Firebird, that’s a great point. I think Job is a really complicated story that gets taught in so many ways, they can’t all be right. As you point out, Job is as innocent in God’s eyes as a newborn baby. But I have a feeling people take the Job story as an exception to the rule, not as a parable about the suffering of innocents and why a benevolent God would allow the devil to hurt good people. Which I *think* is the real purpose of the story.

To both of you, I’ve thought about this topic since I wrote this post and concluded that it’s not a particularly Christian problem. There are a lot of people who claim no religion or spirituality at all who need to believe bad things only happen to people who did something wrong. I think in fact that this idea is why people seek religion: they desperately need to believe there’s a purpose to all this suckage, so much so that it’s preferable to think they brought it on themselves to thinking horrible things happen indiscriminately to anybody at anytime. The fact that the religion contradicts them is something they would tend to filter out, as it doesn’t suit their purpose.

Job sticks to his guns and insists that god is in the wrong and should explain himself to Job, and although god never does explain himself, and just asserts his power as justification for anything he chooses to do, god does decide to castigate Job’s friends for the fools they are.

Of all possible lessons the book of Job could be said to be teaching, the idea that suffering cannot be explained by fault of the sufferer is central and unavoidable. And yet, although Christians invariably point to Job when they must discuss suffering (the problem of pain, as C.S. Lewis alliterates it), the all too common attitude you describe is never called to account, never realized for the gross torture it is.

It’s so apparent that it’s not really about the victim(s) in any of these thing, but about some psychological element for the people saying it, and yet that doesn’t stop it from being exceptionally hurtful.