On God

I guess I have a weird perception of God, because of a lot of things, things I won’t go into, but even though there were bouts of time where I didn’t believe, I certainly do now. I could go into the many rhymes and reasons for my faith, but I don’t think this is the time or the place. I know that I have no concrete proof of his existence but that doesn’t mean I have any doubt in my faith. That said, I don’t pin down my faith in any particular religion - not because I doubt the value or the altruism of any of them, but because I can’t get myself to commit to any single one.

I guess what’s also true is that while I’m aware and completely sure in my conviction that a God does exist, I’m almost completely sure that he’s a kind God. I don’t think that the great being or beings that created us somehow expect us to be their servants and worship them all day. I think God would expect respect, and you to simply, have good intentions. I think of him as a father, really. Picture yourself as a father, you wouldn’t expect your children to be your servants, but at the same time you would hope you could teach them to be good people, not only for yourself, and their own good, but because of the betterment of society. Even when a child ISN’T always good, would that make you love them any less? Of course I’m sure anyone would bring up the example that parents do and SHOULD punish their children when they do something wrong, but I don’t think any parent would want their children to go through the pain of hell. And then there’s the example that for some people, this life is hell, but I will address this later.

And, yes, that’s a bit scaled down approach of the whole God-Subject relationship, but scale it up, and it adds a lot of complexity. I think the first thing to note is just how many children he has to look after! Of course he’s not human so his ability is obviously more than ours, but for some reason I can’t imagine any being to be centered on every single one of us, not because it seems undoable, but because it seems so horribly inefficient, and that’s not something I characterize with someone who has as much power as he does. 

Someone here, I think andrew, gave a really good metaphor one time for how we see the world and how God sees it, and it’s really truly always stuck with me, and I tell it to a lot of different people when it comes up.. Basically it goes back to the sunday comics you read when you were a kid. If you put your nose to the paper and looked really close you could see all the comica were made up of little dots or varying sizes and colors - it was just how the printers worked back then. Imagine us as those dots. To us, we see only a limited view of things. Any two dots, even in the same panel of the same comic) may see two very different things - all yellow dots around them, or all small dots,. I think that’s the way we look at the world we look at and make our judgements about existance through that - and why shouldn’t we?! If we can’t go off our experiences than what CAN we go off of? But I think it’s all a bit misleading because take your nose away from the paper and you can see that the whole world isn’t just yellow dots, or small dots, it’s so much more. We can never take our noses away from the comic that is life, but I think HE can. I think he has a purpose for us all, and I think you’re part of that because he wanted you to be the way you were because if you weren’t the picture would be slightly off. This is the way I get myself to be okay with things like death and natural disasters and such.

I guess that leads to what I’m really trying to say- if God DID create you, than why would he create something he didn’t approve of? The being with the ability to create LIFE as we know it… screwed up? I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think any of us are screwups and I don’t think any of us are not how God intended. I don’t think he’s shortsighted enough to know what any of us will become. If there is a God, he knows everything, and isn’t sort of haphazard about it. That said, I think there IS true evil in the world. I don’t believe, however, believe that even evil people don’t have a purpose. Everyone’s a dot, do what you feel is right and good so you can continue to be the best dot you can be. That’s really all any of us can hope for, in my opinion.

(Source: forums.sadface.org)