Biblical Misunderstanding

picture link*

Looking back, I realize that no matter how sincere my faith, and I was entirely sincere in my faith, I was never a very good believer. For one thing, I was forever misinterpreting bible stories.

For example: The Tower of Babel. For the those of you unfamiliar with the story, it's really just an explanation of why there are so many different languages. After all, everyone on earth is descended from the same two people, why would there be many different languages instead of only one? Simple- goddidit because man scared him.

You see, all those people speaking the same language could work together to do marvelous things. The marvelous thing they agreed to do was build a tower tall enough to reach Heaven. God saw this, was afraid, and so scattered the humans all over the earth and made them speak different languages so they couldn't work together. As a child, I saw this as a testament to the power of people working toward a common cause. Working together towards a common goal, people can do anything. They can bring about equality for women, end Jim Crow, scare the piss out of god himself.

Wait, what?

We mortal beings can threaten the omniscient, omnipotent creator of everything? Apparently.

But the LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. ⁶ The LORD said, "If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. ⁷ Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other."

Maybe I did get that right as a child. Sure kills the whole "omnipotent" thing, though.

*I switched to chrome because explorer was crashing every 5 minutes, but for some reason I can no longer link the picture itself. annoying.

It's a Feature, Not a Bug

omnipotence, omnipotent, god, bible, christianity, christian, atheism, atheist, pagan,
Makarios explores what he essentially describes as a glitch in human design, a glitch that I would call a feature.

I stated in my last post, "Jesus didn't come to earth to establish a new religion. He came to bring healing to a broken relationship. The relationship was broken by disobedience BUT the disobedience was the result of a lack of, or perhaps even an inability to love our Creator as He is worthy to be loved. As with any relationship, when we love ourselves the most, we serve ourselves over and before those who we claim to love. That's too bad because one of our primary goals in life is to love God and to enjoy Him forever.

here's my problem with that. supposedly, our creator created us. if his entire goal is to be worshipped, and he made us for that purpose, why did he make us lacking or unable to worship him properly?

this just doesn't make any sense. god is omnipotent and omniscient. therefore, he knows how to make humans capable of worshipping him properly, and is capable of doing so. the fact that god did not make us capable of worshipping him properly means one of three things: (a) he is incapable of doing so, (b) he is unwilling to do so, (c) god did not create us.

(a) is an impossibility if god is omnipotent. if god is omnipotent, god as christians imagine him does not exist. this does not prove the nonexistence of any deity, simply the deity as imagined by christians. i don't really know if jews and muslims picture an omnipotent god or not. this leaves the field open for pagan gods, so win for you, my pagan friends!

(b) this isn't really worth spending much time on, because it automatically falls into the category of "ineffable", which is just another way of saying "shut up, that's why!"

(c) this option gets really weird really fast, and could possibly be a subheading of (a). Yhwh, the god of the christians, does exist, but did not create us. Either some other god created us, or abiogenesis did its thing, and Yhwh merely found us here. The purpose Yhwh put us to has nothing to do with the purpose we were created for (or the purpose we just don't have), hence all the troubles between humans and Yhwh. It's not our fault, it's not Yhwh's fault, humans are just a bad fit for Yhwh's needs. This option also requires that Yhwh is not omnipotent. Pagans win again!

It's the omnipotence, really. If christianity had not declared god omnipotent, we wouldn't have these issues. You don't have to explain the failures and limitations of a limited god, but with Yhwh, there's just no way around the logical gaps.

Omnipotence- The Pros and Cons

god, omnipotence, omnipotent, religion, christian, covenant, unbeliever, pagan, atheism, atheist,
One of the things that has always bothered me about the christian god is the supposed quality of omnipotence: almighty or infinite in power, as God.

What bothers me about Yhwh's supposed omnipotence is that every time you turn around you see an example of something that really needs to be fixed. People dying in floods or fires, children being raped, people being tortured, people starving to death, people dying slowly of terrible illnesses. Any reasonable person looking at that is going to experience some serious cognitive dissonance trying to reconcile an omnipotent, loving god with what actually happens here on earth. Some people resolve their cognitive dissonance by retreating into "god is ineffable", some people become atheists. However you do it, eventually you have to reconcile yourself to the inevitable conclusion that either Yhwh doesn't care or Yhwh isn't omnipotent, but he certainly isn't loving and omnipotent.

In my opinion, pagans have the best solution to this problem (without resorting to the "oh, fuck it, I can't believe this shit anymore" of the atheist): specialization rather than omnipotence. Pagan gods and goddesses are like modern day medical professionals. If I have a brain tumor, I want a neurosurgeon, but if I need my hip replaced, that's not the doctor I want in the room. Pagans have different gods and goddesses for every occasion, and they are clearly not omnipotent. Thus, if I ask a pagan why didn't Thor or Zeus or whoever save those people from drowning, I'm not going to create any cognitive dissonance. The answer is simple: it wasn't in their power.

Writers tend to deal with this problem in the same way: they remove the element of omnipotence. Either god is space aliens/humans from the future, vastly more powerful than our bronze age forebears, but not omnipotent, or god is limited in some way. For instance, Stephen R. Donaldson creates a god limited by his own creation in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever. This of course brings up the issue of how does god create a rock so big he can't lift it, but at least we know why we're counting on an antihero to fix things.

Feel free to chime in with your favorite explanation of why god is the way god is. Book recommendations always welcome.