You might want to read my thoughts on Deist ideas, “My Remarks To a Deist“. Many such posts I’ve written have been inspired by discussions which took place on internet forums in times past. Atheist Forums, Jewish Forums, Christian Forums, even forums for Ex-witches, Pagans, and other types of Online discussion platforms.

Those remarks to a self-professed Deist hold some of my thinking on why the Bible is a part of understanding and knowing God. but I think the biggest accusation that may be leveled against the thinking of both Agnostics and Deists is the quote from Wiesel, and here it is again:

“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference…..And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference -Elie Wiesel”

If God just sets things in motion… and then leaves everything to its own devices, that is not loving. No more than a parent who brings forth a child, and then just leaves it lying on its own on the ground… That indifference guarantees that life does not flourish.

If God doesn’t care whether you interact with Him or not, then that is not love, it is indifference of epic proportions. Like a parent who ignores a child and cares nothing of its worth or relationship, perhaps taking care of the basic necessities, but no more. That is stultifying, life suffocating, indifference.

So if we believe that God cares, loves, gives life, and fathers… then we ought to intuit that He wants to have relationship and nurture His creation, His children.

Some of what I’ve said in the remarks to a Deist:

This would be my answer to all who hold liberal reconstructionist ideas on the Word of God. Let’s call it what it is: calling God a liar …. and then look to what this means for them: that they know nothing of God and cannot. It doesn’t matter, to that person, whether there is a God or not.

If scriptures cannot be trusted to give instruction of who God is and what He is like…. then what? What else is capable of standing the test of of time and culture? One would be left groping as a blind man. And that is what happens to many their whole lives through.

If there weren’t light the darkness would not hold such horror. And it is a horror to not have the life that light gives… everything would wither and die.

There are just not many answers to the big questions of Truth, Existence, and Meaning. Apathy is not an answer. It is giving up. It is the worst form of death, a slow withering death.

But we are left with this: we cannot prove God to anyone. We cannot prove that answer, because we are not given that. What we are given is faith, and faith will prove -against all odds- the truth in reality. We cannot prove that God’s Word is true in the past… we may only prove that it is true in the present and that requires faith for seeing it to the outcome on the continuum. I believe this is one reason He is described as the Living God.

There are no other choices. God is True or He is not.

Perhaps that is why John 3:33 says:
“He who has received His testimony has set his seal to this, that God is true.”

Rules

But let’s talk a bit about what people do with this black and white, watershed forming, pinnacle of decision.
We don’t get to weasel out of deciding whether we judge God to be true or not, but then there are those who try to back-door God’s truth. And these are the people who make up rules… and those who love to have rulesheets to follow to excuse any real relationship to God… or for that matter to each other.

I would never say rules aren’t good, or that that they are bad. Like many things with man’s mark upon them, they are useful tools. That is, until they become weapons.

Rules have a God-given role. Real rules are what we call “law” and a succinct description given by St. Paul is as follows:

Galatians 3:24-26
Wherefore the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith.
But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.
For ye are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus.

Rules have defined lines, which are for training purposes only. Eventually you want to grow up and have mastery enough to produce something of worth. A life worth living. You don’t love by the rules, Love is the rule, the only one that remains in force.

But one of the helpful things about rules that are found in the Law of the Bible is that they use history and principle to define what love is and is not.

And that is no small undertaking.

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This is how I find out whether my idea of love, or of God, is healthy or not. I have had lots of very unhealthy ideas in my life, some which I foisted on others as well as myself. My views of myself, of God, of others, of motivations, of values, all have required ongoing adjustments, and some of the corrections were so painful that if I had to do it over again I think I would have taken any effort possible to have avoided the mistakes in those areas of life. I don’t have Pollyanna ideas that this is “what makes me what I am today” – I could have done without those parts. People around me could have done without them. But we don’t change our past history, we only learn from it… and try to give a better form to the future one.

This will wind up this part of the conversation…but you are more than welcome to continue it in the comments.

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference…..And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference

Elie Wiesel said that. If you aren’t sure of who he is, Elie Wiesel was a Holocaust survivor who came to terms with the horrible things that happened to him and those around him at the Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp. And that quote says something that God wants us to understand about Him. I say God, because he also said some of the same in the teachings of the Bible. But we aren’t ready for that statement yet. Let me backtrack a bit. As usual in this sort of conversation I want to talk about us, because we understand ourselves somewhat more than we understand God.

