God’s Away on Business
It’s hard to sort out the reasons and the sequence of my loss of faith. In the afterimage of my memory, it looks like a single explosion rather than an evolving realignment of ideas. The epicenter of that explosion is God’s silence. In my darkest hours, prayer produced no succor. I was left alone to struggle in pain and doubt.
Some may excuse God’s absence by saying that I shouldn’t expect answers exactly when I want them, that they arrive in the Lord’s own time. That’s not good enough some times. If I’m on the verge of forever losing my faith in God, then getting back to me tomorrow isn’t soon enough.
Others may say that God sometimes answers prayers negatively. Answering “no” or offering only silence to the plaintive question “Are you there?” shows either a twisted sense of humor or a heartless disinterest.
Maybe God is trying to teach us something we might wonder. That might be reasonable when someone just wants to know that someone is watching out for them, but when a child on the brink of starvation in Africa cries out to God for food, or a sex slave loses all hope of escape from the endless rapes that have become her life, my heart tells me that no amount of learning can justify such gratuitous suffering. God will strike a man dead for violating the sanctity of the Ark of the Covenant with a well intentioned touch (2 Samuel 6:6–7), but he won’t lift a finger to protect the holiness in the heart of innocent children? I ask you to judge which is holier and more deserving of protection.
Wo to the God who offends these little ones (Matthew 18:6). May a millstone be hung from his neck, and may he drown in the depths of the sea.
If God wanted to teach me to have compassion, then his plans have gone slightly awry. Not only has my compassion for suffering increased, my hatred for any deity who would put us through such torture has caught flame. It has shown me that whether or not God exists, he can’t be bothered to help us. We are all we’ve got no matter how we answer to ourselves the question of whether God lives. In our darkest hours, we can only look to each other.
If I die and unexpectedly meet God, I’ll have a choice word or three for him, spit in his eye, and cheerfully go to Hell where all the compassionate folk take up residence far from that insufferable tyrant.
(music videos via mind on fire)
Tags: compassion, religion, suffering
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March 25, 2008 @ 10:35 am
There’s also an excellent rendition of Dear God by Sarah MacLachlan featured on mind on fire. It’s more soulful and heartfelt than the one I included above, but is visually lacking.
March 25, 2008 @ 4:38 pm
Until you are on the verge of ceasing to exist beyond all restoration, you’re not on the verge of forever losing your faith. If you and I happen to meet God at the same time, and if we learn together that God could have best pursued our exaltation in some manner other than that which we are now experiencing, I’ll gladly join you in hell. Until then, I’ll consider your increasing compassion and decreasing patience for oppressive gods to be evidence for the God I worship.
March 26, 2008 @ 10:40 am
First, you obviously worship a God who isn’t classically omnipotent.
Second, and most importantly to me, is that this discounts the truly gratuitous suffering that takes place. There is nothing instructive, transformative, or redemptive for the victim in the short life of a child stolen from her parents to become a sex slave for the nominally Christian LRA. If your God can’t keep this from happening, then that only reinforces my point that we’re on our own. There’s no point wasting our time worshiping such a God. It’s better to ignore Him and focus on what we can do for ourselves.
For those who actually believe in the inerrancy of the Bible, my question still remains: which is holier and more worthy of protection, the innocence of a child or the Ark of the Covenant?
March 26, 2008 @ 11:05 am
I intend no discounting of gratuitous suffering. You and I can’t keep this from happening, but we still value each other. I extend the same esteem to all aspects of God, expecting only that each does what it can to make the better world.
March 27, 2008 @ 7:08 pm
If I die and unexpectedly meet God, I’ll have a choice word or three for him, spit in his eye, and cheerfully go to Hell where all the compassionate folk take up residence far from that insufferable tyrant.
Amen! I said something similar, but far less eloquent, when a Christian friend told me that ultimately, no matter how unfair or uncompassionate god may seem (we were arguing about the condemnation of so many to hell), we had to worship him if for no other reason but his omnipotence.
March 27, 2008 @ 8:42 pm
Ha! Send me to hell with the compassionate, and we’ll make a heaven of it — and you know where this idea comes from.
March 31, 2008 @ 3:29 pm
“The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” (John Milton, Paradise Lost, 1667, 254–55)
March 31, 2008 @ 6:39 pm
I’m good with that.
May 8, 2008 @ 10:33 pm
[...] Blake, in his post God’s Away on Business, said: It’s hard to sort out the reasons and the sequence of my loss of faith. In the afterimage [...]