwelling place of Yahweh.  In order to perform the rites of the Jews, the priests had to be in the presence of the Ark.

But the idea of the Divine Supplement changed this.  As it evolved, some religious experiences could occur in the presence of a substitute.  People no longer needed the presence of the Fetish in order to worship or give devotions.  To the modern mind, this does not even seem to be that significant; we are completely used to the use of symbolic objects.  But remember, to the ancient mind, these objects were not symbolic, they were authentic.

To illustrate this, let’s look at the phenomenon of seeing the image of Jesus or the Virgin Mother in an object.  From a modern religious point of view, this is a symbol of God’s presence, but we don’t necessarily view the image as true manifestation.  In the ancient world, they would believe He was actually present in that picture.  (I am not going to address the fact that humans are pattern makers and find images everywhere.  That is a topic for another day.)

To further this point, let’s examine the idea of the Altar.  In the Torah, the only true Altar was the one that existed in the Tabernacle, because upon that Altar rested the Ark.  God’s physical presence was required to make the Altar holy.  After the Temple was built, it was sanctified by the Ark.  In the period of the Second Temple, the altar held a replica of the True Ark, the original having been lost with the destruction of King Solomon’s Temple.  Still, that substitute was holy enough to allow the rites of the Temple to occur in its presence. 

Today, every synagogue has an Ark, which instead of housing Yahweh; it holds a copy of the Torah.  The Ark of the modern synagogue is Divine Supplement that symbolically ties the assembly to their history.  This object is not an altar, but it is an object that connects the worshiper to the worshipped.  The copy of the Torah is yet another Divine Supplement; it is only made in Jerusalem and in a highly ritualized fashion that evokes and connects to the one true Torah written by Moses.  Though this, both the space and the text are symbolically connected back to antiquity.    

As we move into Christianity, we stretch the idea of the Divine Supplement even further.  It is interesting to see how it evolved in the various Christian sects.  In the Roman Catholic tradition, churches typically had a relic of a saint, or if they were truly wealthy and important, a relic of Jesus himself.  These objects are directly venerated, as were the fetishes of antiquity, and they are important to the sacridity of the church, used rituals and rites that made the space sacred.

Like the Torah Scrolls in Synagogues, these objects are a spiritual linkage to God.  They are not in and of themselves divine, as they are either the remains of saints, or physical objects connected to Biblical events, but they represent a connection to God.  Again, we see the idea of the Divine Supplement; the semi-sacred relic that is purely human substituting for the Divine Fetish.  On a side note, the Roman Catholic Church required the presence of a relic in all altars prior to 1969.

   

This process of development of the Divine Supplement takes an even larger step in the Protestant faiths.  Their churches are consecrated through a ritual process that makes the space sacred, there is no need for a fetish object or even a relic to sanctify the space.  Rites, which Eliade would describe as hierophanies, have taken the place of the fetish objects that were necessary in antiquity, and they have become an alternative to the concept of theophany, which is a literal manifestation of God.

The very concept of the hierophany is the utlimate exemplar of the Divine Supplement.  In the ancient world, experience of God required a theophany, in other words, He had to physically manifest, either in form or in action.  Examples of this are Moses and the Burning Bush, the Pillar of Fire, or the Fiery Chariot that carried Elijah bodily into Heaven.  Yahweh in the Pentateuch was known through his actual physical presence.

A hierophany, on the other hand, is a substitute for the physical appearance of the Divine.  It is an ideal model presented in lieu of an actual manifest Deity.  This ideal model, according to Eliade, is a system of laws, commandments, and rituals which create value, direction and purpose.  This system is what creates the Sacred, eliminating the need for an actual physical connection to God.  Connection to God, in the hierophany model is spiritual, not material.

By creating this ideal model, connection to God becomes both ritualized and internalized.  I will examine the internalization of this connection in my next blog, for now, I want to explore the ritualization of connection.

I began to address this in my last post, when I discussed how the Laws of Leviticus and Deuteronomy set the Jews apart from the rest of the people of the Middle East.  The Covenant became the basis for being Jewish, as opposed to a physical location.  It created an identity separate from nation and allowed the Jews to remain Jewish regardless of where they lived.  As long as they held to the Covenant, they were tied to God. 

