But I Want a Family!

god, bible, jesus, sin, good, evil,
Trigger warning: child molestation.

The question of why any loving, concerned god would allow the vast amounts of human suffering that occurs every day (that is occurring right this minute) is something that has distressed believers, and created nonbelievers, for millenia.



In the time it took you to read that sentence, at least 2 women in the US were raped, depending on how fast you read. I wish I could do something about that. I wish I could make sure nobody was ever raped again. I wish I could end genocide, starvation, disease, war and just plain meanness.



I can't. An omnipotent god could. An omniscient god would know how. So why doesn't he?

Presumably not for this reason:



Wouldn’t you just like God to tell you what he thinks about your suffering? I mean, who wouldn’t? Maybe in a personal letter. Where he spells out what he sees in all your pain. I guess god writes a letter because if you were in front of him while he explains it all, he'd have to start answering questions or something.





For many years, I wrestled with him about where he was when my father took me, his four-year-old daughter, out to the cornfield behind our house to take his pleasure at the expense of my pain. How could God let that happen? i cannot reconcile a loving god with such things. i could reconcile an omnipotent being that just doesn't care about us with such a thing, but a god that answers prayers for lost car keys? no.

And where is he in the bitterness of broken romances, the anguish of jobs lost, the struggles of all the refugees in the world, the hunger of the 800 million people who don’t even have enough food? i love that broken hearts and job loss come before homelessness and starvation. After thirty years of prayer, thought, and study, I sat down one day and these words flowed. thirty years of prayer? she must be right! In the form of a letter to a semi-autobiographical “Annie,” this is how I see God’s perspective on our distress.

The Father of Jesus
1 Golden Way
New Jerusalem I'm fairly certain god had a name before jesus, mostly because i'm guessing jews don't refer to him that way.

My Dearest Annie:

I know you are unsure of me these days, particularly wondering whether you really are dear to me. Your twenties have been such painful years, haven’t they? I know you’ve wondered whether you would ever stop crying. And those breakdowns that landed you in the hospital—such terror—thinking you were going to be rolled up in a little ball and thrown out into the empty universe. i'm beginning to think you should have to pass a test before you're allowed to use metaphors. I’m so sorry you had to go through all that. My heart has bled for you. god has a . . . never mind, but if he's so sad about it, why not do something about it?

. . .

You’ve particularly been wrestling with me about free will. I wanted to write to you today because you’ve begun to see it differently. Up until now you’ve always said, “Free will isn’t worth what it costs! It was a human choice in the garden that led to all this pain, and it was my father’s choices that have provoked so much terror in my life.” good points, actually. why should everyone throughout history suffer because two people made a mistake? a mistake god knew they would make, no less.

You’ve blamed me for creating such a system. well, yeah. why put the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life right where Adam and Eve could get at them? why create those trees at all?

You admitted to me two weeks ago Saturday that you actually hated me. (I was so glad to hear you confess that!) And now, in these last two weeks, it has begun to dawn on you that there’s no real goodness on earth without real evil. no, one couldn't really perceive good as being special without evil, but "good" in the sense of being kind and generous could surely exist without child molesters. The same ability to choose that creates evil also yields goodness. i'll agree to that. some people choose to free the slaves, some people choose to commit genocide. Do you get it, really? get what? I want people who will love me freely, without coercion or manipulation. what? god's fucking lonely or something? if love something set it free, and if it comes back to you, that was true love? god rules the universe via easily mocked mantras? That means you all need to have a choice to walk with me or to walk away from me. okay, but why does "walking away" have to involve torture and rape and genocide? couldn't walking away just mean not attending church? I know it’s confusing, too, because it’s hard for you to evaluate who’s with me and who’s not. wait, what? Like your father, who looked like he was walking with me oh, i got it, false convert. but sure walked away from me that day in the cornfield when he molested you. because that's the important part, not that he ruined his daughter's life, but that he wasn't a true christian. Have you ever thought about what I felt that day? seriously? can you imagine how enraged the semi-autobiographical annie would be if her mother said, "yes, i knew your father was molesting you, but have you thought about how i felt about it, how much it hurt me?"

I know you’ve been angry with me about how I’ve set up the system, but think about it from my point of view: I want a family to love. so god made two people who immediately disobeyed him because god's incompetent? So I made Adam and Eve with the ability to be my children. But they walked away from me and unleashed such evil and suffering. i could have stopped the evil and suffering, or prevented it in the first place, but . . . i dunno. How I grieved! I was sorry I’d made them. i could have done something about that, too. Every violent thought broke my heart. not quite enough to do something about it. And that’s how I felt that day in the cornfield. I wept over you both, knowing what your father’s sin would cost in your life, and in his. And, do you see that I could not intervene? not really, no.

If I stopped your father, it would only be fair to stop all the evil choices and then where would human choice be and then how would I get my family? I want a family! I want an enormous, extended family. I want people who want to come to family reunions. Well, it’s not that I couldn’t intervene in the most literal sense—I could, of course. What I mean is, if I did routinely stop bad choices, that would be the end of choice. Real choices require real consequences. Maybe you think I could just make you love me, but I want a family who really loves me.

this is both ridiculous and psychopathic. for one thing, parents allow their children to make choices, choices about what clothes to wear, what toys to play with, etc. parents allow those choices to prepare their children for a time when they will have to make much more important choices. However, no parent (i hope) ever allows their child to choose to stick their fingers in an electrical outlet or set themselves on fire or drink lye. the writer's theory seems to be that we really ought to let them choose such things, because what happens to free will otherwise?

the psychopathic side of this: I want a family! i need you to suffer so that I can have what I want! wait, isn't that the logic of the child molester . . . holy shit, i just . . . wow.

i think we're done here.