Forgiven Yet?
Maybe sleeping in on Sundays is a defense mechanism against creeping religiosity or something. Being awake — yes, Sat/Sun was "a perfect day", yay — has left me far too much time to ponder things I’ve struggled to forget.
But it hasn’t been all bad. First of all, I realized that (and this might be why it’s on my mind so much) it’s now fifteen years since my personal Exodus, my only-half-forcible ejection from the warm lap of the Holy Father Church. (If there’s a Holy Mother involved in it anywhere, I’m sure She would have bailed when the Church decided to start mass-slaughtering its own sons and daughters. Mothers ain’t down with that shit; I know. And before someone claims "that was then this is now", which statement I’m surprised the HFC hasn’t copyrighted yet, let me remind you that Mothers have extremely long memories.)
It was after Easter, just after my own Confirmation (which is where they admit that they signed you up as a baby, and give you a very grudging chance to get out now that you can think for yourself, because, you know, thirteen-year-olds are totally rational.)
And before you ask, I went through with Confirmation for the same reason I suspect most people do: I was a Believer. I’d said my prayers every single night since I could remember–at least since I was five–without fail. That very Easter, I’d sat down and asked myself, in all seriousness, would I let myself be killed if someone told me to renounce my faith? Knowing it would hurt terribly, and probably ruin my parents for life, and hurt everyone I know, and maybe even they wouldn’t know why I’d died? And the answer was an easy, black-and-white, bring-it-fuckin’-on "yes".
Joan of Arc, and many other saints, were somewhat special, yes. But mostly, I think, they were just young. Flaming-sword convictions are really not so hard, when you’ve not yet seen the real torture, and worse, the scarring, that Life hands out. I honestly think you could have tortured me to death fifteen or twenty years ago and I’d have gone screaming Jesus Jesus all the way. But I digress, I suppose.
After all that, the breakup seems so anti-climactic, now. I was fourteen, having family problems (oo shock), and depressed and full of doubt about everything–except God. God was still easy; God was in my head every night before bed like clockwork. God was a heavy-duty, easy reason to be good and be sorry when you weren’t, and nothing seemed simpler. All the shitheads I knew, and was starting to see in the adults around me–in church, too–didn’t shake my faith; they just made me realize that most people were faking it, which was really no surprise. Hell, Jesus alludes to the same; why shouldn’t it still be true? Anyway, the Church and I weren’t on great terms, but it was where I grew up, where I was baptized and confirmed and went to elementary school, so even though I was in high school, I stuck around. Most kids never finished their two years of catechism, after-school classes not being too popular in high school, but I did. Many more dropped out when faced with the Retreat; I went. I hated dresses and ceremonies, but I did my Confirmation with pride. And then they kicked me out.
I wasn’t on good terms with the Parish anyway, to be fair. The last Rector, who’d gotten me in trouble a lot as a kid for "asking Devilish questions" (hey, I read a lot) had recently been fired for being a drunk, when a little kid doing a reading had taken a sip out of the water glass on the podium & thrown up everywhere because it was vodka (or something similar). Then my family had been kicked out of the parish for sending me to public high school. So maybe they weren’t that mad at me anyway; and the nun who did it was a first-class royal biznatch, no lie. She used to get upset and just scream strings of curse-words at her classes (we thought it was hilarious at the time, of course)…but yeah. I came in one Saturday afternoon, no reason, no masses; I had been walking in the area and thought I’d stop in and sit a bit and pray. And this nun ran over when she saw me praying and grabbed my arm and said, "How dare you come to the House of God dressed like that!"
"I’m wearing jeans and a plain t-shirt," I told her, in case she was blind.
"You’re wearing all black! In the House of God!"
"So are you!" (She was one of those nuns who didn’t wear a wimple, so she really was, was the funny thing.)
She began to pull me towards the door. "You will not sit here and disrespect this place with your vile costumes!"
Sister Diana was strong, as mean people often are. I thought about hitting her, and I regretted not doing it at first, but now of course, I’m glad I didn’t — she wasn’t worth juvy. So before I knew it I was outside — I can remember it being the most amazingly beautiful late-spring day, probably late May, warm and blindingly sunny, with the newest flowers open all around the church — and she’s screaming at me, and there are a few people around, in the parking-lot, and one of the priests, a nice guy, young, can’t remember his name, he walks up behind her and puts a hand on her shoulder. She’s heaving and red-faced, and so, I imagine, was I.
"I think you’d better go," he said.
In my mind, he adds, "And don’t come back," but in all probability, he never said that, or at least it seems unlikely. Anyway, I did go back a while later, and the new rector pulled me aside and told me that my family was no longer members of the church and I should leave. Maybe he meant the incident last year over the schools; I don’t know; but on my way out Sister Diana smiled the nastiest smile you can imagine, like the Cheshire Cat on a bad trip, and said, "I got you excommunicated, you stupid whore." (Maybe not "whore", but she swore at me, I know, because my teenage brain lit up like Vietnam with the horrible irony of it. But it’s funny that the exact words didn’t matter enough for me to remember them for certain.)
Now, I was a kid. It was five years before I thought to check with the Bishop’s office in Detroit and see if I’d really been excommunicated, and to find out that of course I hadn’t; just kicked out of one church. But oh, by then, the damage was so done.