But this concept goes even further as we move forward in time.  In the ancient world, only priests could participate in the rituals that tied the people to the Gods.  The non-ordained could not even set foot in the temple precincts.  This held true in almost all of the lands around the Mediterranean.  Common people could watch certain rites, like the parade of the statues in the Opet Festival, but that was the absolute limit of their participation.

This contrasts sharply with the Jews, who in keeping to the Laws, participated in a number of the rituals that tied them to Yahweh.  Some rites, such as the Burnt Offering, could only be performed by the priests, but many other rituals, such as the Bar and Bat Mitzvah, had the participation of all of the people.  Further, unlike the Greek and Egyptian Temples, all Jewish men could enter the Temple itself.  This ability to participate in the rituals created a sacred connection between man and God.

This ritualized connection increased in the early Christian traditions.  In the Roman Catholic Church, for example, all people participated in Mass, received Communion, and many of the Sacraments of the Church.  Even though the Priest acted as an intermediary and led the rituals, every member of the congregation had a role to play.  It took an entire community to create the sacred space of the Divine Supplement.

In the Reformation, the Hierophany of the ritualized connection became supplanted by that of the internalized connection, and this is where I will pick up in the next Blog. 

The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Los Angeles

The Birth of The Divine Supplement

Origins

One of the great paradigm shifts in the history of religion was the idea that deity no longer needed to be tied to a singular location.  While the shift to Monotheism is heralded as the great advancement in human theological evolution, it actually would not have been effective without this parallel, and possibly even more important shift.

Until this point, the Gods were tied to a location, in fact, most of the early temples were either symbolic or literal homes for the gods.  For example, the Gods Amun and Mut were believed to reside in their statues that were housed in Karnak Temple.  These statues were part of significant religious pageantry in the Opet Festival, which re-enacted the marriage and coupling of these deities.  In this annual celebration, the statues were bathed, anointed, paraded, and then wed at the temple of Luxor.  During the wedding, the Pharaoh and his consort would stand in for the gods, and then after a "honeymoon" in the temple, the King and the Gods would sail back to Karnak.

To our modern mind, we would view this as a symbolic act, much like the modern recreations of the Crucifixion.  However, this modern reframing of the festival does not accurately represent the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.  To them, the statues were not substitutes for the deities, they were the actual gods, or at least vessels to contain their spirits.  This idea was also held by most of the Mediterranean cultures of antiquity; the Gods of the ancient world resided in the Fetish Objects of their Cults.  (I am using the anthropological meaning of this term, which refers to an object that contains supernatural power.  This term does not refer to anything sexual.)

This belief tied the Gods to their lands, because they were believed to dwell among their people, at least in spirit.  Because of this, the worship of a god was not transferable.  For example, when Ptolemy and his descendants became the rulers of Egypt, they ceased worshiping the Greek gods of their land, and became devoted to the Egyptian deities.  In fact, many of the great temples of Egypt, such as Dendara, were erected by the Ptolemaic Dynasty, and these rulers are depicted on the temples worshiping as Egyptian Pharaohs.

This idea even held true in much of the Pentateuch, the part of the Hebrew Bible that is attributed to Moses.  Yahweh is mostly confined to the lands of the Israelites, although He does perform miracles in Egypt.  It should also be noted, that, like the Egyptian Gods, Yahweh was later confined to an object, in this case the Ark of the Covenant.  Almost all the acts He performs during the forty years in the desert occur near the Ark.  Also, even in later books of the Bible, his presence often seems to require the Ark. 

Also, in the early books, He is only the God of the Jews.  None of the other peoples, either in Canaan or in Egypt worship Him.  The other deities mentioned, such as Baal or the Gods of Egypt, are not described as false gods as much as they are forbidden deities.  The people in these stories do not convert to Judaism, the only thing they might do is recognize that Yahweh is more powerful than their Gods.

This idea of Gods being tied to geographic locations and objects permeated all of ancient societies, even the proto-monotheistic Jews, although in their case, as they wandered, God traveled with them, because they carried his home with them.  I would consider this to be a transition to the non-localized deity that would later develop.  There are other examples of Gods being carried into battles and such, but here I am going to focus on Judaism, as one of the earliest written traditions reflecting this development.

