7/2/2003: "Finger" of God

[joydriven]

Our president is made fun of every night on the Tonight Show, and I can't say that many people think it's that big of a deal.

1. The president wouldn't be so fun to make fun of if he was a less-significant person. Incongruity is the heart of humor. The very fact that incongruous scenarios about the president are considered funny is evidence to the fact that he is a big enough person to make the scenarios incongruous. It's one thing if I fall down and trip--it might even make America's Funniest Home Videos. It's another thing to see someone of import fall down and trip. In that sense, the bigger they are, the harder they fall--the irony strikes us, and our human nature is to respond with laughter.

2. Just because people make fun of someone, that does not make their actions right or wrong. Popular belief and popular action do not seem to back up the "there are no absolutes" popular talk. Most of today's society operates on a premise (as thought it were an absolute truth) that what's right for you is right and what's right for me is right--pragmatism rules. If it's ok to make fun of the president in your eyes, then it must be ok, and if I have a problem with it then the problem is only as big as my opinion.

I simply posit a completely different absolute: The God of the Bible.

The Bible's words influence how I think about my society; not vice versa. For instance, you will not likely catch me mocking a president, at least regarding the honor surrounding his position. There are plenty of moral/character grounds that have lowered my personal opinion of the leadership competency of Bill Clinton, for instance, but I would still show him honor and respect. The Bible says that the powers that be are ordained by God, basically cannot run from fulfilling God's ultimate purposes, and are to receive the honor their offices are due. The only time I am biblically sanctioned to buck my governmental authorities is when they buck God's. "We ought to obey God rather than men."

See above. That is why it's so hard to accept that one way. Because I refuse to spend my eternity in the presence of that kind of being. That is blatantly heartless and cruel, and I see it no other way.

This is a very interesting self-contradiction. The one way is offensive to anyone since it requires humility to realize that we don't dictate how we can enter God's heaven. If you come in my house and I have a house rule that requires the removal of your shoes, you would very likely submit to that or have a pretty good reason why not. If God indeed created heaven and earth and all the inhabitants and so on, he does indeed have the prerogative to condemn/forgive/glorify those who submit to his conditions. That's nothing of their own merit, so the mentality is indeed NOT "you're fucked and i'm not" (read Ezekiel 16, the book of Romans, the book of Hosea, the book of Ephesians so that you will have a more well-rounded concept of what GRACE is about--and why only worms and whores are qualified to be recipients of grace).

You say that God is "blatantly heartless and cruel." I ask you, upon what absolute moral authority do you stand in judgment of God's actions? What absolute moral measuring stick do you measure his heartlessness and cruelty with? Your own? Did you attain that sense of right and wrong when you evolved from a gas cloud? Did your tender conscience develop in the wake of a big unexplained random explosion? Is it at all possible for you to believe that God is the source of absolute truth? That God was the one who created you with an awareness of morality? That God is the one who gave you a mind to discern with?

So maybe you believe there's an ultimate creator being, but not the God of the Bible. (This seems to be your view, since you consider only bits and pieces rather than the whole Bible as you make your evaluatory statements about God.) And you just don't like what you're seeing of him. Again, you are harking back to your personal experience. Is it possible for you to acknowledge that your experience might be limited and might just not be enough? That there may be something beyond your comprehension out there? That your refusal to spend eternity with the God of the Bible IS the foundation of your self-damnation? We don't get sent to hell. We work our way there.

It's ironic that most of mankind's reaction to God seems to be shaking a puny God-made fist in the face of God.

[hot_pastrami]

Here in Mormon country, parents blackmail children into going to church, going to seminary, going on religious missions... It's sad. I was a church-going Mormon until I was about 15... then I stopped going to church because my bullshit flag was getting worn out from being raised so often. To me, Christianity in general makes a case about as strong as a wet kleenex. Although I generally dislike analogies, I think I'll use one here, because unlike most analogies, I think it does effectively make a point.

Let's say I have a son, my only child. I love him dearly. One day though, I am given a terrible choice... I learn that an entire family of eight may die a horrible death, and only I have the power to stop it. But if I do so, my son will certainly die. I have to choose whether to sacrifice my only son to save the family, or to take my son and run to safety, and let the family perish. Though it would be a terrible thing to let eight people die to save my one son, it would understandable, and maybe even forgivable, to save my beloved son's life at the expense of theirs. This is akin to the choice God supposedly had when Jesus was to die for makind's sins... and speaks of the weight of His sacrifice... right? Well...