See, I did go looking for another church, figuring that my old one was just Evil, though of course by now I know that those little dramas crown most churches, like scarlet letters of the ego-stroking profanity that most of them really are. But finding a faith was only the skin of the problem: it was the search for a new church that finally killed my actual faith. See, I always had problems with Catholicism, problems that I’d always planned on fixing from within (so as not to piss off God, see). The Church was sexist, and mean to kids, always trying to scare them (and other weak people) into believing and behaving, instead of giving all the perfectly good reasons that even I could see to do what Jesus preached (which was to do what he did, but Catholics don’t like this view of it either).
Don’t kill people because it kills a part of you. Don’t lie because it screws up all your relationships. Don’t steal because you don’t want to be stolen from. DUH, I always thought. You don’t need to make little kids cry at night for fear of Hell and the Devil to teach them those things; kids are very reasonable. And kids, I always maintained, all love Jesus by default; scaring them into it is just pointless.
And the Church was so desperately afraid of questions! And I loved questions. My parents were inquisitive people; my Dad loved to debate anything, emphatically including religion. And as I said, I read a LOT. But I learned the hard way not to ask the questions I had to the people who were supposedly there specifically to answer them, because it just got me in trouble, over and over and over again. I probably would have flunked school from standing in the corner all the time, if I hadn’t been several grades behind where the State said I should be anyway. (Stupid State; what do those tests know about your level of religious knowledge?)
So when it was over between us, I resolved to find a new Church that I could live with, one that didn’t stomp on questions and didn’t lie to kids and didn’t say nasty things about me because I was a girl (though by that time, I was doing my level best not to be — God obviously loved boys better, so maybe if I acted like a boy I’d get some points, eh?). I also would prefer, I decided, a church that liked people to read and learn, and preferably one that wasn’t so hung up on sex being evil. (I was fourteen. Sex, or at least the idea of it, was right under Jesus in my estimation. ;)
Well, that knocked out all of Catholicism, fast enough to make my head spin. Then pretty much the rest of mainstream Christianity followed like dominoes, once I learned to ask the questions that mattered to me right up front. (I once went through three churches in a day.) I started to branch out. I stuck with an Episcopalian church for about a year (probably no surprise there), even admitting to myself at the time that I didn’t want to abandon Christianity altogether and they seemed like the last hope — but inevitably in happened, and my schizm with them put the nail in Christianity for good: You NEED Christ to go to heaven, they said. But only about a tenth of the world is Christian, I said. Did God create the rest of them just so they could burn? Unfortunately, yes, they said. That’s why we have to tell as many of them as possible. (Don’t worry, one of the more well-read priests told me, Dante proves that God isn’t really nasty to people who didn’t accept Christ. They just can’t get into Heaven.) What about Gandhi? Sorry. What about Zen monks? Well…yeah, too bad there. Heaven is a Christians-only affair, and what’s more, it’s the only affair, or so I was expected to believe. (A few nice old ladies whispered to me that they thought that everybody’s heaven was real, and that people who didn’t believe in a heaven would be pleasantly surprised to find out that they had one anyway. But the church itself was not okay with accepting me based on a stated belief that denied the necessity of Christ for salvation, period; and I was through being a member of a religion that I had to hide my own true beliefs from.)
In short (too late, I know), things just got WAY too illogical at that point. I became really upset that people were making up these giant metaphysical realities and just acting as though they were true with no proof, and only the flimsiest of evidence. If I was going to get tangled up in another church, it was going to be one that at least had a plausible worldview, that at least didn’t assume something that was borderline ridiculous in its logical arrogance, like the fact that "God wants" everyone to believe a certain story. I really liked one of the Episcopal priests; we talked regularly and he never put me down for asking questions, so I was extra upset when he couldn’t answer my question about the necessity of Christ / salvation thing except to say, "Because that’s what God wants."
"Who the fucking hell do you think you are," I remember screaming as I headed for the door. "You’re either a liar or a lunatic if you think you know what God wants!"
Well, believe it or not, knowing what I knew at that point, the rest of the religions went pretty fast, because every single one I found that was even plausible for me to try (i.e. it let women, or Americans, in) has a requirement that you believe that their way of doing things is the only way to go to Heaven [or Insert Salvation Metaphor Here]. Even the really wild ones fell through my fingers pretty quickly — Qaballah, Enochian/OTO, Ba’hai, Hinduism, Buddhism (close but no cigar) … Everybody was just following their own made-up story of How It Was and Why [Insert Supreme Being Here] Liked Them Best.
And they still are today, emphatically including most "atheists". It’s like a big competitive game of Make Believe, and it would seem silly and harmelss if it wasn’t often so real and so nasty, as played by grown-ups with grown-up stakes.
But to say I don’t understand why people play that game would be like saying you don’t understand why people do drugs — it’s obvious. They play the game because it gives them a ladder to climb, to ascend through the misty morass of their minds, and reach the place where you feel that connection with "God" that I felt when I was young, like putting your finger in the light-socket at the ceiling of your own internal cathedral. The feeling, the knowing, which for so many years I would have died for without question. Whatever that is, and no matter how idiotically misguided (and sometimes evil) the people who claim to know how to quantify it, that connection is still precious to people, maybe the most precious thing there is — and that, I can understand. Even from here.