This idea of a geographically based God began to shift radically for the Jews in the sixth century B.C.E. either during or immediately after the Babylonian Exile.  This is the period when the Book of Joshua was written, and in that book, for the first time possibly in history, we see God and location begin to separate.  Specifically, this occurs in Joshua 22 verses 10 through 34.

In this story, the children of Gad and Reuben, as well as some of the children of Manasseh, build an altar to God on the east bank of the River Jordan, where they are going to make their home.  The rest of the Jewish tribes, believing this to be a false altar raised in rebellion to God, prepared to go to war with their brethren. 

Upon arriving, Phinehas discovered that these tribes had not raised an altar to rebel but to honor Yahweh.  Because they were separated from the rest of the Tribes of Israel by the River Jordan, they had erected the altar so that their children could also know God.  Phinehas blessed this endeavor, and there was no war between the tribes.  The only restriction imposed was that they could not use their surrogate altar to perform specific rites, such as the burnt offering, that were restricted to the Tabernacle.

The importance of this event is overlooked by many.  On the surface, it seems to be another lesson about not worshiping false idols, but it is actually far more significant.  It marks what may be the very first instance of what I will term the Divine Supplement; an object that is not in itself of God, but represents God.  It is the first instance of a modern view of the worship of deity.  I will more deeply explore this concept in my next blog post.   For now, I want to look at how this radical idea might have originated. 

It is not surprising that this concept would occur in the book of Joshua, which is the first book of the Hebrew Bible to be written during the Babylonian Captivity.  The Torah, although probably put in its final form during this period, likely predates it by a century or more.  During this period, the ancient Jews were dislocated from their lands, captive in a foreign nation and trying to cling to the faith and traditions of their ancestors.

This was an act that was radical at the time.  As I stated earlier, throughout the ancient period, when you moved, you took new Gods.  Even several centuries after the Book of Joshua, this was the typical action.  The expected result of the Exile should have been conversion to the worship of the Babylonian deities.  In fact, that might have been the very reason for the Babylonian Captivity; to stamp out the worship of Yahweh.  I suspect the many injunctions in the bible about foreign gods and false idols are also a reaction to this tradition and to refuse to bow to the convention of religious conversion.

So, given that Judaism was one of the most elaborate theologies of the ancient world, and one that was based on discussion and theological arguments, there became a need to justify the ability to keep faith in a foreign land.  If Yahweh was tied to the land, and even more, to the Ark, in Babylon the Jews were cut off from God.  Both the Temple and the Ark were lost to them.  By constructing a Biblical justification for a substitute altar, the Jews became free to find legitimacy for any temple they might raise in Babylon.  Their God was no longer tied to place or object.  Only certain rituals such as the burnt offering were denied them, not access to Deity.

Judges could also be a response to this exile, with its constant themes of losing and finding faith in God.  The entire Book reflects how hard it is to hold onto faith when surrounded by other religions, with the Israelites converting to the worship of other Gods, only to find their faith again through a charismatic leader who leads them back to Yahweh.

At this point in history, the Jews created something radical, through the writings in their Holy Books. 

Though the Torah, they created a series of laws and rituals that would set them apart from all other people.  No longer was religion based in location, it was based in keeping the Covenant, and living a religiously prescribed lifestyle, reinforced with injunction not to mix with other people.  This kept their purity and made Judaism a religion that could not be adopted just by relocation.  A person had to bind themselves to God in ways that no other society had done before and thus preserved their unique identity.  They found the way to truly create a Jewish Identity.

In the Histories, they created a chronicle of losing and finding faith.  They also created their concept of a God who did not act on whim, but followed a Divine Plan, even if it was utterly incomprehensible to His worshipers.  This is in direct contrast to the whimsical and capricious deities of the rest of the ancient world.  I suspect that He was depicted as cruel at certain moments because life at this time was cruel, and they molded God into that image.  Still, the main story of the Histories is that people need to remain firm in their beliefs and not be swayed to the worship of other Gods.

