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Sphere: Related ContentTag Archive for 'god'
I think that many, if not most, mainstream Christians would say that experience alone cannot tell us anything about God. We need to filter our experience through the Bible for it to be reliable and “true.” So, the Bible is the authoritative word on how we experience God and what we know about God. But, at the same time, the Bible is what it is because of who and what God is. So, the Bible tells us about God but God’s nature gives the Bible the authority to inform us about the God whose nature gives the Bible … Isn’t that a bit of the-chicken-n-the-egg reasoning?
But what to do to break this circular cycle? I think we need to iterate.
There are many “problems” that people struggle with. God’s actions do not always make sense to us. We don’t understand what happens in the world because it doesn’t fit with our understanding of God. The Bible has difficult passages because it seems to say two, or three or four, different things. It seems that most mainstream Christians just hunker down and hope that when they get to Heaven God will explain all. They take refuge in the fact of God’s love and omniscience and leave it all up to him. But most of the time, that doesn’t seem to provide much real comfort.
And this is where iteration enters the picture. If something doesn’t make sense then perhaps what we need to do is change something—iterate toward a more consistent solution. The problem is that we get so stuck in our current mindsets that we don’t even consider revising our basic assumptions. Our concept of God should not be static. Our handling of the Bible should not be the same today as it was yesterday. But these are too often not even considered to be variable and so we sit and spin and get no where.
Sphere: Related ContentBird at The Thinklings asks “Why?“. Why did God condoned such violence in the O.T? And some of the comments are making me shake my head and ask “What?” As in “What’s you talkin’ ’bout Willis?” and the less eloquent “What the f*** are people thinking?”
Some commenters say that God’s wrath has to do with the treatment Jesus received. What? God is commanding and condoning the killing of babies because of something that’s going to happen hundreds of years in the future? And I still don’t get all the angst over the death of Jesus. He had to die, didn’t he? That was the whole farggin’ reason he was here. So why is it such a horrible, devastating, criminal act that he was crucified?
Then there’s the person who says that all those Canaanite kiddies had it coming. After all, if they were over the age of accountability, then they must have “done a great many terrible things.” What? Unless that guy thinks the age of accountability is somewhere near 25 then he’s got problems. All (as in every single solitary) 8 year olds had already “done a great terrible things”? That’s inconceivable.
Then there’s the guy who says that everyone God commanded to be killed deserved it because they all saw (or heard about) God in action yet they personally and deliberately chose to harden their hearts against him. What? First of all, back to the 8 year olds. Did they really see or hear about God and did they really harden their own hearts? I know when I was 8, I did what my parents told me and believed what my parents told me.
Secondly, let’s just assume—hypothetically, of course—that Quetzalcoatl is the real God. Now, many people have heard about him but let’s say they are all at the portal to the pearly pyramid and St. Montezuma is the gatekeeper. Who would even possibly accept the judgment that they had heard about Quetzalcoatl and yet personally refused to believe in him and so they are to be sacrificed and sent to hell?
Thirdly, it seems that God does not always play fairly. Let’s look at the plagues God sent on the Egyptians. After plagues 1-7, it seems that Pharoah hardened his heart against God and did not let the Isrealites go. But look at Exodus 10:20, 10:27, and 11:10. There it says that God hardened Pharaoh’s heart! It sounds like Pharaoh was about to give in but God had 10 cool plagues planned out and he just had to get them all in so he put the fix in to make sure he had is fun. Yes, people do deliberatley turn away from God but it seems that God admits to giving them a bit of a nudge sometimes, too.
Most of these rationalizations for God’s wrath in the O.T. are the same arguments that people today use for rationalizing how God can send millions and millions of people to hell because they were born in the wrong place at the wrong time. They just don’t work. They are flawed and inconsistent. And if you really try to make sense of it all, the only option is to alter your notion of God. Trying to say that God is 100% love and God is 100% just and God is 100% this and that and the other doesn’t fit. One characteristic must trump the other and in most cases, when dealing with the “heathen,” it’s justness that trumps love yet when dealing with “Christians” it’s love that trumps justice. That’s just not playing fairly and if you realize that it will force you to reconsider the basic assumptions you’ve unconsciously made.