Is it real, that feeling/knowing, that connection, in the not-a-psychological-thingy sense? I have no idea. I will confess (not to mince words) that my experiences of it have been few and far-between since I stopped attending masses and pondering sacred metaphors all day (though I’m sure that going back to those activities couldn’t bring it back for me, either — every few years, I still try, and every time, I regret it). Though, the handful of experiences I *have* had have been very real to me, and though there was no metaphor attached to them at all, they felt just as "spiritual", in the revelatory-clarity, white-light and deep-inner-peace sense, as anything I’ve felt through a religious framework. So maybe it is real.
When I’m at my best, I look at all that I’ve read and learned and I tell myself to stick with it, stick with the principles that make sense and the stories that point to truth (not ego-gratification, aggrandization of self over others, and pure made-up bullshit designed to keep butts in the pews). Stick with your inner Path, even if you can only see one step ahead at any given time, and you’ll get there; you have a better chance that way than the blind followers ever will, if there’s any justice to it. Trust truth, not people, and not the monkey-mind. Above all, pay attention to this world, which holds all the clues the Creator could have possibly intended for you. Do as Krishna said; remember that the task before you, be it peeling potatoes or writing a midterm, is the task that God set before you, and do it as though your soul depends on it.
On bad days, I want to curl up with my old rosary and die, start over, go back to where God was real.
And since there’s no way I can make this post "not too long", here’s something else: A poem I read that I immediately wanted to mail to all the Christians I know, past and present and future:
Abou Ben Adhem, by Leigh Hunt (1784-1859)
Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)
Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,
Adn saw, within the moonlight in his room,
Making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,
An angel writing in a book of gold: –
Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,
And to the presence in the room he said,
"What writest thou?" — The vision rais’d its head,
And with a look made of all sweet accord,
Answer’d, "The names of those who love the Lord."
"And is mine one?" asked Abou. "Nay, not so,"
Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,
But cheerily still, and said, "I pray thee then,
Write me as one that loves his fellow men."
The angel wrote, and vanish’d. The next night
It came again with a great wakening light,
And show’d the names whom love of God had blest,
And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest.
word.
-pd
17 devoted students of Roshi accepted this page in 0.527 seconds without moving, or saying a word.
Go you!
Wow, your “going heretic” story is pretty dramatic, if it was less intense you probably wouldn’t be so bothered by religion these days.
My tale is much smaller and less entertaining. Like you I was a good catholic kid, went to a catholic school (an augustinian one), prayed every day, confessed regularly and read the bible often. Then one day when I was fourteen (maybe thirteen, I don’t really remember) I thought about free will and damnation and concluded that the christian god was illogical (my reasoning was: we are made by god with free will, free will give us the choice to be damned, then god is responsible for that possibility (hey he is the omniscient omnipotent creator, not me), after all he could’ve created a different universe without either damnation or free will). After that moment I just became atheist. These days I have other lines of reasoning to question god (I like to collect then to argue with christians and make them angry, it’s too funny), but I still don’t believe in god or in the supernatural.
Now I’m curious about something: why do you think buddhism is close but no cigar? After I became a buddhist (soto zen school) I found that most (if not all) don’t know that different buddhist schools are much more different in practice and belief than different kinds of abrahmic religions. Many buddhists I know don’t even consider it a religion because there is almost no supernatural beliefs in it (in core buddhism, that is, some interpretations are way to heavy on the magic side of buddhism). I’m still an atheist and I don’t believe in an immortal soul or even karma as supernatural guiding force, but I don’t particularly need to disbelieve in such things: i just doesn’t matter. Anyway I should probably post about myself in my blog instead of cluttering yours ;)
The Catholic Church really screwed up. Starting from the days when it became a secular power (Caesaropapism), it became corrupt. Augustine, although he tried to answer the questions of his day with what he had on hand, introduced many ideas foreign to the Christianity of his time, and these ideas unfortunately became the norm in the Latin-Carthaganian “school of thought”, purgatory being one of them. Luther and the Protestant reformation could see the abuses and corruption within the Catholic Church, but already they were so far removed from pre-medieval or non-Latin Christianity that they ended up throwing out the baby with the bath water by re-inventing Christianity. The dualism of Augustine also lead to a Latin school of mystical theology, and when that mixed with the reason of scholasticism, it became very distorted.
What Western Christianity needs is a flavor for Christianity. There are so many non-Christian ideas in Western Christianity that no one is able to tell what is authentic and what is not.
There are two other schools of thought within Patristics aside from Latin-Carthaganian: Helleno-Alexandrian and Cyrio-Antiochian. There is another historical mystical movement opposing the Augustian-Aquinas mysticism: Hesychasm.
If you want a good example of the Christianity you never knew existed, I would recommend “The Mystical Theology of the Orthodox Church” by Vladimir Lossky. If you can get through that without going cross-eyed, then you would see what other more authentic versions of Christianity there are out there, exclusive from the history of the Catholic Church. The God of the Orthodox Church is very different from the God of the Catholic Church. You’ll also see how easy it was for William Johnston to see “Christian Zen” in this, and how it does not make any sense.
