God and Evil as well as a continuation of Moral Evil

        “They were taking refuge in the concrete. Anne realized that. Faced with death, people look for reasons, to protect themselves from its arbitrariness and stupidity,” (Russell 197). When something evil happens, people need a way to understand it so that they can move on. In this case they needed a reason as to why Alan had died and were looking to Anne for the answer. When Anne said she could not find anything they had a hard time accepting that. As with anything “evil” in the world we need to know why/how it happened. When the Holocaust occurred people needed to know how so many people could have let that happen. Leaving the reasons for something like this unknown makes it harder for people to cope with the situation.

         Another issue Anne brought up was God and how he can let evil things happen. She asked the priests, “Why is it that God gets all the credit for the good stuff, but it’s the doctors fault when shit happens,” (Russell 198). This issue is very hard for people to wrap their heads around. People already have a hard time understanding why God lets bad things happen and that is why they resort to blaming people or things. Later on in the book the priests try to comfort her by saying that “God Himself, in Scripture, tells us, ‘My ways are not your ways and My thoughts are not your thoughts,” (Russell 201). They try to explain the Gods ways are unknown to us and he does have a plan for people. Maybe God took Alan’s life because there was something worse that could have happened to him on this new planet. They will never know why He did what He did but they need to stop trying to figure it out because they never will know.

         In the previous post I asked why the new beings would hurt Sandoz’s hands and also said that although they seemed evil maybe it was just the way they were portrayed in the novel. In this section of the novel we learn that the new beings did this to most of their species and it was not meant to be torture. Sandoz, however, was not completely sure why, he thought maybe it was a way to show beauty. So although at first the beings seemed evil to the reader, truly, in this act, they were not.


        At the end of this section Sandoz brings up something very surprising, he says, “I am God’s whore, and ruined,” (Russell 213). He compares himself to a mistress and claims he is God’s mistress. Sandoz, after the trip is defiantly struggling with his belief in God, which seems shocking because at the beginning of the trip Sandoz, it seems, is finally finding God and God is filling what is missing in his life. I am curious to see what changed in the following section.

By Katherine Pellin