Oh, the Calvinists could make perfect sense of it all with a wave of a hand and a swift, confident explanation
about how Zarmina had been born in sin and likely predestined to spend eternity in hell to the glory of an angry God (they called her a «vessel of destruction»);
about how I should just be thankful to be spared the same fate since it's what I deserve anyway;
about how the Asian tsunami was just another one of God's temper tantrums sent to remind us all of His rage at our sin;
about how I need not worry because «there is not one maverick molecule in the universe» so every hurricane, every earthquake, every war, every execution, every transaction in the slave trade, every rape of a child is part of God's sovereign plan, even God's idea;
about how my objections to this paradigm represented unrepentant pride and a capitulation to humanism that placed too much inherent value on my fellow
human beings;
about how my intuitive sense of love and morality and right and
wrong is so corrupted by my sin
nature I can not trust it.
And, if we know anything
about human nature, we know we have a desire for certainty, a fear of being
wrong, a tendency to difine ourselves by our beliefs and to identify those like - minded, the «us» of the them / us divide.
The dramatization as THE STANFORD PRISON EXPERIMENT wisely takes the clinical approach, employing the detachment of the scientific method in recreating the events that are as disturbing now as they were over 40 years ago, not for where the experiment went so very
wrong, but for what it revealed so clearly and, worse, so irrefutably
about human nature.