God did give us a choice to be damned, and a choice to express love through obedience, and we had full authority and freedom to make that choice. Without that choice, we would be robots. The greatest gift God can give is to be like Himself.
Great explanation, and I will *definitely* check out the book — my husband’s drooling about it too, even though he’s in the middle of about six books on ancient Egyptian religious practices, so that’s saying something.
You lost me at the last three sentences of course, but you knew you would. ;)
Hey Daniel — I hereby copyright your story; you can no longer post about it in your own blog. ;)
First, there was so much about Buddhism that didn’t seem relevant to me, like mandatory vegetarianism. (I’m type-O with almost double the average normal iron content in my blood, so vegetarianism is strongly contraindicated, plus it would mean a lifetime of pills to avoid anemia and other problems in my case.) Also, what types of Buddhism I found that could be reasonably practiced in middle America all suffered from a core error that I later identified in Christianity and elsewhere: The need to “be a follower”. Christ and Buddha both admonished people to quit following them and BE like them, quit quoting them and strive to see things as they did, and very few, if any, people in either denomination listened. Most Buddhists, like Christians, think that Enlightenment (Christhood) is something the Buddha does, and your job is to follow the rules of the people who set up the system of Buddha-worship, just like following the rules of the Christian church — neither of which seem to have hardly anything to do with their founding patron’s core message anymore.
(I’m currently a very non-religious Taoist, I suppose, in that it’s my current ideal philosophy/science, and one of the reasons I think this happened is philosophical Taoism’s ability to avoid the above problem. You can’t worship The Way, at least not easily!)
Thanks!
Nana nanana, you copyrighted just that trailler, the director’s cut is now posted there: http://daniel-yokomizo.livejournal.com/20239.html.
Now, just a few comments on your buddhist experience. First WTF?!?, I mean I know that those schools of buddhism exist but I never met them personally so it always surprises me (on a side note you seem to be bound to meet those especimens, your catholic experience was bizarre, psychopeople you’ve met were idiots and even the buddhists!). Secondly vegetarianism isn’t mandatory in many schools of buddhism, I’m not vegetarian for many years (I was once before I was buddhist) and even the Dalai Lama eats meat. Lastly, I urge you to read about zen, it’s much more centered on practice and self-enlightenment that most can possible imagine. Hell, if you put it in a wishlist I’ll buy you “The zen-doctrine of no mind”, the best book on zen ever.
To Sabbath:
If god made us like him, we would be able to create an universe of our own with a bunch of people-thingies and offer them the choice to either worship us or be pounded in the ass by some guy painted in red for eternity. Also we would be omniscient and omnipotent. BTW this god of yours has serious confidence issues, after all he can’t handle rejection without sending people to eternal suffering? Also it’s like the “choice” that the mob gives: one that nobody can refuse without a world of pain.
Thank you for the questions, Mr. Yokomizo. God has an essence and an energy. The angels and people were made to share in God’s energy. If, as you mention, and rightly criticise, people were exact duplicates of God, then they would be all God. Duplicates of a perfect being would actually be one and the same thing. A deified being shares in God’s energy, becoming like god. But both beings, the God by nature and god by grace, are still two different beings. We do in fact create all sorts of things, we are not stuck in an instinctive nature. We can override our instincts when ever we want (suicide—instinct of self-preservation). Animals, for example, only follow their instincts and can not “create” something new. As for creating out of nothing, that is possible for a deified person, but not a fallen one. God did not make creation to rule over something—you are thinking like a Roman Catholic—but so that he can share himself.
We are clearly in a fallen state. God did not make humankind in the state it is in now. We do not share in God’s energy to the degree we were intended to. The whole purpose of the incarnation and redemption was to provide a way for fallen people to find deification again.
Both a fallen state and a graceful deified state are facts of reality. God could force people into an intimate union with himself (his energy), but that is not what he wants, as we learn from prophets and apostles. We would lose our free choice, essentially become “de-humanized”. If an angel or person chooses not to live in synergy with God, then they have full leave to suffer the consequences of that decision. Those consequences in turn should compel people to return to God, which it often does. That is why the world is not paradise right now. The kingdom of heaven is established inside us by union with God, not around us, yet.
God did not give us a gift that would destroy us. He gave us full independence, and we are now learning responsibility for that independence. We are not sources for our existence in ourselves. We need God to exist. Synergy with God means becoming gods, any other spiritual motion means losing that synergy and, well, basically falling apart.
God knew what would happen by making angels and people, that many would turn away. But many more would come closer to Him. You can not say that you would have done that a better way because the whole plan has not spun out yet. The picture is not yet complete.
B– Okay. This reply got WAY TOO LONG, plus it covered a whole bunch of the stuff that writing this initial post and reading your responses to it made me want to get down anyway, so I posted my reply, and some further explication, in a new post. That way it’ll be easier for you guys to keep talking to each other here, without me butting in with a freaking novella. ;)
[...] post was originally a comment in response to a really good discussion thread going on in the first Forgiven Yet? post, but it got too long and lent itself naturally to being the follow-up to that post that I [...]
