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Lorelei115 -> RE: Letter to a Christian Nation (11/2/2006 8:05:01 AM)
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ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
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ORIGINAL: Lorelei115
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ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
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ORIGINAL: LadyEllen
MC - that depends on whether one believes in the Biblical God, I'd say?
If god is omnipotent, then god is capable of removing the inherent cruelty of the universes design and if god doesn't, biblical god or no, god is still a cruel, malicious, vindictive joker. If god isn't omnipotent and has to design the universe according to specific rules, what god created that god?
Ugh. I hate going into this at 2 am but Im going to give it my best shot.
If God were to remove all the bad, negative things from the universe, how would we know how to recognize good when we see it? To know light, we have to know what darkness is. There is also the most beautiful and troublesome gift that God gave us. Free will. Free will means that God CANNOT interfere with the way we choose to run ourselves and our world. If He were to change what we do to fit a perception of what is "good" how would we ever learn what true goodness is?
To my mind, all the cruelties of the world are not made by God, or an equivilant force of darkness (Satan, the Devil, etc), but by man himself. I don't see God as a cruel, malicious vindictive joker. I see Him as a parent, forcing himself to step back and let His children make their own mistakes and learn their own way in the world, no matter how much it hurts Him to see us be so cruel to ourselves, others, and the planet who's care we were entrusted with.
Please note that I use "God" in a universal sense here, not neccessarily the Christian Bible version. I myself have issues with the Bible, but I will not go into them here, nor do I allow it to affect my belief in a higher spiritual power.
Let me counter. We see and sense only what we are designed to see and sense, which is not very much. God has effectively given us a blindman's stick and sent out into the unknown. It is not beyond an omnipotent god to bestow wisdom, knowledge and resources on those creatures god creates and why would one need to experience negative things in a universe full of abundance and good, wisdom is all one needs? God created the universe, he created the bad things too which he didn't have to create and if he didn't, there wouldn't be any need to learn about them because they wouldn't exist.
Who designed an earth with earthquakes, floods, plagues, famine, where creatures have to devour each other in order to survive, President Bush? Some parent, god sounds rather like Saturn devouring his children. And why would a god make beings that are all too aware of their own demize, that seems rather cruel to me or have Islamists got it right, die for god and go to heaven?
What sort of petty god requires worship? It must all be rather boring. Actually, it is probably why he created the universe, to keep himself entertained in eternity and an infinite universe with no one to talk to let alone any equal to share the emptiness of what must be god's existence. We are obviously the frivilous joke he amuses himself with.
Well, as I said, I think one does need to experience the negative in order to be able to recognize good when one experiences that. To me, life is about learning. God sent us here, basically deaf and blind as you say, in order to experience the hardships as well as the good.
Its like if you had never seen the color blue, how could someone explain it to you? They can't, you have to experience it for yourself. If we lived in a world where nothing ever died, and everything was like a happy la-la land, how could we possibly learn anything?
Also... I don't think God demands worship. I think that is a human invention. I think God has given us a deep desire to communicate with Him, and I think that some people have misinterpereted that as a desire to be worshipped. That is one of the reasons I don't follow an organized religion.
I completely understand where you are coming from, I used to feel the same way. I was SO angry that God would let people suffer and not do anything about it. And I got so tired of when I asked why God would let this person die a painful death of cancer, or let these people die of starvation, I was simply told that God works in mysterious ways and we are not meant to understand His higher plan.
But I don't think the knowledge of our own demise is neccessarily cruel. The fear that comes from knowing that we are going to die is nothing more than our animal survival instinct kicking in. I think that it is meant to help us focus in the here and now. If we all thought we were going to live forever, what would be the point in getting anything done today? Without a deadline of some sort, things often don't get accomplished. A lot of the absolute terror that comes from knowing we are going to die is just our animal instinct kicking in. If one can think their way past that, death becomes nothing more than the final mystery, so to speak. One of my favorite quotes about death comes from the Neil Gaiman series, The Sandman. In it, an old man has just died, and the anthropomorphic personification of Death comes to collect his soul. He says to her, "I must confess, young lady, I have always wondered what lay beyond life, my dear." She answers "Yeah, everybody wonders. And sooner or later, everyone gets to find out."
The point is, we can't know. Until we die, everything that we say or do or feel about God cannot be proven. The only thing I can know about good and evil in the world is what my internal moral compass tells me. All the discussion and debate on the nature of God in the world will not prove or disprove a certain theory. I see the so called "cruelty" of the world as things that we must take lessons from. You take it as evidence of a cruel creator. Until we die, neither of us can be proved right, so, I choose to believe in my point of view. If I am proved wrong when I die, at least I will have the satisfaction of knowing that I lived my life on Earth to the best of my ability with the tools that I was given. Really, what else can anyone do?
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