So don’t question God or the Bible. Simply question your assumptions and see how that changes your view of God and the Bible.
Sphere: Related Contentticks, lice, tapeworms, fleas, hookworms, E. coli, Giardia, mites, chiggers, bed bugs, mosquitoes
Are you freakin’ kidding me?
Does anyone still use “the watchmaker” argument? It goes something like: the complex inner workings of a watch require an intelligent designer so the complex inner workings of the universe also require an intelligent designer — let’s call that intelligent designer … oh, I don’t know … how about … “God.”
But what about watches that tell “fuzzy” time. You’ve seen them for your computer on those download-a-useless-app-or-two pages, right? You can control how fuzzy the time is so the clock could read “almost 3:30″ or “around 5″ or “afternoon.” Does it take an intelligent designer to make one of those? I mean a chimpanzee can look at the sun and determine that it’s time to get home and groom his mate. (And I’m not talking about the chimp that “accidentally” wrote Shakespeare’s Othello on the typewriter.)
I think this watchmaker argument hearkens back to an out-dated way of looking at the universe. I mean, back when atoms were mini solar systems with the electron orbiting the nucleus like a tiny Jupiter, this would have been a pretty apt argument. “Look how ordered and mechanical and deterministic the world is. It reminds me of … of … a watch! And we all know that watches don’t assemble themselves so there must have been an atommaker to make those orderly, precise, deterministic, indivisible little critters.”
But that’s not what an atom is at all! The electron is a probability cloud, not a satellite. It has no state until it’s measured. Chaos makes things anything but deterministic. Wind up a watch and you can predict what time it will read in the future. Wind up the weather or a fractal and you never know where it will end up. The world is not based on order and precision. It’s based on probabilities and averages with our meddling scientific observation changing (or determining) the future — literally!
So, I think it’s time to retire this analogy and get one that fits the world as we know it today.
Sphere: Related ContentI thought I knew the creation story in the Bible. Now, I couldn’t tell you what was created on what day but I knew the basic order and knew when man and woman were created. It’s been a LONG time since I’ve read it but I thought I knew it.
Not so!
I reread it today and several things jumped out at me that I had never noticed.
First, in Genesis 1:31 God pronounced everything to be “very good” yet in Genesis 2:18 he says that something is “not good,” specifically, man’s being alone. What happened here? God says that it’s all good and then realizes something is a tad askew? He made two of every animal but only the human male and it took him a minute to realize he should have made a female human as well? That doesn’t seem very omniscient of him.
But there’s more. Look at Genesis 1:27 and here it sounds like God made male and female together, at the same time and in the same way. Both were made in the image of God. But that’s not the impression I get from Eve’s being created from Adam’s rib.
Now, I do not recall ever hearing a sermon on this and I do not know what the “party line” is but here is an explanation that makes sense to me. God did create man and woman together, in the same way and at the same time, just as with all the other animals. This is what he pronounced as “very good.” Then something happened that left Adam alone, which was “not good,” and so God created Eve.
Hmmmm. Does the name Lilith ring any bells?
Anyway, it seems that God’s first choice of creation method for woman did not work out so well so he chose an alternate method the second go round. If you look at how God addresses man and woman in Genesis 1 they seem to be equals — he says the same things to both. But apparently someone couldn’t handle all this equality and so Eve was made from Adam’s rib.
Sphere: Related Content[ This is in response to a comment by Mark on my recent post: "The problem with the problem of evil" ]
I couldn’t sleep last night and picked up Volume 9ii of the Collected Works of Carl Jung. Scanning the chapter on Christ, A Symbol of the Self I came across Jung’s thoughts on evil and they are apropos of the discussion in my earlier post.
The fact that God is only good seems to be a doctrine that flies in the face of what we read about Yahweh in the Old Testament but the early church fathers seemed to think it scandalous that there could be anything but good in God. Tatian (2nd century) is the earliest authority for the axiom: “Nothing evil was created by God; we ourselves produced all wickedness.”