I was worried to continue this discussion here (after all it’s not my blog or anything) but if PD is ok with that so am I. Anyway, here I’m just posting my reaction to you (Sabbath), anything else I’ll post on the new post or in my blog or some other place.
Now let me be blunt: you talk too much and around the argument. Why do heaven or angels must be summoned to be placed in the middle of this discussion? My argument is simple and direct, I’ll focus on it and on nothing else. Here is the list of my premises, they’re what most christians believe, so I think you agree with all of them:
1. God exists, is omnipotent (or at least was when the universe was created by him), omniscient (or at least wiser and smarter than any human being) and follows a human-like morality (i.e. so we can label him just, good or whatever, like almost all christianity does).
2. God defined a set of guidelines for humanity to follow. These guidelines were are known to us (the specific guidelines are irrelevant for this discussion).
3. Humans that fail to follow these guidelines (either them all or a subset, again it’s irrelevant) are damned by god (directly or indirectly).
4. God created us with all our limitations and potentials including free will.
Any problem with these premises? Moving on:
4. From 1 and 4 we can infer that god could created any kind of universe and any kind of humans he wanted. He also knew the possible consequences of his choices and could’ve changed any of the parameters to create a different pair of universe and humans that avoided anything he wanted to avoid. I don’t want to get into the “knowing the future vs. free will” problem with omniscience, I’m just saying that the he was in full control of his design and went on with it anyway.
5. From 2, 3 and 4 we can infer that there’s a non-null probability that a human fails to follow his guidelines and is damned. If it were different it wouldn’t be true free will. Also God was aware of this fact and went on with this choice (i.e. both free will and damnation in the same universe) anyway.
6. From 1 and 2 we can infer that the guidelines are arbitrary and god could’ve chosen different ones. If not he’s not truly omnipotent. I’m not interested in his motivation, I’m only saying that he isn’t limited in his choice of guidelines.
7. From 1 and 3 we can infer that god doesn’t need people to be damned (otherwise he isn’t omnipotent) but still chooses to damn them. This universe could be entirely damnation free and god wouldn’t suffer from it.
8. From 1 to 4 we can infer that god made the universe (with all it’s rules, laws of physics and limitations), humans (with free will, passions, desires and fears, or at least the possibility of having those), the guidelines and damnation. The possibility of damnation was his choice since the beginning, he could just drop it and keep the rest as it was. So he made the game, the rules, the players and the punishment for not following the rules.
9. From 1 we can infer that there’s no need for neither of the game (i.e. the universe), the rules, the players nor the punishment to exist, and without any of those there wouldn’t be damnation. An omnipotent god is self-sufficient and has no needs.
Again, any problem with these? They’re entirely based on the premises and don’t say anything about god’s intent (which I don’t care about) or line of reasoning. They just show that it was (and still is) all under his absolute control. The conclusion is pretty simple:
10. So I say it’s his fault in the first place that damnation is a possibility and isn’t fair to make faulty players and punish them. Isn’t just or good (in human terms) to have this reality as is. So there can’t exist a god that satisfies all the premises, which eliminates the god of almost all abrahmic religions.
Don’t get me wrong but I believe you’ll either won’t post anything at all, just start talking about something else or say that god works in mysterious ways. In the past fourteen years I never found anyone that succesfully addressed those points; all I ever asked was a clear and direct objection to either the premises or the conclusion: most of the arguments are “but god exists and is good, therefore you’re wrong” or “you’re wrong but I can’t really tell you why”. Let’s just say that I’m too cynic about this subject and the only purpose I draw from this kind of discussion these days is to amuse myself when I see christians contradict themselves and their chosen bible with their answers. So please, prove me wrong using logic instead of vagueness and preaching.
Going over the premises:
1. I agree with everything else but the words “human like morality”. Just because humans think it is good does not mean God has to.
2. agreed.
3. “damned by God” means God performed a judgment. This premise looks at the guidelines as a law, and transgressors of the law should be punished just because they broke the law. This thought entered Christian theology from the Romans, and is by no means representative of the whole. In Eastern Christianity, sin is looked at as a sickness that needs to be healed. Suffering is because of sin, not impose as punishment for sin.
4. I don’t like the wording of this premise because it could mean that the state which humankind is in now is the exact one God made them in. The entire existence of Christianity is to reverse a “fall”. We are going to run into a difference between Western and Eastern theology here too about what exactly “fall” means. We need to determine here whether we are speaking of humans in their natural or fallen state.
Going over the following points by given number:
4. If we are going to get into the mind of God here, let us at least look at the whole picture and not just the first parts. You mention humans as God wanted or intended. There is to be a general resurrection, judgment, and then a completely new cosmos. I do not think that we can discuss what God wants or intended until we can determine the end product of humanity. We know from revelation that they way things are now is not what God wants (ie fallen), but now is not the final destination.
5. The guideline are not arbitrary. If you look at the Old Testament for example, all the rules regarding “uncleaness” actually relate to anything in a persons life which is a result of being fallen: birth, sickness, death. The priests who went into the sanctuary were also “unclean” until they washed, which does not make sense if sanctity is “clean”. In the New Testament, moral purity is required to attain a level of grace. The more purity, the more grace. Anything immoral is “sinful”, meaning destructive damaging to the whole human (body + soul/spirit). Sin is a spiritual medical condition, if you will. So the guidelines express a fact of one’s state of being. The guidelines are arbitrary if you only see them as a code of rules without representing anything.
