My son and his wife took their dog Marcel with them when they went camping at a state park and Marcel had been anxious about the events. He was agitated when he saw his own back yard on the return and after having dinner was reluctant to go outside to do his business. He did not want to leave his home again. He likes to lie under the kitchen table and pat the floor with his tail and get up every once in a while to stare at my face, me a member of my son’s family, while I pet his head and pat his flank, and speak sweetly to him. Maria, my daughter-in-law, said she thought that Marcel, who had been rescued from an animal shelter, must have been abandoned in his youth and never forgot it. My son said that abandonment was one of the cruelest non-criminal things a person could do and I blurted out that my father had done that.
My grandfather had a dog named Duke and for some reason tired of him and told his eldest son, my father, to get rid of him. Whatever the complications of my father’s relation to his own father, he complied. He drove Duke fifty miles away from where he lived and abandoned him in a forest. My father never said how he felt about that journey, whether he imagined that Duke had been confused, when abandoned. or waited at that spot for my father to return, or whether Duke died of thirst or exposure, and for how long my father wondered if he should go back and try to rescue him. Maria thought the abandonment horribly cruel. It would have been better to shoot Duke outright, I only added that some of my relatives were not very nice people. I still feel badly about Duke, as if I were partly responsible, or inheriting my father’s blood, the children inheriting the guilt of their fathers, even though it happened when my father was a young man and had not yet met my mother.
The story of Duke the dog leads me to think of an episode of the Abraham and Isaac story, which is artfully arranged as a single and fast moving narrative but includes a number of independent pieces: God, Abraham, Issac, and even Saeah, who was a strong minded woman who might have had something to say about the matter. Issac asks, on his journey, what had been brought for the sacrifice, and Abraham replies that God would provide, which is true enough but begs the question and might lead Isaac to suddenly feel abandoned of affection and loyalty and subject to arbitrary justice, as happened with my grandfather. What was Isaac to do? He said nothing, as if he had to be loyal, taking whatever fate brought, and even Marcel resists possible second abandonment. The engagement of people with authority is very complex because underlying the whole idea is that people can always decide to resist authority, even Adam and Eve, who rebelled against authority even before they had eaten from the tree of knowledge, and were punished nonetheless.
I don’t want to offend anyone, but my musing on abandonment, which is a cardinal sin, and authority, which is a cardinal virtue, leads me to think that the Catholic version of atonement is deeply superficial, despite the fact that St. Paul regards it as the central meaning of all of human history in that the purpose of history is to atone for the sins of mankind and so become right with God. There is only one way to salvation, which is the erasure of past and present sins, which is either through the person of Jesus or by following His principles. Otherwise, all the generations of children are cursed because of their original parents. That doctrine seems an offense to decency in that Duke is not my fault and, whatever my father’s malfeasance, my father did some nice things in his life and so not to be judged so harshly, as happens in Dante where one failure puts you in Hell forever. Maybe "original sin” is a metaphor for all the ways people have their shortcomings, but that is not what Paul says and he is not just another fallible theologian. He is in the New Testament and so obligatory.
Focus on the particular transaction by which atonement is accomplished. A variety of prayers plus a sincere heartfelt sorrow for having transgressed, will relieve you of that stain so you can move forward as a whole person. But what does that accomplish? It is all about the sinner rather than the sin. I told a very bitter Holocaust survivor who wanted more Germans to have been killed that doing so would not have brought anyone back. The dead would stay dead. Just denazify and make Germany a democracy. As it has been for three quarters of a century. Just execute some particularly bad people as an example. Endless killing does not redeem people or resurrect people. Duke is still dead. Punishing bad people is selfish, to make oneself think of himself as a better person, rather than to have a sense of terrible crime. Christians are terribly self absorbed.
A more accurate appreciation of atonement, or,rather, the lack of it as a reasonable concept, is offered by Oscar Wilde in “The Portrait of Dorian Gray”. However you may pretend you're honorable or redeemed or are treated as such by others, in fact, every person catties the scars n themselves of all the cruelties they have inflicted, all their wrong steps, even if they claim they were misinformed or ignorant, but knew what was going on in the Holocaust or during slavery or not being informed about Trump. The shame and ugliness are there. The scars never disappear even if they are covered up with new layers of scars which make people even more ugly and so, deep down a moral failure is a kind of aesthetic failure, morality the appearance of beauty and evil an odor of rankness, like my family’s rejection of abandoning a dog, a general sense of that wrongness rather than a reasoning about what is or is not cruelty.
I have had two dogs in my life. They were miniature poodles. I have also had a cat, who came along with my wife and was good people even if a bit haughty because the vat was very loyal to her human family. Most domestic pet dogs are assistance dogs in that they give support to people when they are down. My second poodle, Eli, was very helpful to me when my wife of forty seven years died. He was small enough to wrap himself around my neck like a boa when I settled in my easy chair and I thought he sighed. We could stay in peace and quiet for a while. Some years later, he was in bad pain. He would retreat to a closet and rub off pus and say nothing. I took him to a vet and after some tests was shown to have kidney failure and the cet said she had to put the dog down. She said putting dogs down was the worst part of being a vet. She understood how deeply people felt about their pets.
So never mind the children who die from childhood cancers, those written off as suffering from original sin. What about Eli? As every one remarks, dogs do not know why they suffer while people can know the cause and rationalize what is necessary. C. S. :Lewis says we have to know pain so as to be human because that is part of being human. But breathing and thinking are also human and so anything that happens has to happen which begs the question of what human things had to happen or could be or could have been eliminated. Also, religious people who say God is only concerned about morality rather than nature and so are off the hook about suffering are like Pontius Pilate washing his hands of the matter concerning Jesus. Who else had the final decision? Who countenances human and canine suffering? Why did Eli have to suffer? What did he do wrong? God is very cruel and if there were a God, I don’t think He should be forgiven.