First, A little About Us and this Conversation

Several things led here for me. Two are fairly recent, with input from two young women at very different places in their lives. One is just starting out, not yet out of High School, but questioning the things she was taught about God, Christianity, and though not calling it by name, Truth. The other is moving into that strange time of life as one approaches one’s thirties, a retrospective, an analysis of what one’s family of origin, teachings of the Church, and personal faith has actually returned in terms of that search for Truth. I capitalize it, because this sort of truth is the metaphysical, the elusive, great all encompassing sort of truth we seek in the final answers of who God is. Some give up on that, but not usually before they have spent some time in the search. So most of us have some experience with that.

I am not sure I am talking to either of them so much as to myself, because it is that underlying impetus that has always been a part of me, to know God, that occupies so much of my mental, and physical efforts. And that quest has been in company with many who are or have been atheists, or materialists, or religionists. The three are not so far apart as you might imagine. Much of what I have encountered and embraced has been “about God” and that is the core of this post, because you rarely come to know God unless you know something “about” God. Not that the information must all come from teachers,preachers, or tomes. Nature has plenty of puzzle pieces, enough to give us an inkling, but also enough information to make us dangerous. That is kind of a joke, but I’m going to let it stand with its grain of truth.

OK, about us. We learn that as little children we have a hard time seeing the world apart from ourselves, and in some ways, especially spiritual ways, I don’t think we manage to get very far from that subjectivity. We think “others” are like ourselves, and spend a lot of painful history finding out how much competition there is in the “selves” walking around. Not wanting to spend too much time on this, but how far are we -really- from two and three year old children? Just better quality masks.

Whether agreed on that, one thing that is quite clear anytime you talk to people about God is how sure they are that God is how they feel(in their own minds) He is. Or He is like what they are familiar with- or what they need Him to be. Invariably it starts with us. I can see one thing in which that is as it should be. We are individual persons, with our own personalities and characteristics, and our own experience of events and others, and all the rest of it that makes up our lives as sentient beings.

That ought to illumine us about something. If we have personal individuality and personalities, then a Creator God ( and all others are too small and inconsequential to bother with), at least has that much. And if God has His own personality and character, then it can not only be a possibility to be known, but it is also “other” than us. We don’t get to say we automatically can know who God is and accurately know things about Him…. not without His relating to us in some way.

Not anymore than someone would presume to know us, without relating to us and allowing us to express ourselves to them.

Now is the time to look at that beginning quote. Much of what we revolve around, indeed if you believe certain thinkers like Rollo May or ( as in the book I’m re-reading right now,Scott Peck) or even the Beatles, all that we center on.

So here is what I am going to say about all this:

We can’t possibly know anything about God, without Him revealing those things about Himself. He is very “other” than us, and we can’t project our emotions or thoughts on Him with any sort of accuracy. There are things we can presume, in the way the Bible puts it:

Psalm 94:9
He who planted the ear, does He not hear? He who formed the eye, does He not see?

If we are beings, we can see that God is a being. More of a logical sequence than a projection.

The truth of Wiesel’s statement about indifference as the opposite of life and love, both aspects of God, finds correlation in Revelation 3:16
“So because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of My mouth.”

What Type of Conclusions, Then?

One of the universals, and there are very few, is the response of all living things to love. God states that He is love, and that would all make sense. Jesus stated that He is life, so again, you can see the tandem existence of life and love, the only remaining problem with this becoming the definition of what love looks like. While that isn’t small in philosophical efforts to define, the 1 Corinthians 13 definition is not only sufficiently challenging, but realistically practical enough to merit consideration. And more than that, real attempts to live by it.

Thus far, though I haven’t said anything earth shaking or ground breaking. We can all pretty much reside peacefully on that page: God is loving, He is lifegiving, He cares.

Where the division often comes is in the validity of the information which more specifically outlines things about God.

Like the Bible.
But that is for you to chew on for awhile. Let me think more about where I’m going with these thoughts. In the meantime, I invite you to please express how you see this discussion going, or where you have gone with it yourself. Or just wait until we take it up again…. probably after I repost things that might add to the conversation.

I’m probably going to meander around this landscape for awhile.

- 19% of US internet users are Creators, who publish blogs, maintain websites, or upload self-created photos, podcasts or videos on social sites.

- 25% of US internet users are Critics, who post ratings and reviews of products and services on user review sites, comment on someone else’s blogs or contribute to online forums or wikis.

- 12% of US internet users are Collectors, who create metadata that’s shared with the entire community, by aggregating RSS feeds in a feed reader, by saving or tagging URLs on a social bookmarking service, or by voting for websites on a social voting site.

- 25% of US internet users are Joiners, who visit and maintain profiles on social networking sites.

- 48% of US internet users are Spectators, who read blogs, online forums and customer ratings/ reviews, listen to podcasts and watch peer-generated video.

- 44% of US internet users are Inactives, who do not participate at all in social media activities.

So which one are you?