6. I guess it would be hard to say that there is something God could not do, but in this case I am confident to say that the current guidelines are meant to reveal sin. Please note that the guidelines before and after the fall are different. The guidelines will also be different in the new cosmos. I would have to think more on this one.
7. I do not agree with “God…still choses to damn them”. God made it clear in revelation that he has no pleasure in the death of a sinner. Could God have fixed the fall without the murder of Christ? The only element here God refuses to interfere into is human’s free will, and that sort of shapes how the history of the redemption has spun out. Something else that you are not considering is what would of happened had Adam and Eve followed the first “guideline”. Their immortality or mortality was set up in this decision. Do you see how important a role free-will is playing here? The Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil did not itself give that knowledge, obeying or disobeying that rule not to eat from it was to grant that knowledge. Well, we know now, but have we learned from it? The real question is what was God’s plan had the first people obeyed. You need to realize that God made a plan B to save runaway beings without impairing or tampering with their free will. Plan B was not plan A.
8. Again you are inferring here that God made humans in their fallen state, which he did not. Also we have the real far out call to imagine something God could have done but did not. You mention later in the list that you are not concerned with God’s intention, but that question seems to me to have some weight here. God intended for people to participate in his life, which is a life of every good thing, and he was leading them into that life, step by step (guideline by guideline if you will). I don’t think describing this plan as a game with rules and players is appropriate, because God cares. But apparently what God wanted was children, not puppets, and they did bad on their very first responsibility test.
9. Agreed.
I don’t agree in your note after 9 about God being in absolute control. He is not controlling our free will, he made it, and he will not destroy. He is trying to save it without destroying it, and the nature of a free willed being is that it can decide whatever it wants.
10. To blame God for damnation is also to blame God for free will. Forget the Roman idea of guilt and punishment for sin “because they deserve it”. The whole thing comes from Feudal Europe.
Now, have I successfully addressed these points, or not? Has what I said changed anything for you?
Anyway, I had lots of fun going over the points. The whole reason I am floating around on PD’s sometimes scary blog is because I encounter new ideas, and I figure I am a better person for that. What you wrote so far here has had many insights I never would have come up with, so you are a better man than me.
I just read this entry, and I wanted to say thanks.
The last 2 days or so, somehow I hit the “… I should start going to church”
Not really should, but I want to. I’ve never been, really. Twice in my life. I’m 18, almost 19.
The community, the faith (just to have faith, not necessarily being all “god is EVERYTHING” or whatever) and the unity. I feel like I need that right now. A friend of mine said “…then join a soccer team”, but it’s not the same.
Anyway, thanks for the insight and info and stuff. I don’t know what I’ll do now… I’m Canadian, if it makes a difference in the whole scheme of things. *shrug*
I am in awe of you guys, really. Daniel, that was one of the best set-ups for that argument that I’ve seen in a long, long time (you should totally put it on your own site if you haven’t); and Sav, you did a hell of a job with it, and, I would say, didn’t avoid the questions or stretch the logic at all (outside of the usual assumptions, but in this case Daniel built them into the argument, of course). In fact, if I haven’t told you before, I may not be a fan of Christianity as a whole, but if I ever had to or chose to get involved with it again, I would definitely go with your beliefs over any of the others I’ve encountered. (Partially because you so neatly avoid some of the more insane conclusions, and partly just because you obviously know your stuff. ;)
I’m very lucky to have both of you here, yo. I know I’m not exactly the world’s sanest or least-scary blogger, so feel utterly free to make any suggestions that occur to you, or use this place as any kind of conversation-forum you want. If you write or see something you’d like to be mirrored on the front page, just ask (and conversely, if you’d like something *not* to be re-posted up front, let me know, since sometimes I get so impressed by these discussions that I’ll slap ‘em on page one just because. ;)
’stine, good luck — I miss the idea of community and faith myself sometimes, but in my mind that’s no longer associated with religion, since I spent so much time looking there, and never found what I wanted, which was people to learn and talk and argue and commiserate with, and maybe even act with to change the world a little. (I live right by Detroit. I have NEVER once been to a Church in the suburbs that in any way encourages direct action to take care of the local poor or homeless, and all the churches downtown are either a) racist (usually the opposite of the way you’d think) or b) only interested in using food and shelter as a method of coercion to convert people.)
If I ever did find a church that did those things, though, I would probably join up, even if I didn’t agree fully with their beliefs. (And by definition they would let me, I suppose.) So maybe my problem is with modern middle-American churches in actuality, not religion in potentia or as a concept.
[...] wrote this in my own comments (if you’re not following the discussion on "Forgiven Yet?" then you really should be!) and, I’ll admit, surprised [...]
Wow, I’m terribly late. There’s a Neil Gaiman quote that says: “Never apologize. Never explain.”, so I’ll just come back as if nothing ever happened.
Sabbath:
About the premises.
