It's just a story
Job. Just the man for the job. Another tale of Biblical ethics today, this time the Man of Patience – Job. Job is a decent sort of chap, but one day God and the Devil decide to make a wager. (At this point I have to wonder how God and the Devil happened to meet at all and why such a meeting would apparently be so amicable. See The Book of Job for further details.) The Devil bets that Job is only good because things are easy for him. But if things became difficult, he’d lose his faith and turn evil. § Obs. 1 The first part is rather like one of the questions in our recent speaking exams about an easy life being a good life. The second part is that old chestnut that morality comes from religion and that in the absence of religion, people lack morality. I think it was Dostoevsky who claimed that without God anything is permissible, which is clearly not true. Gods or no gods, clearly much which we would consider impermissible still happens anyway. Morality, which is inconstant in many res...