It's been nearly a week since the world remembered the day, seventy-five years ago, that a nuclear bomb was detonated on living human beings.  Hundreds of thousands of people in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki perished, most of them incinerated instantly, gone before they had a chance to know what was happening, and many others from the aftereffects of the radiation that the bombs unleashed.  It was a disaster of catastrophic proportion, a tragedy beyond sense and imagination.

          Although we can debate, perhaps endlessly, about whether the U.S. should have dropped the bombs, this misses the point.  On the one hand, the bombs demonstrate, albeit in deeply chilling fashion, the remarkable inventive capacity of the human being.  On the other hand, however, the bombs present, in horrific form, the full picture of human depravity, the human being's frightening ability to turn on its own, to dismiss the infinite value of its very self.  To forget who it is.

     The bombs underscore that, absent a transcendent moral anchor, humanity will forever struggle to find its way.  To wit, without a God, is anything really moral?