Finally, the Book of Joshua, while technically part of the Histories, does something radically different than either pf the other two sets of books that were codified in this period.  Joshua creates the idea of a non-localized ability to worship God and still be heard by Him.  It forms the basis of the idea of a religious substitute, the Divine Supplement.

In my next post, I will go into depth on the concept of the Divine Supplement and its relation to the Authentic.

A street in Jerusalem.  I took this picture in 2000. 

A Well Regulated Militia

Limitations

It is time to have a serious discussion on the Second Amendment in this country, one that is adult and mature.  We need to talk about sensible issues.  However, in the post Newtown Massacre environment,  we see people beginning to engage in posturing on both sides of the issue.  On the left, you hear calls for the complete repeal of the Second Amendment.  On the right, you have demands for every teacher to be armed.

This is not productive, and if it continues, it will become another wedge that splits this nation apart.  We have enough of those already.  This can no longer be an issue for political posturing on either side; there are already too many dead. 

In light of this, I want to talk about what the Second Amendment actually guarantees, and then I want to examine what I think is a sensible position on this issue, and why we need to look at it.

First, I would like to examine the historical realities that underlie this part of the Constitution.  Before I begin, I would like to quote the exact text of the amendment:

            "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,

            the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Most people, especially in the media, do not discuss the entirety of the text, nor understand the context that it came out of.  So I will start off with some background on this.

In the British Army, weaponry was accorded to soldiers by military rank, which often also corresponded to social class.  The infantry was typically pulled from the ranks of the landless poor, the unemployed, and even petty criminals.  As was the custom at the time, they only received inferior weapons, most typically a musket called a Brown Bess.  This gun was extremely inaccurate, and only worked as a war weapon when you had many soldiers firing simultaneously. (This is called a volley.)  The finer quality of weapons was reserved to the officers, which also happened to be noble born.  Admittedly, this was partially due to cost, but it was also a way to keep the rabble from having truly dangerous weapons. 

In this, the Right is correct in a way.  They kept powerful and accurate weapons out of the hands of the lower classes as a way to help prevent revolution.  Of course, as we saw in the many revolutions that have followed, it isn't really that great of a strategy.  Sheer numbers will eventually overwhelm a well armed minority.  One only needs to look at what happened in Egypt, where the government was one of the best armed in the Middle East,  to see how little superior firepower actually means to determined revolutionaries.

So to return to the point, the European militaries had poorly armed and minimally trained infantries that were drawn from the low end of society, and a well armed, well trained, upper officer caste.  Further, there was almost no mobility between these groups, and service was often by conscription.  In other words, people in the infantry typically did not choose to serve, and then they were given poor quality armaments.  All of this was done to build the world spanning empires of this period.

An understanding of this helps frame the existence of the Second Amendment.  Look back at the text in light of this information.

It starts "A well regulated Militia."  As envisioned by the Framers, there was no Standing Army of the United States.  Although this was quickly modified because they realized that there did need to be a national army, it was still supposed to be the lesser force.  The primary force in the country was to be the state militias.  This system still exists in the form of the National Guard, which is technically under the control of the Governors of the states.

The next part, "being necessary to the security of a free State," indicates the role of this Militia.  The militia, as the National Guard does now, was responsible for the security of the States, both individually and collectively.  Remember, having freed themselves from the yoke of one Empire, the Founders were very hesitant to create a new one in its place.  The states wanted the primary control of military forces, and this was the compromise hammered out.  It protected the states from each other, but created a framework for mutual defense.

The last part is the section that is the problem when removed from the context it was written in.  "The right to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  Taken out of context, it seems pretty plain, you cannot infringe on the right to bear arms.  In context, it becomes clear that the right lies within the bounds of a well regulated militia.

What this amendment initially guaranteed was that all citizens who wished to serve in a militia would be allowed to, and further that they would be allowed to have whatever weaponry they wished.  There would be no class stratification for arms, and also that those militia members would be allowed to keep their weaponry.  This was not typically allowed in the European military, where the weapons belonged to the government, and were only given out in preparation for battle.

Further, allowing the Militia members to keep their weaponry allowed them to be ready to fight at a moments notice; there would be no need to go to the armory to retrieve their weapon.  This made the state forces nimble and quick to respond.

