Lecture: Biblical Series XIII: Jacob's Ladder

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So, one of the things that I've been realizing as a consequence of going through these stories is that the degree to which they're about individuals is quite remarkable. I think that's really telling. You know, one of the reasons I prefer Dostoevsky to Tolstoy is because Tolstoy is more of a sociologist. He's more interested in the relationship between groups of people. This is an oversimplification because obviously Tolstoy is a great author, but I like Dostoevsky better because he really delves into the souls of individuals.

I think it's remarkable the degree to which all of the stories that we've covered so far in Genesis are about individuals, and they're quite realistic, which is quite remarkable. They're not really romanticized to any great degree because all of the people that are regarded, let's say, as patriarchal or matriarchal figures in Genesis have no shortage of ethical flaws and also no shortage of difficulties in their life. The difficulties are realistic; they're major-league problems. You know, like familial catastrophes, famine, war, revenge, and hatred—all those things. It's not a pretty book, and that's one of the things that makes it great. I mean, that's one of the things that characterizes great literature, right? It doesn't present you with a whitewashed view of humanity or of existence.

And that's really a relief, I think, because, as you all know because you're alive, there's no such thing as a whitewashed existence. Like, to be alive is to be in trouble ethically and existentially.

I've been reading this book recently—I'll talk about it a little bit later. It's called "Better Never to Have Been" and it was written by a philosopher in South Africa, in Cape Town, named Benatar. That's his last name. He basically argues, I think it's a specious argument, and I think it's artificially constructed, but he basically argues that because life is so full of suffering—even good lives are very much full of suffering—that it's wrong to bring children into the world because the suffering outweighs the good even in good lives. It's actually wrong. It would also be better not to exist for exactly the same reason.

My sense in reading the book is that he came to that conclusion and then wrote the book to justify it, which is actually the reverse of the way that you should write a book. What you should do when you're writing a book is you should have a question, and it should be a real question, right? It should be one you don't know the answer to. Then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to some solution. You should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking so that they can come to, well, not necessarily to the same conclusion, but at least track what you're doing.

I don't think that's what he did; I think he wrote it backwards. But then, I was thinking about it a lot because that's actually a question that I've contended with in my writing. There are memphistaphiles and there are satanic figures, for example, in Goethe's Faust and also Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, who basically make the same case. You know that existence is so rife with trouble and suffering that it would be better if it didn't exist at all.

The problem I've had with that—there's a variety of them, but one of the problems I've had with that is what happens if you start to think that way? Because what I've observed is that people who begin to think that way, that isn't where they stop. They get angry at existence, which is what happened to Cain, as we saw in the Cain and Abel story. Then the next step is to start taking revenge against existence, and that cascades until it's revenge against—well, I think the best way of thinking about it is revenge against God for the crime of being w...