Cosmic Bet

About the Book

There is probably no human condition that deeply moves us, raises immediate denial defenses, and frantically looks for hidden causes in the victim like the truly innocent person who suffers the unjustified snare of Fate, the gods, God, The Cosmos, chance or whatever one wishes to call it.

Why Me?  The cry of the innocent aware of his or her unjustified suffering is as old as mankind.

The major religions deal with this in various ways—most often in the form of a Cosmic battle between Good and Evil.  Perhaps the most interesting version is in the Bible in the story of Job.

Due to a Cosmic Bet by God and Satan, good and faithful Job is subjected to a litany of sufferings.  His wife and closest friends presume him guilty.

Yet Job is, in fact, innocent.  He screams out to God—"Why Me?"

God's Biblical answer is essentially, "Who are you to ask the question?"

Unsatisfying to the modern Western mind, for sure.  And Priests, Rabbis, and Preachers are often reluctant to deliver sermons on the Book of Job.  They would rather take the position that the Innocent have gone to a "better place"—or engage in endless psychobabble—or invent evil spirits and demons—or the classic Parochial School evasion: It's a Mystery.

The technical term for the explanation of the presence of evil in the world is a theodicy.

It is unfortunate that Western Religion does not take a serious attempt at the classic theodicy of the story of Job.  In this author's estimation, it is the most important question of our time given the history of the 20th Century and the death of millions of innocents.

Cosmic Bet takes Job into our time with a wager by God and Satan visiting completely unjustified suffering on America's most popular and beloved TV newsman--John Oliver Brennen.

The story follows the Biblical outline as much as possible given the thousands of years and cultural differences between Job's time and our time.

Using some Native American spiritual themes, combined with some philosophical insights from GWF Hegel and the extraordinary perspectives of Rabbi Kushner (When Bad Things Happen To Good People) I have attempted to expand on the Biblical answer that is so unsatisfactory in our time and culture.

I believe it was literary giant John Barth that remarked that we never tell new stories.  We only retell the stories that hold our human values for our time and our setting.  I have found over the years that comment to be true and is the reason for retelling the Job tale of innocence violated so it has meaning for us in our time and place.

When we were children we had our favorite stories with which we imposed on our parents to read over and over to us again.  Thus, our values began to take shape.  I think we have a deep human need to receive our values in stories.

Important stories containing important human values need to be told over and over again—no matter how hard to hear as we lose our childlike need to hear them and become sophisticated adults.  The operative word in sophisticated is sophiste--the Greek word for artificial.

Time for a reality story?

About the Author

J. Bolton Maddox has had careers that stretch from Police Captain in Washington, DC to Assistant Professor in a college Philosophy Department and newspaper columnist. His passion has been the study of human values and is convinced that human values are best conveyed in stories. He sees his task as a novelist to make those classic stories of human value have meaning in our day and age.