Say I have this same choice, to save my son or to save the family... but this time, I happen to know that my son is basically immortal, and will gloriously rise from the dead after three days or so (don't tell me that the ressurection was a surprise to the all-seeing, all-knowing God). How hard is my choice now? I would have to be a really loathesome, shitty, worthless speck of a being to let the family die under such circumstances, since I can save the family without losing my son for more than a few days... and moreover, I get to hang out with my dead son's spirit for the few days that he's dead! Yeah, really tough choice there.... big sacrifice.

Organized religion, to my eyes, is seldom more than emotional blackmail at an enormous scale. I think spirituality and philosophy are very good things, but you won't become an elightened person by going to church any more than you'll become an automobile by sleeping in your garage. If there were a God whose punshment for failing to believe in Him was damnation to Hell, and if He loved His children, I'm sure He'd make sure the message He sent them was more substantial than a 1400-year-old bastardized text.

If I go to hell for not believeing in God, it's His fault, because He gave me a logical mind, and then failed to give me ample evidence of His existence. He sent me here knowing exactly what choices I would make, so I was damned from the start. Fuck that. Besides, if heaven is anything like going to church here, the Mormons can have it... I'll take hell.

[Undertoad]

JoyD I really respect your drive to answer such questions. Two more from me:

The "rules" in the bible seem vague and contradictory. Some people believe that eating animals with cloven hooves is an abomination in the sight of the Lord, and so having lunch and dinner of bacon and ham is downright prohibited. You yourself believe that suggesting that a cloud of gas millions of miles away might be a cosmic joke on behalf of the Creator is Wrong.

Yet I know for a fact that most Christians eat a TON of ham, especially on their holiest days, and many if not most Christians make light humor of God's meaning every day.

Q1: If the rules are so critically important, why are they so vague and often contradictory?

Q2: Are the pig-eaters going to hell?

[joydriven]

Just a clarification, Undertoad, regarding your comment before (I'm still catching up!) about the "attack." I wasn't referring to a personal attack and did not take it as a personal one. The comments you made that undercut the authority / reliability of the Bible was the attack to which I was referring. It's the foundation for what I believe, and it really seemed that you were discounting it based on your own opinions of it. I haven't tried to promote man's opinions (including my own) but have tried to stay consistent about promoting the only confirmed and self-affirming revelation of God to men about Himself. That is in an effort to adhere to my premise that the God who has revealed Himself in the Bible is the source of all absolute truth.

And to those of you out there who are seeing "holes" in my logic, I don't deny that apparent holes are there. It is circular reasoning to an extent to say "I believe the Bible's claims based on the Bible's claims." I readily admit that I have deliberately decided to posit one absolute (and inherently therefore exclusive) way when it comes to religious matters.

This is no more circular reasoning than the circular reasoning employed by pragmatists and solipsists and scientologists and so on. At one point, any seeker of truth has to take a leap of faith. It's not so much the amount of, or the strength of, your own faith that gives that faith its value. Rather, it is the Object of that faith.

You place your faith in a chair that you're going to sit in. If you place your faith in a broken chair, yours is bad faith--no matter how good its intentions, no matter how sure and wholesome, etc. You place your faith in a good chair, and you will find that chair can hold you up--no matter how much you know about Physics, no matter how scared you are, no matter what your background with chairs has been.

I put my faith in Jesus Christ. If He is an adequate Object of my faith, if He indeed does the saving--my opinions, my feelings, my insecurities, my sin record, my emotional baggage have no bearing whatsoever on the situation. It's a black and white, done deal.

Yes, I am giving a personal testimonial to what I know on a personal level, and I recognize (as Alan indicates as well) that there are certainly emotional ramifications and preconceived biases that affect my decisions, but my point is that "my" faith is not the issue. The issue is where/in whom my faith is placed. To be a Christian, or not to be a Christian? No, that's not the question. Is Jesus Christ a worthy, able, adequate Savior? That is the question.

About your ham-eating query, Undertoad. I think you need to recognize the distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. These are indeed deep distinctions. Practicing Jews today fail to acknowledge that the crucified Christ was indeed the Son of God and the promised Messiah. Instead, they reject Jesus as the one true way and place their faith in traditionalism and hope for another, future christ.

