Sometimes it feels like this world is all just a big joke. I often talk about the evolution of the Christian God. He starts out with good enough intentions, creating men, giving them gifts and happiness. Then they disobey him and he becomes malevolent, prescribing curses for them and eventually wiping out most of them. Then the world becomes violent and wicked (raising questions about the effectiveness of the flood that killed almost all humanity), and God allies with one people group. This alliance then systematically wipes out several other nations and the Bible becomes virtually every hack-and-slash video game. Violence, gore, war, and gigantic body counts. Luckily God got tired of the whole action movie motif after awhile and "his"tory becomes nice again. We have a bit of a romance story with Jesus, which is nice... it changes the pace of things. Then it all ends with some dark foreshadowing (perhaps a sequel to the Bible was in the works for awhile). Then (looking at history) we have science and more war, and evolution and more suffering, and secular movement and more calamity. Doubt permeates everything we do. Everything's fucked to shit... and yet we all still smile and make the same mistakes. Perhaps God intended this part of history to be a comedy. Every deity needs a giggle after the heavy subject matter of the Bible... God's probably up in heaven somewhere eating popcorn, watching us, a smirk on his face.
Or maybe it's all just bullshit... ya, that's probably it.
I don't think so. I do often wonder at why the God of the Old Testament is so completely different than the God of the New Testament, but perhaps He's not. It may be that it's the same God, but in the Old Testament He was saving His people in different ways, and the people in the Old Testament were further along. From what I can tell this whole thing that we call life on earth is like a cycle. Man was created and lived for a while, but eventually got discontented and so he messed up his well-being by doing what he thought in his knowledge would improve it. Then they went on living under a punishment and generations passed, and then God saw that the way to save the next generation from such despair was to destroy all men in a world-wide flood. This doesn't sound very nice, but maybe it was the best way to fix the world at the time, for a time. This was clearly not a permanent fix. This cycle can be seen to repeat in many smaller cases, such as the destruction of Babylon, Sodom and Gomorrah, Tyre, etc. Then God saw that the best way to "fix" the world was to send His son. Not to sound as though I'm shoving religion and Christianity down your throats, but this was the permanent fix. How then is the world so rotten? (Which is so clearly obvious.) Well, that is what your "dark foreshadowing" is. This new solution is the last cycle as far as can be told, and it's still in the process. Kind of like in an algebra problem there are several steps to the solution. It just so happens that this is the final solution, so it's going to be resolved with the end of the world. Which doesn't sound very nice either, but that's because, and this is obvious, our brains our very small and it might only sound mean because we don't understand what's really going on. The problem is that we really won't ever know what's going on. That's where this whole faith comes in, and that's where I'm going to stop, because I can't tell anyone about faith. I am so bad at trusting anyone, much less God, that I am no authority to say anything.
ReplyDeleteI'll end by saying that I really honestly don't think that God is up in heaven smirking at us, because if He made us simply to torture us, as you seem to believe, our lives would be a heck of a lot worse. I mean, think about it: an all-powerful God, and things can only get worse. Look at all the good things that are in our lives and be completely honest with yourself. There's no way that God created us just to torture us, because we really aren't as tortured as we think we are. Our spirits are very troubled, but there are other reasons behind that that I'm not going to go into now, seeing as everyone has probably stopped reading by the time I started disagreeing with T. Ryan. Am I right?
I'm glad all that gives you comfort... that you're so comfortably indoctrinated with it all. I see no need to rebuttal. I bang on brick-wall minds enough. Though I will cut you with the double-edged sword which you imposed upon me. If you deny the fact that God is amused with us (arguing that since he's omnipotent, he would make things a lot worse), then you must concede that he is malicious. Regardless of his infinite power, he purposely created an imperfect, violent, awful world in which people do violent awful things to one another. That was entirely his choice and he withheld (and still withholds) the good that his infinite power could accomplish for the world. If you do not accept that that is malicious, then I am greatly concerned for your morality.
ReplyDeleteI think that the point that Katie is trying to make is He created the world with people and the ability of free will. He wanted people to choose him over sin, rather than being forced to do so. The outcome of mankind's choice was and is blatantly obvious.
ReplyDeleteOh, that's nice... you're saying that without leaving evil as a choice, there would be no free-will. But what you fail to see is that every metaphysical quality is in place because God put it there. Hence, the existence of evil and free-will (as concepts, as "realities", causes, whatever) are in place because god created them that way.
ReplyDeleteBecause God is omnicient, He had the ability to create a world where we could "choose him" over whatever... without the existence of suffering. When metaphysics are open to literally any alterations, there are no limits to what can be done and what cannot be done. The assumption that we would be forced to love him falls flat.
Not necessarily. When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they are the one's that brought suffering, mortality, and immorality, not God. God made the tree for the option of free will and for them to choose for/against him. However, since I know you don't believe this Biblical information, it's not going to enlighten you in any manner. The thing the Bible preaches is that mankind can find peace and tranquility through following the grace of God. Going through trials and tribulations are God's way of saying, "There's a bigger picture here, and you need to put your armor on." Without suffering there would still be no reason to follow him over anything else because he supplies the remedy to suffering.
ReplyDeleteto other anonymous:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.jkrishnamurti.org/krishnamurti-teachings/view-daily-quote/20110912.php
Very good. I think Hume (building off of Berkeley) made a similar point in book 1 of his "A Treaty of Human Nature".
ReplyDeleteI'll also posit that free-will is an illusion (if an omniscient God exists). We have what can be considered as a limited perspective on reality- we do not have any bit of infinity instilled within us. I cannot emphasize that enough. In mathematics we must apply a symbol to the concept of infinity because there is no other way for humans to comprehend it. This means that God's influence extends beyond our own. This means that we are not in control- and any control that we claim to have (free-will) is subject to the transcendent power of god. God knows the future in its entirety and he constructed that future. If the story has already been written, how can we claim that our role in it is of any consequence? How can we claim that we are the driving force of humanity, when humanity's engineer oversees everything?
It's arrogant... it's preposterous. Do the cogs in a machine claim to be in control of their movements? Do they decide the overall goal of their spinning? Do they pick and choose the cogs that their teeth mesh with? Of course they do not... they function as their creator designed them to. Such is humanity... such is the illusion of free-will. If god exists, then we are cogs, and we turn and spin and mesh the way that our creator designed us to. There is no deviation from this.