1. When I said human-like morality I specified the purpose: to label him just or good or whatever most christians claim he is. Don’t your view of christianity attributes some of these on god? If not then this argument is pointless, since it doesn’t deny an amoral (as humans understand morality) god. But from your writings I infer that you view god as good and loving, so I guess you were just nitpicking, otherwise please say so.
3. Notice that I said directly or indirectly. In the roman catholic church and derivatives we have a judgement-like damnation, so your point is right. But even in eastern christian traditions sin still causes suffering, it makes the sinner further from god. This is, AFAICS, indirect damnation, because god could’ve created an universe without suffering, a reality where sin would have no consequences. God doesn’t favor sin and sinner’s distincly have a different (after)life experience because of it. The essence of this is that by not following god’s guidelines one’s (after)life will be worse (in the sense that most wouldn’t choose this all things being equal) than it would be otherwise, and that this consequence exists because god designed it into the universe. If you believe that in the reality god designed there are no “bad” consequences for sin then this argument is pointless, but I don’t think you believe it so. Also “Suffering is because of sin, not impose as punishment for sin.” doesn’t work because god defined the rules (i.e. sin causes suffering) and was aware of the consequences, from 1.
4. I don’t assume destiny of predestination. Also I said limitations and potentials. If we are in a fallen state then we can infer that such state exists. Also if our original state isn’t this we can infer that there’s a transition from the original state to the fallen state. Both the existance of this fallen state and the possibility of transitioning to it from the original state were designed by god. I’m not saying that god caused the fall, but he designed a reality where a fall was possible. He also designed humans able to fall and sin, we didn’t created this ability out of thin air. Again if you disagree with this then we can end this argument.
About the inferences (I didn’t notice that there is two 4s in there, sigh):
4. We don’t have to get inside god’s mind. We don’t have to understand his reasoning or purpose, or even assume that he is bounded by such concepts. What I said is that the possible consequences of his design were known: that is if he designed humans to not be flame proof and there would be fire he knew that it was possible to burn people. Again, I’m not saying that the actual (instead of possible) consequences were known, but he knew that by creating humans without omniscience implied that they wouldn’t know everything, for example. FWIW he could’ve made omnipotent, omniscient humans instead of us, even smurfs instead of people, living in a universe without gravity and sin and full of candies and unicorns, or you believe that he had no other possible design than us in this particular universe? Do you disagree when I say that this particular kind of reality is what god designed and that he knew what could (again no predestination, just possibilities) happen when the things and ideas he created interacted?
5 & 6. When I say arbitrary it’s because he the design could be different and this reality could exist without death, for example. Murder (between humans) wouldn’t even exist (therefore wouldn’t be wrong or evil) if humans were immortal. If humans came unto this reality by spontaneous generation, instead of having parents, there would have no need to honor our parents. If we had no greed or lust or envy there would be no need for a guideline against those activities. In no bible I know of there’s a guideline saying “Thou shall not make the universe disappear”, because we can’t do that. We could if we were designed with such power. I say it’s arbitrary because the same god that created the guidelines designed us with the ability to not follow them. We can even say that by stating that murder is wrong he acknowledges that people can murder, that is he designed a universe full of people with the ability to murder each other.
7. So it’s outside god’s power to just come here and say “Look guys, I changed my all-knowing mind and from now on sin doesn’t matter anymore. Just do whatever you want and be happy”? Do you believe that god wasn’t aware that designing a reality with both fallible humans and a state of fall means that there’s a non-null possibility of people going to this state of fall? Does this god you believe in needs people to suffer from sin? Also why there was a need to limit them (i.e. Adam and Eve) to whatever else besides the tree of good and evil? Why such tree was required? Couldn’t god have designed a reality where no such tree would ever exist, make it fruitless or make the fruits thorny, smelly and unnapealling? Couldn’t he had built an electric fence outside it? Why did we need to eat in the first place? If such tree existed it’s because it was part of god’s design and if eating from it was bad, this was also part of god’s design, or do you believe that god couldn’t have made a reality where eating from that tree had no impact whatsoever on our immortality?
8. No I’m saying that god made humans with the potential to fall and a reality where a fallen state existed. Do you disagree with those? Couldn’t he create a reality like this but without a fallen state and humans like us but without the potential to fall?
On god’s control and free will: the free willed being can’t decide whatever it wants, it can just decide whatever possibilities god created in the first place. The concepts of murder, love, hate, belief, etc. weren’t created by humans, they exist because god let them exist. I can’t use my free will to change the value of PI, because it isn’t possible in this universe. Or can’t I decide that the universe doesn’t exist anymore. Nor even can’t I choose to undo my actions and go back in time.
10. The possibility of damnation is different from free will. The fallen state (or damnation or whatever you may want to name it) was designed by god. If he truly is omnipotent there’s no need to have both free will and damnation, he could’ve made a different design and everything would be fine. If he truly is omniscient he knew that humans could (again, possibility) transition to a fallen state. If he was truly good/merciful/loving he would just dismiss any consequences of sin (e.g. sufferering, hell) because there’s he has no need of those and we could be designed without any need of those (I’m not saying that we do or don’t need them). This entire argument is to dismiss an omnipotent and omniscient creator god, one that requires us to follow a set of guidelines, made us and reality with all the possible interactions, and still can be viewed as good, just, mercyful or loving. The abrahmic god is absolute, outside logic, 2+2=4 because he designed reality that way, so if we suffer from our actions it’s because suffering was designed as part of this reality and if we need suffer for any reasons it’s because he designed us like that. So I “blame” god for free will like I “blame” him for damnation or by the color red being red and not blue: it was his design, not ours; his guidelines, not ours.
