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What kind of a God...
Nov. 13th, 2009 01:24 pmIn a recent discussion on Facebook, one of my colleagues raised an interesting question which, although certainly not new, prompted me to craft a more detailed answer - for her, and for myself - than the size-limited FB comments permit.
The background: One of my friends sent me this picture to post:
and you can imagine that this prompted a bit of a discussion. Somewhere in the thread, I responded,
"Hey, I didn't write the sign, I just posted it for my friend who wasn't sure how. I have my own philosophy around theism and its antithesis, and it boils down to "Don't be a dick." In the end analysis,thinks I, God cares less about which Church you belong to, or don't, than how you're treating your fellow man."
To this my colleague wrote (hope you don't mind my quoting you here, Sonia):
"That would be the only worthy god, i think. Who could get behind the guy who demands one sing his glory every minute of the day, but who can still go and make Claire die giving birth to her 3rd little baby? if god exists, he better be powerless against the laws of nature, otherwise, he's gonna have a lot of angry people to answer to."
A fair question, and one that is asked by many people in a world where so much seems capricious and unfair.
In the mid 70's, I lived and worked in Austria for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Amid the standard rebuffs of "Nix, nix, ka' Zeit und kein Interesse" and "Wir sind alle Katolisch hier, wieso gehen Sie nicht zu den Heiden?" I had many discussions about faith in general with a populace who was only one generation away from the depredations of World War II, and who had been, by choice or by chance, on the losing side. For all their traditional adherence to the Catholic faith of their fathers, many Austrians put no stock in religion - I can't count the number of times people vehemently protested the existence of a God who would allow such horrors as they had witnessed in their own lifetimes.
And the wars and the horrors go on...
For myself, I have to be able to be at peace with the world I see around me. I have chosen to do this with a strange mixture of faith and secular practicality.
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
As for reconciling myself with the existence of God in a world of unexplainable tragedies, my mind turns to Corrie Ten Boom, the author of The Hiding Place. When she was 10 years old, she once asked her father a piercing adult-themed question. She went on to relate,
"He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor. “Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said. “It's too heavy,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.” And I was satisfied. More than satisfied – wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions. For now I was content to leave them in my father's keeping.
I do not believe in a God who causes or allows terrible things to happen and approaches his human family with the attitude, "Haha, life's a bitch, ain't it? Now kneel, suckers!" This kind of God is less believable than the pure secular causality of "hydrogen atoms evolved to consciousness."
My heart tells me that neither scenario is the case, that we're playing a on a far bigger stage than any one of us can possibly see. I see mortality is a school to which we are sent by a loving parent; the classes are harsh - life gives us the tests first, and the lessons afterwards - but when we graduate to the next phase of our existence, whatever that looks like, we will all see that life, with all its seeming vicious unfairness, had purpose, and that it was all for our good, growth and development.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me whether the humanists are right, and it's all a huge cosmic crapshoot, or whether what I belive about Divinity is spot-on or way off. Either way, my responsibility is to live life in such a way that I can go down to my grave content in having done all that I could do to raise the human condition.
That is how I find peace.
The background: One of my friends sent me this picture to post:
and you can imagine that this prompted a bit of a discussion. Somewhere in the thread, I responded,
"Hey, I didn't write the sign, I just posted it for my friend who wasn't sure how. I have my own philosophy around theism and its antithesis, and it boils down to "Don't be a dick." In the end analysis,thinks I, God cares less about which Church you belong to, or don't, than how you're treating your fellow man."
To this my colleague wrote (hope you don't mind my quoting you here, Sonia):
"That would be the only worthy god, i think. Who could get behind the guy who demands one sing his glory every minute of the day, but who can still go and make Claire die giving birth to her 3rd little baby? if god exists, he better be powerless against the laws of nature, otherwise, he's gonna have a lot of angry people to answer to."
A fair question, and one that is asked by many people in a world where so much seems capricious and unfair.
In the mid 70's, I lived and worked in Austria for two years as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Amid the standard rebuffs of "Nix, nix, ka' Zeit und kein Interesse" and "Wir sind alle Katolisch hier, wieso gehen Sie nicht zu den Heiden?" I had many discussions about faith in general with a populace who was only one generation away from the depredations of World War II, and who had been, by choice or by chance, on the losing side. For all their traditional adherence to the Catholic faith of their fathers, many Austrians put no stock in religion - I can't count the number of times people vehemently protested the existence of a God who would allow such horrors as they had witnessed in their own lifetimes.
And the wars and the horrors go on...
For myself, I have to be able to be at peace with the world I see around me. I have chosen to do this with a strange mixture of faith and secular practicality.
In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote, "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way."
As for reconciling myself with the existence of God in a world of unexplainable tragedies, my mind turns to Corrie Ten Boom, the author of The Hiding Place. When she was 10 years old, she once asked her father a piercing adult-themed question. She went on to relate,
"He turned to look at me, as he always did when answering a question, but to my surprise he said nothing. At last he stood up, lifted his traveling case from the rack over our heads, and set it on the floor. “Will you carry it off the train, Corrie?” he said. “It's too heavy,” I said. “Yes,” he said. “And it would be a pretty poor father who would ask his little girl to carry such a load. It's the same way, Corrie, with knowledge. Some knowledge is too heavy for children. When you are older and stronger you can bear it. For now you must trust me to carry it for you.” And I was satisfied. More than satisfied – wonderfully at peace. There were answers to this and all my hard questions. For now I was content to leave them in my father's keeping.
I do not believe in a God who causes or allows terrible things to happen and approaches his human family with the attitude, "Haha, life's a bitch, ain't it? Now kneel, suckers!" This kind of God is less believable than the pure secular causality of "hydrogen atoms evolved to consciousness."
My heart tells me that neither scenario is the case, that we're playing a on a far bigger stage than any one of us can possibly see. I see mortality is a school to which we are sent by a loving parent; the classes are harsh - life gives us the tests first, and the lessons afterwards - but when we graduate to the next phase of our existence, whatever that looks like, we will all see that life, with all its seeming vicious unfairness, had purpose, and that it was all for our good, growth and development.
Ultimately, it doesn't matter to me whether the humanists are right, and it's all a huge cosmic crapshoot, or whether what I belive about Divinity is spot-on or way off. Either way, my responsibility is to live life in such a way that I can go down to my grave content in having done all that I could do to raise the human condition.
That is how I find peace.