Also, when you look at the Second Amendment in the context of the Third, you more clearly see that they both have relationship to a citizen's rights in relation to the armed forces.  (The Third protects from having to billet a soldier in a private home.)

So to tie this up, the Second Amendment basically provides that all citizens can serve in the Militia, and if they do so, will be allowed to have high quality weapons, retain them in their homes and carry them at will.  But it also means that in order to do so, you must be a part of the well regulated Militia, or at least be willing to serve as such.

This is actually not that much different from the laws in Switzerland, where all men must serve in the military, receive military training, and then for the rest of their lives, keep their weapons with the knowledge that they may be called upon to defend the country.  Essentially, all Swiss men are members of the Army Reserves, which means that every home has military grade weaponry in it.

So, taken under this view, according to the Original Intent of the Second Amendment, the only people who should have weapons are those that have served or are currently serving in either the military or National Guard.  But over the years, as we have become safer, and increased in population, there is not the need or ability for all Americans to serve in this manner.  Consequently, the interpretation of the Second Amendment has expanded.  And this is what sets the stage for our current dilemma.

We need to ask ourselves what are the limitations?

Even in the post Revolutionary War America, there were limits to the types of weapons people could have.  For example, citizens couldn't have cannons, nor could they have the rudimentary bombs that existed in that time.  There were always controls on the armaments that were permitted outside of military armories.

Today, this extends to a wide range of weapons.  For example, people cannot own tanks, nuclear bombs or chemical weapons.  Of course, the counter to that is, those are weapons not arms, and don't fall under the Second Amendment because it specifically states arms.  However keep in mind, switchblades, swords and long knives are also arms, and those are almost universally prohibited, at least if they are sharp and carried in public.  Since the switchblade manufacturers lack a powerful lobbying arm, their products are illegal.  Consequently,  we already limit arms, at least unless politically powerful forces align behind them.

 

I think a better tipping point of the limitations is how many people the weapon can harm in one use.  The heavy weapons that are illegal are ones that are designed only to kill people, typically lots of them, and do so at a rapid rate.  Therefore we outlaw the weapons of mass killing, like bombs, grenades and similar devices.

However, automatic machine guns and the like are also designed to kill masses of people; they are not hunting weapons, nor are they even weapons of self defense.  A machine gun is not the item that you would pull to fend off a mugger; it is a weapon to kill dozens, and if used in that sort of situation, many people other than the bad guy would be dead.  Outside of a zombie apocalypse, you are unlikely to be set upon by that many people at once.

Outlawing this sort of firearm would not violate the intent of the Second Amendment.  Remember, the Framers never imagined this sort of weapon, they barely had passed from the Musket to the Rifle in their time, and almost all weapons had a very limited kill speed.  As I said, even in their day, they outlawed for private ownership their form of weapons of mass death.

The same thing can be said of high capacity magazines.  Again, these are not items used in hunting, because you try to kill cleanly with one shot.  You don't want to pump a deer full of lead.  Similarly, they are also not for self defense either, for the same reasons listed above.  If you cannot stop an attacker with a few bullets, you are either a terrible shot, or you are fighting an evil superman.  In the first case, you may very well kill others, and in the second case, you're going to die anyway, no matter how well you are armed.

At this point I would also like to address a couple of side issues that I've touched upon, self defense and fighting tyranny.  These are two issues the NRA constantly brings up.  (I'll address the third one in a bit.)

First, there is the claim that carrying a gun is the best form of self defense.  I've talked about this one in a previous post, but I will restate it here.  A gun is only actually good for self defense if you have had military or police training.  The bulk of military training is not to teach you how to shoot, but how to be able to pull the trigger.  Killing people is not instinctive and there have been many studies that prove this.  You actually have to train someone to be able to kill, because every instinct in their bodies rejects it.

Interestingly, there is some proof that first person shooter video games actually function as desensitization training.  This is also at least partially born out by the number of mass murderers who loved violent video games.  However, I am not going to go as far as confusing correlation with causation.  Still, I do think that the Right has a point that these sort of video games do contribute to a reduction of the value of human life.

But still, without training, people will hesitate before firing a fatal shot.  A criminal who has brought a gun to commit a crime has come to terms with killing and is unlikely to hesitate to pull the trigger.  Therefore, in that moment of hesitation, the person carrying the gun is actually more likely to be killed than an unarmed man. 