Basil the Great said that evil has no substance but “is the privation of good” and “arises from the mutilation of the soul.” Furthermore, “if all things are of God, how can evil arise from good?” In another passage, Basil says:
It is … impious to say that evil has its origin from God, because the contrary cannot proceed from the contrary. Life does not engender death, darkness is not the origin of light, sickness is not the maker of health. … Now if evil is neither uncreated nor created by God, when comes its nature? That evil exists no one living in the world will deny. … Each of us should acknowledge that he is the first author of the wickedness in him.
Jung says that good and evil “are a logically equivalent pair of opposites” and are the premise and co-existent halves for any moral judgment. They do not derive from each other but are “always there together.” Evil is a human value, like good.
Jung continues to say that, as Basil asserts, if evil arises from a “mutilation of the soul” and yet evil really exists then “the relative reality of evil is grounded in a real ‘mutilation’ of the soul which must have an equally real cause.” The real corruption of the originally good soul must be done by something real. Furthermore, how can man be the sole author of evil when Lucifer’s sin proves that evil was in the world before man? What was the cause of the “mutilation” of Lucifer’s heart? Jung points out the logical fallacy in Basil’s argument: “the independent existence of evil must be denied even in the face of the eternity of the devil as asserted by dogma.”
Thomas Aquinas, in Summa Theologica, says:
One opposite is known through the other, as darkness is known through light. Hence also what evil is must be known from the nature of good. Now we have said above that good is everything appetible; and this, since every nature desires its own being and its own perfection, it must necessarily be said that the being and perfection of every created thing is essentially good. Hence it cannot be that evil signifies a being, or any form or nature. Therefore it must be that by the name of evil is signified the absence of good.
Evil is not a being, whereas good is a being.
However, Jung points out, not only is darkness known through light but conversely, and as a logical equivalent, light is known through darkness. Cold is merely the privation of heat but does that make cold non-existent?
The privatio boni argument remains a euphemistic petitio principii no matter whether evil is regarded as a lesser good or as an effect of the finiteness and limitedness of created things. The false conclusion necessarily follows from the premise “Deus = Summum Bonum,” since it is unthinkable that the perfect good could ever have created evil. It merely created the good and the less good … Just as we freeze miserably despite a temperature of 230° above absolute zero, so there are people and things that, although created by God, are good only to the minimal and bad to the maximal degree.
Despite the logical fallacy of the “privation of good” argument, Jung recognizes that it is used and believed and this cannot be disposed of easily. “It proves that there is a tendency, existing right from the start, to give priority to ‘good,’ and to do so with all the means in our power, whether suitable or unsuitable.” In the end, Jung says:
The privatio boni may therefore be a psychological truth. I presume to no judgment on this matter. I must only insist that in our field of experience which and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another.
I’m sure I have not done Jung’s argument justice, but I hope it’s at least comprehensible.
Sphere: Related Content“God will make all things right.”
I’m not exactly sure where in the Bible this is said but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. This seems to be another instance of trying to placate those who suffer now with the promise of something better in the future.
How, exactly, will heaven and hell “make all things right”? Let’s say someone murders my wife. Will knowing that the murderer is going to hell and that I’ll see my wife in heaven after I die really make up for all the agony and loss I’ll feel during my lifetime? And what if my wife wasn’t a Christian? And what if the murderer converts in jail? Then I’m in heaven with the murderer and my wife is in hell! How is that “making all things right”?
Future reward cannot “make right” present suffering. Future reward really amounts to compensation; and compensation is not justice. It can make the suffering bearable or give the suffering the illusion of meaning but it cannot “make it right.”
The problem with this attitude is that, in the end, we still have no reason for our suffering. To say that we will be compensated in the future does nothing to explain why we are suffering right now. This is precisely why Christianity has such a hard time with the existence of evil. All the answers are that “everything will work out in the end.” But that is not a real answer. It does not address the real issue.
Sphere: Related ContentReading this post, from Inspirations and Creative Thoughts, about Islamic reaction to the doctrine of the Trinity got me thinking. What are the downsides of thinking about God in anthropomorphic ways?