It is true that the God of the Old Testament is the same God as the God of the New Testament. He is still holy. If you read Leviticus, you will see striking proof to the point that God was making--that the Israelites could not save themselves. All these details for the building of the tabernacle, all these dietary laws, all these sacrificial DOs and DON'Ts, all these failures for kings, all these sinful priests, were meant to point up the Jews' need for a PERFECT/ADEQUATE sacrifice for sin, a PERFECT/ADEQUATE Prophet, the PERFECT/ADEQUATE Priest, the PERFECT/ADEQUATE King. As you can read in the New Testament books of John, Ephesians and Hebrews, Jesus Christ (as both perfect 100% God and sinless 100% man) was the ultimate and better fulfillment of all of these things--the sufficient sacrifice, the most authoritative Prophet, the most holy Priest (mediator between God and men) and the most noble and worthy King (Lord and ruler of all).

The laws of God in the Old Testament were the schoolmaster that was intended to bring God's people to saving faith in Jesus Christ as the promised anointed one who would bring an end to the Law and be its ultimate fulfillment. Now God can look at those people who have put their faith in Jesus, and He declares them justified because of Jesus' merit.

How many generations of billions of people have offered their opinions and devoted their intellects to solving our need for eternal answers? And they die, and their words die. I want/need something outside myself to give me answers to my questions. I'm tired of everyone's pewter towers--they send me into dispair. I need an Eiffel Tower to place my trust in. And I choose the God of the Bible to be that absolute reference point as I try to navigate through life.

It's not what these hands have done. It's not how much faith I can muster up. It's not how I feel. It's not what I can understand or reconcile mentally.

It's what God did. It's what God provided. It's what God promised. And it's what God, because of His passion for His own glory and our best good, ensures to all who believe.

Which is why I choose to believe that

God so loved the world
that He sent His only Son
that whoever believes on Him
will not perish
but will have everlasting life.

[hot_pastrami]

Personally, I respect others' right to believe what they will in such matters, and I admire the convictions of those who are convinced of their version of truth. I am even happy and willing to engage in discussions on religion and related philosophies. I am only bothered when religious beliefs are dispensed as statements of fact. I am as troubled by someone's insistence that God is real and holy and true as they would be if I suggested that God was a snowballed product of over-active imaginations. That doesn't make it wrong for them to assert that God is real and that I will burn in hell for thinking otherwise, but it does mean that I will be as blunt with them. However, I do admire the way you've been expressing your beliefs, being generally respectful of the opposing view.

As for your chair analogy, I think it needs a little altering to include relevant circumstances. One places their faith in a chair when they sit down, yes, but that is a trivial decision. If they sit in the the Wrong Chair (WC), they get up, brush themselves off, and try again. The sitter can change his/her decision based on the additional useful information. Religion would have us believe that we make the choice, and that we are forever responsible for it.

So, put the two chairs above pits of lava. One chair is a wooden chair of straightforward design, with four legs, arms, a seat and a back. It looks sturdy, and feels stout when wiggled. The wood does not sound hollow when knocked upon, and the pieces do not seem to flex or crack when put under some pressure. One is able to observe and test it thoroughly before sitting and paying the consequences of his/her choice. The other chair is draped in cloth, obscuring all but the most general details. There is a long, very old note stuck to the chair, with many sections of the text smudged out, and others scratched out and rewritten, describing the nature of the chair, assuring the potential sitter that it is safe. You are not allowed to touch it or remove the drape before sitting.

I'd choose the chair I could see to be of sound construction, personally, since my very life is in its care. And that represents my belief system... I believe that which I have reason to believe, and suspend belief on anything else until I have reason to otherwise. This varies with the importance of the subject obviously, but generally I need more evidence of Truth than a old text of questionable origin, and a desire to believe it is true. I must observe, or be informed from a trusted source. But everyone's minds work differently.

[Undertoad]

The analogy only gets weirder when you consider that your payoff happens in this world, the world you know, while most religious folk expect the payoff in the next one.

IOW, the "lava" for you is eternal torture in a world you can't see and can't prove exists, while for the religious, the "lava" is living a life on entirely false pretenses and not getting anything as a reward (or worse, getting the eternal torture of some other religion's hell).

[hot_pastrami]

The other thing I cannot swallow is that a Creator who loves their children wouldn't give them the opportunity to accept Him/Her/It once they have returned to Him/Her/It. This, to my mind, is yet more evidence supporting the theory that religion is emotional blackmail. If there is no opportunity to redeem oneself in the afterlife, one is completely bound to a religion, and has no room to explore and make up their own minds about Truth without essentially turning their back on their religion.

Puny human spirit: "Wow, it's the afterlife!"