A few years ago, I was inside a restaurant when I saw the manager get jumped in the parking lot.  One of the employees and I rushed the attacker and we were unarmed.  The attacker probably was, but our sudden and unexpected retaliation shocked him so much that he fled.  That and the fact that we jumped him and started pounding him.  I am NOT recommending this as the appropriate response in a mugging, but sudden, unexpected action is more likely to turn the tables than a gun.

Another thing to remember is that a gun is not necessarily good for self defense in a situation like Newtown.  Again, without extensive training in high pressure shooting situations, it will become extremely hard to acquire the target and shoot with necessary accuracy.  The reality in a situation like this is that you are as likely to kill an innocent as you are to stop the murderer.  Even with military or police training, friendly fire deaths are common.  Without that training, they are almost certain.  Remember, we almost always overestimate our skills, and saying that if we were armed in a mass shooting we could stop the killer is an abject denial of reality.

To sum this up, unfortunately, despite what TV and the NRA tells us, we are actually in more danger if we are armed than if we are not.  The only way to make this not the case is to get the same sort of training that the military provides.  This leads to another sensible gun law, if you are going to carry a weapon for self defense, you should receive military quality training on how to use it.

The second thing that the NRA constantly brings up is that we need guns to protect ourselves from tyranny.  They even state "fear the government that fears your gun."  My response to this is, if you are that afraid of your government, you need to vote them out of office now.  And if you are part of a tiny minority that that thinks the government is already irredeemably evil, consider moving to some other country.

The truth is, Americans will not suffer the yoke of tyranny for very long at all.  We are a rebellious and malcontented group of people on the best of days.  This is a country that will march on Washington at the slightest provocation.  You only need to look at the Tea Party and the Occupy movements to see this. 

If we ever actually faced the sort of dictatorship that the fringes on either end fantasize about, that regime would only last a few days.  Look how quickly most revolutions happen even in countries with iron fisted control, and the masses are often armed with little more than sticks and stones.  With all of the handguns and rifles in this country that would remain legal, even under an assault weapon ban, a hypothetical totalitarian government would never be able to take root in this nation.  This is a straw man fallacy, meant to distract us.

The final issue that the NRA brings up is that if you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.  Of course that's true, it's a recursive statement, just like any other if-then assertion.  However, it is also unfounded, at least in the case of these recent mass shootings.  Many of them, especially Newtown, were essentially crimes of opportunity.  The guns were legally obtained, but they were obtained by people who shouldn't have been able to get them.

To be very blunt, mentally ill people and people who have been convicted of felonies should not be able to have guns.  It doesn't matter if that infringes on their rights; the rest of us have a right to not be killed.  There is vast precedent for this.  In many places in this country, if you are a convicted felon, you lose your right to vote.  The same should be true of owing a gun.  You choose to commit a crime, and as such, you know that there will be consequences.  Losing your right to own a gun is no worse than losing the right to vote, and in all honesty, it is actually less severe.

Preventing the mentally ill from owning guns is a stickier legal proposition, especially given that people do not have control over mental illness.  Taking away a right for something that is an illness is on some level disturbing, but we need to avoid the slippery slope fallacy.  There is a clear dividing line here and laws could be very carefully written to tightly constrain the limitations for mental illness.  Still this needs to happen, given how many mass murderers are not mentally stable.

To sum this up, we need sensible gun control in this country.  We do not need to repeal the Second Amendment, nor should we arm everyone in some sort of Wild West fantasy.

We need to do the following things in the wake of the Newtown Massacre.  First, we need to ban assault weapons, weapons that have no legitimate self defense or sporting purpose, but are designed to kill large numbers of people.  Second, we need to outlaw high capacity magazines, Teflon jacketed bullets, and other sorts of projectiles that are again designed to kill people exclusively.  Third, we need to keep guns out of the hands of convicted criminals and the mentally ill.  Fourth, we need to close the gun show loopholes that allow people to purchase guns without a background check.  Fifth, we need to require that all people who have a concealed carry permit go through military grade training on how to use their weapon, and prove that they are accurate and competent in their handling of it.