Along the lines of this post from Exploring Our Matrix, I was also thinking about how the OT God is most often conceptualized as having a location. He was with the Israelites either as the pillar of fire or in the Ark or he was located on Mount Sinai. In all these cases, you could point to one spot be say, “God is there.” At times, God is seen as locating himself, temporarily, in one spot — as with Moses and the burning bush — which de-emphasises his human characterization. The implicit idea is that God was there to communicate with Moses whereas in the previous examples he was more firmly implanted for a longer time frame.
From the NT, we think of Jesus mostly in his incarnated form and as the son of god. We think of him as an historical person (indeed, some Christians fight tooth and nail for an historical Jesus and claim that Christianity is nothing without it) located in a particular place at a particular time. Even now, after his ascension, he is sitting sitting at the right hand of God — an image which restricts both God and Jesus to a particular space.
There is very little in Christianity that focuses our attention away from the human characteristics attributed to God. Sure we talk about his omnipresence but right behind the words is the image of a father. Even in the end, our souls - the numinous part of ourselves - end up located in space, in heaven, where we will be with God and Jesus. You know, I’ve never thought about seeing the Holy Spirit in heaven. Nor have I heard a sermon preached on what role the Holy Spirit will play in heaven. The one part of the Godhead which retains some non-human characteristic is blatantly missing!
The Trinity could be a medium for concentrating on the non-human characteristics of God yet even here we’ve named them God the father and God the son. We force the divine into a human-shaped mold.
Perhaps it’s not all that surprising given the strong anthropomorphic nature of the OT which is Christianity’s heritage. But I think that it is also one reason we react so negatively to other religions. We call the atheistic because they do not have a God that is a father figure. We call them nihilistic because they do not end up in a specific place when they die.
God is more than our anthropomorphic conceptions of him. We can’t even refer to god without assigning a human gender to … him. I think most Christians would be offended if we called God “It.” God is more than our human conceptions otherwise he would not be God; he’d be understood by us. So why do we insist that everyone hold the same limited conceptions as we? Can’t the ineffable be reduced to more than one subset of ideas and still be the same?
Sphere: Related ContentIn The Creation of Consciousness, Edinger talks about the “new myth” initiated by Jung with his book, Answer to Job.
On the basis of our emerging knowledge of the unconscious the traditional image of God has been enlarged. Traditionally God has been pictured as all-powerful and all-knowing. Divine Providence was seen as guiding all things according to the inscrutable but benevolent divine purpose. The extent of divine awareness did not receive much attention. The new myth enlarges the God-image by introducing explicitly the additional feature of the unconsciousness of God. His omnipotence, omniscience and divine purpose are not always known to Him. He needs man’s capacity to know Him in order to know Himself.
And I just realized that the rescuing of Lot from Sodom is an excellent example of this. Lot and his wife and two of his daughters were rescued because they were “righteous” in the eyes of God. But, look at what Lot’s family does immediately after being rescued. Lot’s wife immediately disobeys God’s command and turns to look at the burning cities and is turned into a pillar of salt. Both of Lot’s daughters get their father drunk, sleep with him, and bear sons. Furthermore, Lot’s two grandsons are the fathers of the Moabites and Ammonites. Now, God was not fond of either of these civilizations, to say the least. Neither of them were allowed to enter the assembly of the Lord (Deut 23:3). The Isrealites slaughtered the Moabites: they killed 10,000 “robust and valient men” (Judges 3:25) on one occasion and an untold number on another (2 Kings 3:24). Saul slaughtered the Ammonites and scattered them so that “no two of them were left together” (1 Sam 11:11). Jeremiah makes prophesies against both the Moabites and Ammonites.
So, God considered Lot and his family righteous but immediately after he saves them from destruction, they disobey a direct command and father two civilizations that are Israel’s mortal enemies and the cause of many Israelite deaths. This does not seem very consistent with an omniscient God.
What do you think? Why were Lot’s daughters saved only to sin and father civilizations that God hated?
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