I was talking recently to a young friend who is going through a crisis of faith. He can't continue to believe in God, he said, because he simply can't accept the notion of a supposedly just God whose actions are so arbitrary. If it matters to God whether we believe or disbelieve, he said, why doesn't God show special favor to those who believe the right things? Why don't their prayers matter more?
And how can a just God justify to humanity events such as the tsumani that killed so many in Indonesia a year and a half ago? And why, if praying makes a difference to anything, isn't it more reliable? When my young friend prayed that his mother's cancer would go away the first time, it had gone into remission; but when it returned, all his praying did her no good at all. "It's pointless," he said.
Furthermore, what about all the people---on both sides---being killed in Iraq? How can a just and merciful God allow the good (whichever those are) to be killed along with the bad?
Listening to him made me very glad to be a heretic. Conventional Christians have to engage in heroic twists and leaps of logic to explain to themselves and others why good people suffer along with the bad. Because I came at Christianity (christianity) from a different angle, I never have this problem.
1. God doesn't care whether you're happy. First of all, I don't assume as most Christians I know seem to do that God wants his creatures to be "happy," whatever that means. If I believed that this was the purpose of creation, I really would have to chop some logic.
The idea that personal suffering is a sign of God's inattention certainly isn't supported by the Bible. If you assume that when bad things happen to people it's a sign of God's anger, Jerry Falwell, you clearly haven't paid enough attention to what your Bible tells you about what happens to those whom he favors with his personal attention, starting with Christ and working backwards and forwards through history.
I remember a dismal hymn we used to sing at the Episcopal Church that expressed the paradox that Christ was so fond of reiterating: "The peace of God...is no peace, but strife cast in the sod/Yet brothers pray for but one thing/The glorious peace of God!" I didn't get it as a teenager and I certainly wasn't interested in a God who promised "not peace but a sword."
I had to come to Christianity the long way around, via other religions. Given its difficulty, I find it much easier to see life as the process by which the soul educates and disciplines itself than as a one-time-only temporary chance to convince God that you are sufficiently repentant/pure/faithful to deserve a place at some extended picnic with the other good and deserving. If we assume that there is a God who takes some sort of interest in our welfare---and based on experience, I do----the only possible inference we can draw from what we observe about the reality of human life is that suffering, bereavement, and death are (from God's perspective) circumstances that somehow inure to our benefit, however much we may wish to forego them.
2. God doesn't care how you die (or when). It's quite clear to me that God could not care less about death and the human fear of death. From God's standpoint, it doesn't matter how many are killed in by the tsunami or in a terrorist bombing or due to bubonic plague. Furthermore, I don't believe that it matters to God whether a fetus is aborted, a soldier dies, or a sparrow falls. From the standpoint of the eternal, the passing of a soul from a transitory state here and now or 100 years from now couldn't possibly matter. For believers, death must---mustn't it?----be the first step in the right direction, out of the illusion of time and back into eternity.
Believing that God is actually not bothered by death---your death, my death, even the death of everyone on the planet as the result of an asteroid strike---permits me to avoid all the writhing around trying to explain why God would "let" Jon Benet Ramsey (just to pick someone at random) be killed or allow hundreds to drown in their homes during Katrina. Whether I die today or fifty years from now is all the same to God.
According to this view---which really is the only one that OUGHT to make sense to a Christian---- the soul resides here for awhile and learns what it can; at a certain point it returns to the source. One thing it learns during its earthly sojourn are the valuable lessons that we learn from personal suffering----the most important of which is that form of love that requires you to view the other as an extension of your self. One of Christ's foremost teachings was the extension of self; and in my experience, the only way to learn compassion, and beyond compassion, empathy, is by undergoing losses.
For this reason, though God might not be concerned with preventing unnecessary suffering and violent death, we must. We must do so on the ground of our common humanity and out of compassion. For the race to survive, the fear of death is essential. That fear and terror, and the grief a person fears at letting go of life, even when it's become a misery and a burden, are part of our common human heritage. We owe it to ourselves and to others to respect the life force while it lasts and to ease the transition when it starts to wane. And we owe that respect even to the most depraved of our fellow humans.
3. Your life is a training ground for your soul. According to Christ, learning to feel the suffering of others as if it were your own is somehow fundamental to becoming worthy of God. It changes the part of you that resembles God to resemble God more. It makes you willing to endure suffering and even death on behalf of others. And enduring suffering and---eventually--- death is the only way you learn that both are simply incidents of the soul's larger journey.
