Cracks in my Faith

I created this blog a year ago, though I have some fundamental friends who argue only God can create.  All I know is the idea emerged in my brain, I named a blog after the idea, and something was here in cyberspace that was not here before.  In the past year I have written 36 posts, or about 3 per month.  If you are reading this I thank you and encourage you to interact with me via comments.  Or, you can become a follower and get notices when I write another post.  But, for me to seek “followers” somehow seems hypocritical or at least oxymoronic.

So a year later I see very deep cracks in my faith.  My family was Christian.  My father was a Presbyterian minister.  When I was a kid if the church doors were open we were there, and we had to obey and listen and learn.  I was “saved” in junior high and have been regarded as a man of faith ever since.  As a principal and as a school superintendent I would offer a blessing before faculty meals.  I did my best to follow the tenets of my belief in my practice as a public school administrator.

And then I retired and had a lot of time on my hands.  I was totally rattled, totally, when the German Wings airliner went down in the French Alps killing all 150 aboard.  You remember:  the co-pilot locked the pilot out of the cockpit and aimed the plane straight down from 38,000 feet.  Passengers and crew had about 9 minutes knowing they were going to die.  9 minutes is a long time.  I assumed all or almost all of them were frantically praying for an intervening miracle.  They called on the God who parted the Red Sea and made it Flood for 40 days, and created the world and the universe and arranged to have a virgin conceive and arranged to raise people from the dead and turn water into wine and feed 5,000 from a loaf of bread.  They called on Him or Her to save them from a maniac.  But, he chose not to.  Can there possibly be a scenario where a loving creator allows that many of his creations to die all at once in a horrible explosion?  It hit me suddenly and hard:  No God who claims to love us would allow that to happen.  Not that tragedy and many more.

So my faith cracked a little.  Then I started reading believers and atheists.  Guess what.  The atheists make more sense.  Believers simply say I believe, I believe there is a God, I believe there is a God that loves me and hears my prayers, and I believe he can turn a deaf ear and let me live in pain or die horribly because that is his plan, but I do not believe he has evil plans.  At this point I am ready to say that if you do not recognize this as BS then waterfront property in Kansas is going to look good to you.

The cracks got wider.  There is no way a sane, thoughtful, educated person can read the Bible and conclude it is true.  I took a yellow marker and started reading.  I highlighted every passage I knew conflicted with a scientific or historical fact.  I played along with angels in skies and bushes burning and chiseled stone tablets, but could not allow a 7 day creation story when we know so much more.  I could not allow the logic of creating all life on this planet then simply watching 99% of all those life forms become extinct.  I could not allow that God created man in his own image and gave him the right to subdue the earth, but made sure that only about 15% of the planet is available for this chosen life form to survive on.  Something is seriously askew.  Either my beliefs are false, or God is mean and a practical joker.  If 75% of this planet is water and He wants us to thrive, why don’t we have flippers and gills?

And then I started listening, really listening to the believers.  What I had always heard for my entire life now sounded more and more like pure crap.  We never walk alone?  God will never give me more than I can handle?  Our prayers are answered, each and every one of the more than 7 billion prayers that float silently somewhere, will be answered.  But when the answer comes it may not be what we want and it may not come at all.  Really? Then why pray?  Because I have faith God hears me.  Yeah, but you have about a 33% chance of getting what you asked for and a 33% chance of being ignored, and a 33% chance of getting something you do not want at all.  Given these odds I would recommend not praying as a much more reasonable approach.  Guess all those folks who died on the German Wings flight got exactly the opposite they prayed for.  All of them.

Though people say the Bible is God’s word it would at best be a dictation from God through the ears to the hands of humans.  Errors arise.  If a bunch of uneducated men from the Bronze Age write it, even with good intentions, then there will be even more errors.  If God actually wrote the Bible He made a lot of mistakes.  I mean a lot.  The inconsistencies, the varying accounts, the falsehoods are all over the place.  So, if it is the literal word of God, God is a moron.  If not, if it is truly human error we observe, then why read any of it?