None of these things would violate the intent of the Second Amendment, either as originally constructed, or in it's modern permutations.  I do not for one second believe that these steps are a panacea.  No matter what we do, there will always be tragedies like the ones we have suffered this year.  No matter how distasteful it is, we have to accept that fact.  Still, we can act to limit the both the frequency of these events and numbers of people who die in them.

In the end, how many more children have to die before we act?

God's Coventry

Theodicy

The spate of mass shootings in this country are enough to make people question the existence of a benevolent and omnipotent God.  The issue of how to reconcile the existence of loving God with the evident evil that exists in the world has been an issue for philosophers and theologians since the Age of Rationalism began. 

Gottfried Leibniz created a framework to reconcile these seemingly opposed aspects of the universe, while preserving the theological foundations of a Deity of Good.  He called his creation a theodicy, and it was one of the first attempts to justify the existence of God using rational thought, while also creating a framework to explain the evil in the world.  It is different from a simple defense, which does not attempt to explain the existence of evil or even help people understand why evil exists.

There are four aspects of a theodicy.  First, it must provide justification of the existence of God despite the evil in the world.  Second, it must be built from a common sense world view, which means that it cannot draw on obscure points of theology, but must work from common belief.  Third, it must draw from historical and scientific opinion, which binds it into the realm of logical argument.  Finally, the theodicy must be built off of plausible moral principles.

It was one of the first attempts to bring God into the realms of Natural Philosophy.

As this is an interesting theological exercise, in light of the events in Newtown, I would like to build a Theodicy to try to explain the horrors inflicted by armed villains.  I am doing this in response to the disgusting statements of people like Mike Huckabee, who claim that these mass shootings occur because we have "excluded God from the public schools."

Before I build my argument, I must address these statements, because not only are they vile in light of a tragedy that has left twenty small children dead, but also because if that is true, then God is irredeemably evil, and there is little if any difference between him and Satan.

In the Book of Job, God allows Satan to inflict disaster and suffering on Job, to prove that no matter what happens, Job's faith is strong enough that he will not turn away from God nor will he curse God for what has happened to him.  After Job's faith is affirmed, and Satan is proven wrong in his belief that Job only loves God because God has gifted him, Job receives back what he has lost.  While the story of Job is disturbing on a number of levels, in the end God is shown to be just and compassionate.

That is not the case if God massacres children to prove a point.  Unlike in the story of Job, those children will not come back, nor will they be replaced, as were Job's herds.  God simply obliterated them without mercy.

Even worse, if God is sending these things to teach us a lesson and out of anger that we have supposedly excluded Him from our country, how evil must he be to slaughter the innocents to make a statement.  The children have nothing to do with deciding issues like prayer in school gay marriage or any other social issue people want to blame. It is also quite likely the parents who are now grieving did not have anything to do with those decisions either.  To punish people who have done no wrong, and let the actual decision makers remain unsanctioned is an evil beyond belief.  If God is so cruel as to do these things, then God is not good or loving.

Since that is so alien to what I believe about a loving deity, I must reject it and with it I must condemn anyone who uses this sort of disgusting rhetoric to try to sway a grieving nation.  It is an act as evil as the initial massacre. There are things you simply do not do, and one of those is telling a grieving parent that their child died because America allow gays to marry or has taken Christian prayer out of the schools.

Instead, I must look at how this sort of evil can exist in the world, despite an all powerful and all loving God.  And through that exploration, I will try to build a Theodicy.  I do want to state, I am not a true theologian, and I do not know if this is going to be correctly constructed, but I want to try to rationalize, for myself at least, the issue of evil in the world and how God can permit it's existence.  

I am also not going to fall back on the easy explanation that the evil in the world is the result of Satan.  This explanation either neuters God, making him powerless to prevent the Devil from having Earthly reign, or it makes God a defacto accomplice, sanctioning the actions of Satan.  This explanation is what is called a defense, and would have been the rationalization prior to the Enlightenment.  As such, I would like to use a more sophisticated theology.

The core of the reconciliation between evil and God lies in the concept of Free Will.  I have explored this concept previously, in this blog post, but here I want to look at it from the point of view of God.  God gave mankind Free Will  and this means He cannot intervene, even when our actions are horrific and evil.  People make the choice to commit evil acts, and for him to intervene in these instances revokes the very idea of free will.