My beliefs make the world a much more lucid place to me. I don't ask myself pointless questions about what God could mean by "letting" someone die; I ask myself instead what I'm supposed to be getting out of the experience. It doesn't make the experience less difficult or me anymore resigned, but it does keep me from getting furious with God or feeling let down when my prayers are not answered.
I don't assume that everything happens for a reason---i.e., through design. I believe in free will. In other words, I think we are free to choose between one path and another moment by moment and that our collective choices have a certain determinative power. And I think that once you make your choices, God lets you have the dignity of them.
My young friend reasoned that only randomness can explain why some people are born in Dharfur and some people are born to Donald Trump; and that a world where we start on such unequal footing can't possibly be the creation of a just or compassionate God. Between believing in a nasty God who is amused by human suffering and not believing in anything, my young friend prefers to believe in nothing.
4. God measures good fortune differently from human beings. But if you do believe in God, and you believe that life is a sort of proving ground, your idea of what makes a person lucky or unlucky drastically alters. Christ was very fond of making it clear that luck can cut both ways. "They have their reward now," he declared of the conspicuously righteous, just for one example. The fact that other people think highly of you because you're rich doesn't cut any ice with God; even being rich and charitable doesn't necessarily mean that much if you could afford to do much more and never do. According to Christ, God is interested in the proportions of charity, not in the size of your tax deduction.
Was the poor widow who donated her "mite" less lucky than the wealthier men who were able to donate much more by giving proportionately much less? According to Christ, her long-term gains from her charitable act were certain to be much greater than theirs.
Furthermore, Christ makes it clear---or at least he makes it clear to me--- that God's judgment of a human soul encompasses all its aspects, including all the surrounding circumstances and pressures to which it was subject during its life. In other words, God knows the whole story, including the full price the soul paid during its lifetime for its errors in public and private suffering.
So the white collar criminal whose crime consists of manipulating symbols on a computer screen---no spillage of blood or DNA samples involved---and whose thousands of victims aren't present when his case comes to trial would be viewed by God very differently from the way in which he is viewed by the press or by his fellow human beings. In the eyes of God, it's quite possible that such a person would be considered as culpable or more culpable than, say, the deranged mother of five children who drowned them all in a psychotic break, or than the underprivileged child who shoots a member of a rival gang.
5. God sees the naked soul. I have always imagined that God in the process of judging a soul would look at factors that the law often deals with clumsily such as intent, malice, motive, and remorse and that God might well be more disgusted with petty motives (procuring another's goods by fraud) than by those that society regards as heinous. In other words, the person who engages in fraud because she can might be seen as more morally culpable---even much more so---than the person whose deprived circumstances or history of abuse leads to acts that society considers much worse.
I also don't think God cares whether or not you say you believe in him, or "testify" that Jesus is Lord, or speak in tongues and heal the sick, if you in fact live a righteous life.
I do think (because Christ said so) that God cares very much how you treat other people and how far you managed to go in following Christ's directives for living a good life.
I don't believe in Hell, as it happens----I interpret "Outer darkness" differently---but if I did believe, I'd venture to speculate that it is full of white collar criminals and quite a number of people who called themselves Christians. But I think Hell---in the sense of a place of eternal punishment or isolation from God----would be a waste of spirit and energy, and I don't think God permits waste.
If I imagined a judgment throne, and a sinner being tried before it, I would imagine that the shame of fully realizing the extent of one's sinfulness would be hell enough for those of us who consider ourselves generally well-meaning and rationalize our own weaknesses until they drop out of our consciousness. Seriously, what could be more painful than the shame of having your soul assessed and find wanting?
Consider how terrified most people are of being judged by total strangers and found wanting and how desperately we try to hide our physical defects. Consider the surgeries, the implants, the botox, the hair dyes, the make-up and depilatories, the diet aids and exercise equipment. All of us fear being seen as anything other than our best, whatever that may be.
Then consider how awful (in every sense) it must be to have your naked soul assessed, stripped bare of your virtues and achievements and all the things you use to hide it from everyone else. Think of being seen for who you really are.
And then---if you believe that sin has consequences for the soul--- pray that Christ told it the way it really is: that God is a loving parent who sees the good in you that no one else can as well as the bad that you manage to keep hidden away. Pray that God loves you with infinitely more intensity and understanding than you love your own children, and will be willing at the end to extend to you the same love and mercy you'd show to your own children no matter how bad they may look to everyone else. In other words: you might give them a time out, and take away their gameboy, but you wouldn't shut them in outer darkness forever provided you were sure they were sorry and willing to make amends.
And pray that I'm right and that it's never too late for some sort of redemption.
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