I am not religious at all nor have I read any original religious texts. If I had to choose, I would say I’m an atheist/agnostic. While I thought this story was very interesting, I don’t really get it at all. If I had to say what I took away from it, it just furthers my thoughts on how pointless it is to worship a God. But I may be missing out on something. I’d like to hear your opinions, even (especially) if they’re different from mine.
by Objective_Offer_1674
15 Comments
I don’t think Ted Chiang’s stories are supposed to have deep meanings, like parables. His stories are designed to make you think rather than to express a virtue. Honestly, I thought this story was one of the weaker ones in his collection and didn’t spend much time thinking about it.
I’ve done just fine without him my whole life anyway.
He’s got it wrong. Hell is other people.
This is what I’ve gathered it means by lurking on religious subreddit.
It means you actually die. Not eternal torment or anything. It’s lights off forever while everyone else gets eternity in heaven. But, if you are unaware you’re dead, how is that bad? I’m like… OK sign me up.
His stories aren’t meant to have an Aesop fable at the end, they’re there to make you think. He wrote the story because he thought it was strange that in the Book of Job, virtue was rewarded, when the lesson from that story was about how virtue wasn’t always rewarded, and decided to write a story that committed to that. So, much like the Book of Job itself, this story makes you wrestle with the question of how much love and devotion you owe a God that allows random suffering in this world, and grapples with the idea of true devotion that must be given without the expectation of eventual reward. But he doesn’t give you a straight answer. You just have to sit with it.
That is a pretty old concept in Christianity. God torturing people leaves a bad taste in peoples mouths so the answer is he doesn’t torture you,he just leaves you alone and you would hate that, because all good things come from god.
it’s an idea that doesn’t fully make tons of sense so stories play around with it
[deleted]
I don’t know anything about the book you’re asking about, but I thought I’d throw in a little note from good ol’ *Doctor Faustus*.
When the Doctor is asking Mephistopheles about what hell is like—since the Doctor is all into being an edge lord—the weary Mephistopheles says that hell is not a place but a state of mind. He’d once been in heaven but chose to side with Lucifer and got kicked out.
Having tasted the bliss of heaven, and knowing that it is lost to him forever, anyplace that is not heaven is hell by comparison.
This baseline concept sounds like the main thrust of what Mr. Chiang is trying to get at.
The title is a riff on the privation theory of evil, often phrased as “evil is the absence of good.” It’s a theological concept, especially associated with Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine of “Lord, make me chaste…but not yet” fame), that is in part a response to the old “problem of evil”: If God is all-powerful and all-knowing, why does evil exist? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does anybody suffer?
St. Augustine’s answer was basically “evil isn’t real.” Everything that exists is good, because God is good and God made everything. Things that people call “evil” are merely the absence of good from a situation where good might have existed. Greed isn’t evil; it’s just the absence of generosity. Cruelty isn’t evil; it’s just the absence of kindness.
One of the many, many problems with this theory is illustrated by the story: Even if evil “isn’t real,” isn’t God withholding goodness from some people just as bad as Satan doing evil to them? Even if there isn’t a Hell full of devils stabbing people with pitchforks, isn’t shutting souls out of Heaven’s goodness just as cruel as sending them to that literal Hell? If there’s no active agent of evil, isn’t God alone responsible for all the suffering in the world?
A lot of Ted Chiang’s storys (like a lot of Sci Fi), start with the premise “what if X was true…”, and roll from there. Part of the skill in good sci-fi is taking an interesting X, and then developing it in an interesting but believable way.
Chaing is looking to the Bible for inspiration for some of his X’s, as, first off, the Bible is a fascinating source of parable and mystery, and secondly a lot of people believe (or claim to believe) it’s contents.
So you’ve got
* The Tower of Babylon: “What if the Tower Of Babel story was real?”
* Omphalos: “What if the Bible’s story of creation was real?”
* Hell is the Absence of God: “What if Angels, Heaven, and Hell were real?”
In each of these, he is crafting some variant of the X, as he sees fit, to tell his story. ie, it’s not a theological study that examines what Christians believe about angels (which varies anyway), it’s still a sci-fi one, starting with the “Ted Chiang take on angels”. The goal isn’t to explore the Bible, but rather to tell an interesting story from a unique starting point that will, in turn, make you re-examine that unique starting point.
Funny that not having god in my life would be more like heaven.
I loved this one. The protagonist’s flaw was he only wanted Heaven so he could see his wife again. In the Judeo Christian view, God doesn’t just look at your actions, but also your motivations. The protagonist was chasing storms or “following God” for the wrong reasons. You should love God for God’s own sake.
God is omnipresent. He cannot be absent.
He’s massively overrated.
The edition I read had some story notes at the back. We’re able to read what Ted said about this particular story?