So let’s talk timeline.  The oldest Jewish writings are circa 1400 BCE.  The oldest writings that are Biblical in nature are from around 800 BCE.  But Hindu writings dating from 1500 BCE are preserved, Gathas writings from1500-500 BCE, and the Rigveda from 1700 BCE.  Most amazing is that we have the Sumerian Gilgamesh from 2000 BCE.  In other words, the existence of the Jewish and Christian written story seems to begin around 2,800 years ago.  The Hindu story begins about 3500 years ago, and the Gilgamesh narrative is the oldest still at about 4,100 years ago.

So, let’s say there is one God and He/She created everything, why didn’t He or She reveal himself/herself to humans all at the same time?  Why allow various gods and deities and demigods to claim a foothold?  And if there is something divine about the Jewish narrative we have inherited, why is it the last one to begin if the God was first on the scene? Leads one more and more to proclaim that man made god, not the other way around.

And if it is blasphemy to suggest that the God of the Old and New Testament is a human invention, God could settle all that in a heartbeat.  Just show up!  Perform some miracle and identify yourself.  There are enough cell phone cameras to document the event and we could settle all this once and for all.  No more religious wars, no more money raising campaigns, no more killing of pagans.  We would all know.  There is more anecdotal evidence of UFO’s than there is the presence of a god.

That won’t happen because a central tenet of the believers is that God works in mysterious ways and we are not privy to his plans.  So anyone who claims to know God’s plans is crazy.  Therefore, it takes an enormous amount of faith to believe that this God really exists and remain sane.  More so that he has a plan.  Even more so to accept him as loving as we view the pain and misfortune all around us.  Why is childhood cancer part of his plan?  That is just mean.

It gets even harder for me when I attempt to juxtapose the notion that God is love and that he loves us as his creation and his children, and yet he is very willing to let us die, and he is very willing to cast us into an eternal hell if we do not do as we are told to do.  That does not sound like love.  That sounds like punishment and damnation.  And anyone who crosses God gets dead including Pharaoh’s army, folks in Sodom and Gomorrah, everyone at the time of the flood, etc.  Not so much love for humans in any of those settings.

And God holds a grudge.  Poor Adam and Eve ate of the tree of knowledge.  They were told not to, but they did it anyway, much as my kids do.  But not only did they pay a severe penalty (they were kicked out of the house and forced to change their wardrobe and get a job) but from then on child birth was going to hurt like hell.  How mean a parent is that?  Even worse, that punishment extends to today and covers all of us long after Adam and Eve are dead and gone.  That is just not ethical.

And what is this BS about God opposing homosexuality and abortion?  The out and out punishment for divorce stated clear as hell is death by stoning.  Homosexuality and abortion are much more muddy references.  And why didn’t Jesus address those issues directly while He was here?  As an omniscient son of god surely he knew conflict was coming along these lines, as well as along the lines of slavery and gender equality.  But no, he spoke nothing about future issues that currently tear us apart.  Not so omniscient to me.  In fact, he spoke in ways that assumed slavery and women's subservient role were present and would last.  That is not what I would expect from a God of all time.  That is a God of the past, a God of the status quo, a God of 2,000 years ago.  I am of the opinion that looking to the Bible for guidance on science, as in archeology and astronomy and physics or for guidance on human relationships and culture as in marriage, divorce, child rearing, abortion, race relations, gender issues is as nuts as looking to the Bible for hints on computer repair or even internal combustion engines.  This book addressed issues from centuries ago and is obsolete in all those areas and more.

I am now nesting with the thought that God is an imaginary friend whom many have abandoned as they matured intellectually.  Heaven is more like never-never land, a mythical place that does not really exist, and the same is true for Hell.  Man invented God to solve some problems and answer some questions, but now that we grow ever closer to solving a lot of problems via science and math, we do not need imaginary beings to help.  We live.  We love.  We die.  If billions of people have transcended earth to another place and/or dimension that we call heaven, should we not have heard from at least one or two of them after they were gone?  What are the coordinates for heaven anyway?  Nowhere in the known universe, unless like the Klingon war birds heaven is cloaked.

And why would we be expected to give an all knowing, all powerful god some of our money?  Surely the Almighty can handle His own PR efforts.