God: "You made the wrong choices based on my incomplete and sometimes contradictory information! To Hell for you, for all eternity!"

Puny human spirit: "But I was taught from birth that it was a sin punishable by everlasting torture to believe in <insert unexpected diety here>! Of course, I believe in you now that I can see you and speak to you."

God: "Too little, too late. Say Hi to the Mormons for me."

Puny human spirit, as it is tossed into the eternal wastebasket of depair and hopelessness: "WHAAAAAAAA!"

[joydriven]

Hey, Undertoad...I think I'm confused.

The analogy only gets weirder when you consider that your payoff happens in this world, the world you know, while most religious folk expect the payoff in the next one.

If you were referring to the faith that I'm describing, "payoff" does indeed happen for the most part in the afterlife. It's pretty obvious that I don't have visible, tangible "proof" for my faith in this life. And if there is no resurrection (i.e., if Jesus lived and died and rose for no reason and it won't work for me too), then the sacrifices (i.e., sacrifices-slash-investments, depending on how you look at them) I am making in this life are futile. As Paul says, if there is no hope of the resurrection, then my religion is in vain--I am of all people most miserable. Not only would I be giving up all kinds of worldly pleasures unnecessarily, but I would be gypped out of any kind of eternal happiness either.

The book of Matthew says that

the kingdom of heaven
is like a treasure hid in a field
which, when a man finds, he hides it
and goes and sells everything he has
for joy
just to buy that field.

The point of that biblical simile is that true Christians believe that "he is no fool who gives up what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose." In choosing to follow Jesus, I choose to follow God's commandments and live for a future life--not primarily for enjoyment in this life. If the Christianity of the Bible is false, then I am of all people most miserable.

Contrary to many tangential ideas that are circulating around Christendom today, Jesus does not promise prosperity and wealth. He does not promise a risk-free, persecution-free, trouble-free, sickness-free, poverty-free life. He does not promise comforts.

He promises a cross. And He promises major benefits on the other side of that cross.

[xoxoxoBruce]

That promise worked very well on the slaves.

[Undertoad]

That's what I meant, JoyD, I was just taking HP's analogy a step further (or confusing it) because the lava is different for each chair-sitter.

[joydriven]

aha. you did say that. my bad. i get it now.

[cynthian.]

though i would love to continue writing on this blog i will be away for awhile and then i'm moving. so, my lack of interaction on this page is not because i have nothing more to say, or that i am afraid of the plethora of criticism that would no doubt ensue-but because i'm away from the internet.
by the time i return this topic will most likely be beaten to death. it's been a pleasure conversing. until the next striking controversy then...

[Undertoad]

But y'know, JoyD, the stakes really aren't that high afer all. We all look for whatever meaning we can get out of life, even the non-believers. Without a doubt, most of us are wrong about the purpose, just by math. We have to live according to the meaning we have found in our lives, and according to our own perception of how things are. If one of us gets to the wrong destination, there is still meaning in the fact that we were traveling in the first place; the beauty in the scenery was not lost on any of us; and we can all enjoy life, no matter what the purpose.

[Torrere]

I'm afraid that I don't quite understand joydriven's pewter Eiffel tower analogy.

I wonder: why a Christian's rejection of the Prophet Mohammed more valid than a Jews rejection of Christ?

[richlevy]

Originally posted by joydriven


You say that God is "blatantly heartless and cruel." I ask you, upon what absolute moral authority do you stand in judgment of God's actions? What absolute moral measuring stick do you measure his heartlessness and cruelty with? Your own? Did you attain that sense of right and wrong when you evolved from a gas cloud? Did your tender conscience develop in the wake of a big unexplained random explosion? Is it at all possible for you to believe that God is the source of absolute truth? That God was the one who created you with an awareness of morality? That God is the one who gave you a mind to discern with?

....

It's ironic that most of mankind's reaction to God seems to be shaking a puny God-made fist in the face of God.

I don't know what Bruce said, but I for one do not believe that G-d is "blatantly heartless and cruel." I believe that a large number of people have done "blatantly heartless and cruel" things in G-d's name. For example, if you consider a child being raised in the "wrong faith", then a religious person can justify doing almost anything to "save" that child's soul.

In America, this behavior was most prevalent in schools on reservations which discouraged or banned native americans from speaking their own language or studying the history of their own culture.

Since you also mentioned Leviticus, where do you stand on stoning and burning as punishments? Did you look up Auto da fe?