Ivan Karamazov

to do that with a brutal honesty.

I mean, you think of Ivan Karamazov's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, his recounting of anecdotes of the great sufferings of children.

And I respectfully return the bus ticket and all that sort of thing.

And Dostoevsky's meditation on Holbein the Younger's portrait of the dead Christ, which is rather haunting.

You know, there's a great letter where he's bragging about how he always gets mocked for his faith and the archaicness of his ideas.

But with Ivan Karamazov, he penned a better attack on God than any of his critics could have come up with.

Right.

Which is true, you know, and it's an attack that has actually been inspiring to atheists across the centuries, right? But the reason that he's going to pen that attack is because if his faith can't exist in the faith of it, then it isn't faith, right? And I think O'Connor thinks the same thing.

You have it completely uttered in The Brothers Karamazov.

Ivan Karamazov returns God the ticket.

If there is a harmony, he says, he will refuse to accept it.

The pain which has been suffered by one single child will make a discord.

It's losing everything.

Let's bracket cases in which people want to lose everything because they've had it and their life is miserable and they want to, you know, give back their ticket, as Ivan Karamazov says.

And although I think he's not serious about it in a way, but his idea is... check out because it had enough but you know you can hear in his saying that how anguished he is about how terrible everything is and so what I guess I think is that Epicurus was technically correct but what he seems to be totally ignoring is this temporal experience of heading toward the loss of everything and it's like my mom who felt like everything was being taken away from her And I'll tell you one more personal thing that she said that I found really poignant, which is that she was having dreams that my brother, who's older than I am, was a baby in the crib and was crying and she couldn't get to him.

And I thought that was so heartbreaking because I think that dream was capturing where she thought she was.

here you view evil as a challenge to worship and a challenge of experience it's a disposition it's a dispositional challenge if you turn to h.h price's distinction between belief in and belief that you have belief that being a propositional belief and belief in being a belief an attitude towards and in that instance one can argue that in in dostoevsky and camus there's good reason to think that that the problem of evil is viewed as a challenge against a belief in God instead of a belief that God.

And this is seen in Ivan Karamazov, who says, you know, he's willing to accept the existence of God, but he decides to return God's ticket to him.

He's unable to accept the existence of God, given evil.

Well, not that he's unable to accept the existence of God.

You have it completely uttered in The Brothers Karamazov.

Ivan Karamazov returns God the ticket.

If there is a harmony, he says he will refuse to accept it.

The pain which has been suffered by one single child will make a discord.

But the fact is, is that moral agency is so...

I mean, Dostoevsky makes this clear, and Ivan Karamazov's The Grand Inquisitor, right? That the Inquisitor's demonic, satanic...

ecclesial sort of program is to take freedom away from people.

And so the gift that God gives us is precisely the theodramatic interplay of divine and human freedoms and gives us the dignity of actually mattering.