It is basically similar idea of a parent letting a child chose their path.  As a parent, you can tell when a child is going to screw up their life, but in the end, forcing a child to make the right decision keeps the child forever an infant.  There is no growth without the ability to screw up.  But beyond that, if God intervenes and stops someone from committing evil, the entire framework of Free Will becomes an illusion, because the underpinning is knocked out.

To further explain this, we have to look at the nature of Sin.  To commit sin, there must be two aspects, the decision and the action.  I reject the traditional Catholic view that the sin exists only in the decision, and the action is irrelevant.  If you decide to commit a sin, then upon reflection have recognition of the irrevocable nature of that sin and turn back from the precipice, then you have found redemption, and have not committed a sin.

Similarly, if you sin outside of a conscious decision, either because of extreme need, or being forced to, you have not actually sinned.  This covers the Valjean dilemma; stealing a loaf of bread because you are starving.  It also covers things like the necessity of killing in a war, possibly even if the cause you are fighting for is unjust in the eyes of God.  While the first is sanctioned by most religious authorities, I know that the second is morally questionable, because it skirts the line of the Nuremberg Defense.  However, most people would agree that killing in times of war is sometimes necessary, especially in a kill or be killed situation.

So, outside of the situations that may look like sin on the surface, but do not actually constitute sin, people have the option to chose between Salvation and Damnation.  For God to intervene and stop the actions that are required for the commission of a sin, He actually eliminates the option of Free Will.  At that point, we move into the realm of Predestination, that all souls are destined for Heaven or Hell, regardless of the decisions they make in life.

But why, then does He allow innocents to die.  Can He not contain the evil?  Unfortunately the answer has to be no.  For him to directly intercede in the affairs of man breaks the rules as well.  He would have to weigh the worth of all people, and choose who would live and who would die.  In other words, he would have decide who's life was worthy of being spared and who was unworthy enough to allow them to be killed.

This is problematic on many levels.  First, it eliminates the possibility of redemption.  Perhaps the person is on the wrong path now, but later recognizes the error of their ways and straightens up.  I understand that the concept of omniscience means that God would know if that person would ever find salvation, and of course He could arrange to only have damned souls die in these sorts of incidents, but then that leads to an even more horrific problem.

It means that everyone who dies in incidents like Newtown essentially got what they deserved.  It would mean that everyone who died that day was basically a horrible person who God decided to obliterate.  It also means that people would have no reason to grieve the losses, because they deserved it.  That is the Fred Phelps view of the world, but beyond that fringe, this is an idea that must be rejected.

So basically, God's gift of Free Will means that He understands that sometimes people will misuse that gift.  That is why He gave us the gift.  And further, if he were to intervene, he would either revoke Free Will, or he would make us have no sympathy for the victims, which would irrevocably harden our hearts against people who suffer tragedy.  In this view, Job would have gotten what he deserved and would not be a lesson in faith overcoming adversity.

There is a story about World War Two that is relevant here.  The British had cracked Enigma, the primary code used by the Nazis.  The secret that they had cracked the code was probably the single biggest factor in the Allied victory in Europe.

After the code was cracked, the British decoded that the Luftwaffe was planning to firebomb the city of Coventry, which at the time had almost 200,000 residents.  The attack that was being planned was unprecedented, and would certainly cause massive death and destruction. 

At this point, Winston Churchill had a choice, he could evacuate the city and build up it's defenses, saving hundreds or thousands of lives, but reveal that Enigma was broken, or he could do nothing, let the city be devastated and keep the secret that Enigma had been deciphered.  In the end, he let the attack happen; 800 people died, and thousands were injured.  Most of the city was left in ruins, and in the whole of the war, the only British city to take more damage was London itself.

But the secret was kept.  Thousands were killed or injured so millions could be saved.  Had the Germans known that Enigma was broken, they would have changed the code, and quite possibly won the war.  Churchill later said that the decision to not save Coventry was the single hardest decision of his life, and it haunted him for the rest of it.

In the end, you could say that the horrors that occur in the world are God's Coventry.