Big Lies and God

Exploring understanding the nature of God is usually done from the pulpit. Few questions are welcome at that time. Indeed, even then, almost always, church leaders choose the opposite track. God isn’t enough? Just add Jesus. That isn’t enough? Add The Holy Spirit. That isn’t enough? Anthropomorphize God. Add confusion, muddle details, and make exorbitant claims.

Adding more and more is not simplification to add to understanding. It is added layers of complexity and mystery. I have found plain, simple, straight talk to be a rare, rare commodity in discussions with religious leaders. The rest of the time, they sound like used car salesmen, looking for a buyer.

God is not human like. We’ve already dealt with that problem. He has to have different concerns than mammalian ones. Suckling young is not a part of His Plan.

Lets deal with some questions as if God is not mammalian, but as if He is an arachnid, a spider, or at the very least, not human. Perhaps He is some kind of artificial intelligence? Now that's scary, give me a living spider any day, at least we'd have something in common: hunger.

Lets try to enjoy the intellectual exercise of thinking about God. When we exercise our mental and physical muscles, they get stronger. Let us together build some faith muscle.

What concerns might God have? Since God is bigger than Man, His concerns have to be bigger as well. God must work in broad strokes. He sets things in motion and watches to see how they turn out over time. He has a Plan, and builds a web, and waits. He lurks.

Some of God's concerns might be: How is My Plan working? What am I learning about what I started to explore and discover? Am I moving closer to Perfection? Do I need to make any changes in the Plan? Has this experiment run its course? Have I learned everything it can teach Me?

In God's Plan of using life to explore questions of good and evil for Him, He first created Life. Then He gave Life a way to continue to exist without being individually eternal. He gave life forms several methods of reproduction.

One method, God's Plan of sexual reproduction, builds in variability and adaptability. If death is observable, a part of the individual's experiences, then a fear of death (the unknown) follows, and gives incentives to strive to avoid death. Without this variability and adaptability God's Plan would be static, unchanging, and He could not learn.

Whether you like it or not, change is an essential part of God's Plan. God's Plan sets one form of life in competition with other forms of life, in what we humans recently call survival of the fittest.

First, let's review all sexual reproduction in broad terms. Many species spew out huge quantities of little life packets called eggs. The adults offer little protection and care of the eggs, little or no protection of the newborns, no support, no feeding, no care when they get sick, no protection if they have an accident, no protection if they are attacked by another large, tougher life form, and once they leave home, they don’t come back except possibly to be food. All of the species reproduce as fast as they are able.

Second, only the lucky and the fit offspring survive to breed. This is survival of the fittest.

Third, if humans are in any way special, if God’s Plan has a special task for us, how does God accomplish this with us? We must have a way to do something that other species cannot. We probably would have to have some physical characteristics that other species do not.

Humans are relatively small, with poor teeth and nails with which to defend ourselves. We are not all that fast of a runner. Our jumping skills are limited. Some characteristics stand out: we (a) have full color vision, (b) change our environment, (c) are a generalist, able to do many kinds of things, (d) exhibit extreme neoteny, (e) exhibit complex languages, advanced tool use and manufacture, written languages, and apparent intelligent sentience.

Such is the poor clay that has the task of working on God's Plan.

Article Source: http://www.religionarticlelibrary.com

(c) Copyright 2006: George Wallace completed an MA and taught in the public schools for 28 years. He recently published a book on religion which lashes out at nearly all of the comfortable ideas about God, the trappings of organized religion, the layers of money sucking priesthood, and their departures from the fundamental ideas and messages of Religion. His pithy comments and suggestions for a return to a God-centered personal religion will outrage everyone. www.OhGodIsThatYou.com

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