I don’t think you successfully addressed the points because you still has the usual christian view that can’t be a reality without suffering or that without consequences there couldn’t be free will (a omnipotent god would just change the definition of free will). Once you realize that everything was designed by god, that everything could be different and still exist, that he knew the possible interactions between the pieces of his creation, there’s no way to say this god is god or loving or merciful or just.
Doxy:
What you want me to post on my blog and then later sue me under the DMCA?!? No way ma’am, I’m smarter than that (but not much) ;)
Seriously though, I’ll probably post it after we finish this argument (or at least we agree to disagree), because them the writing will be much clearer. Also I should probably post then arguments against other religions, because this argument is pretty much tied to the attributes of the abrahmic god.
The only suggestion I want to make is: please end our suffering and solve the dread internal server error thingy! Be merciful, we can’t take it anymore.
1. I had in mind a problem that occurs when applying any label to God, such as “good” or “loving”, because they can not encompass any divine attribute. Any human term can not describe God. But I agree with the general meaning here, so yes this is nitpicking.
3. I think you have a “god and a rock” syndrome here: God can make a rock he can not lift, and he can go and lift it again. God made rational beings with freewill, and those beings use freewill for the purpose of self-determination. This gift from God is good, and God is not any less good or loving if his creation can say “no”. Your complaint is that God could have designed a creature that could not say “no”, but did not, or that the creature could say “no” without determining their identity or reality by that decision. Don’t you see that making creation any other way, without real self-determination, is making a constrained or non-rational nature? All things are possible for God, but self-determination can clearly be only one thing.
God did make a universe without sin. The source of evil is not God but Satan. God made Satan good, but Satan “realized” evil from his own self-determination, fulling knowing what would happen. Satan was not compelled in anyway in his choice. Satan created evil. You want to infer here that because this motion of will by Satan had the chance to occur, God would have been the author of it, directly or indirectly. Another way to put it, that the cause of Satan’s decision was in his creator. You blame God for neither preventing Satan’s self-determination, or terminating him when it occurred, or for not making some sort of self-determination that does not determine oneself independently, which is the definition of “self”-determination.
In your description of sin you said, “the essence of this is that by not following God’s guidelines one’s (after)life will be worse”. I.e., the guideline causes one’s afterlife to be worse, or, sin causes suffering. You continued in that thought by comparing the current reality to a universe without consequences for not following the guideline. The guideline and sin (the semantics of sin is “missing the mark”) are both only a tool to reveal what already exists. Neither the guideline nor “missing the mark” cause anything at all. They are only measuring sticks. Suffering is caused by a self-determined state of separation from God, “separation” with a gradient meaning and not a polarized one (only two opposing states). The cause of separation is freewill directed away from God, and the synergy between the soul and God is “separated”. The cause of separation is an action of self-determination made by freewill (also with a gradient quality). I maintain that just because God made freewill, he is not the cause of the decisions made by freewill, since that is the whole nature of freewill. So the author of each individual’s suffering is the freewill of each individual being, independently of God. We have now come close to the popular “River of Fire” by Dr. Kalomiros, which I don’t endorse but it does add another opinion in this matter similar to the one I am presenting here.
4. Self-determination by freewill would be impossible if there was no freedom for self-determination. Could we re-word this premise and say that God created a reality where rational beings could determine their own identity? Saying that God designed humans able to sin suggests sin was in their programming as it where, but that is not a fair appraisal. God did not make humans to potentially self-destruct. Their own decision determined their reality at that point in their existence, although it takes us much longer now to determine who we are.
(continuing with established numbering…)
4. Do you understand that a universe without self-determination means a universe without free love? If we go over the days of creation and stop just before God made humans, we have a large, good universe, but it is irrational. It is simply a big flower garden. Aside from God, there is no one to enjoy it, no one to share it with, because those are all elements of a free, rational nature. You are blaming God for not stopping at that point in his creation. To say that God created flammable humans when fire was present is again akin to saying God programmed humans to destruction, but that is not what self-determination is. This image actually has nothing to do with the question here. Notice that any environmental change (say, being set on fire) does not affect one’s moral standing, to be physically harmed does not determine one’s identity. This is a fine different in semantics, but the implications are immense. You can not imply that God designed any environmental factor that could possible damn them. The issue is with self-determination. There is no question of the motion of will in flammable humans existing where there are flames.
5 & 6. What self-determination is in essence and action is not arbitrary, there is only one thing that can be, and it ties to many other attributes of our being. This is the factor missing from your thought that shapes Christianity.
7. It is not like Adam and Eve were just let loose in some garden where one tree was poisonous. They were told what not to do, and the consequences were explained to them. They way you describe this, it sounds like the whole thing was set up like a slot machine, and poor humans got a losing number, and they didn’t have any more quarters. We are not dealing here with a god-being building sand castles and knocking them down again. There is the constant care God showed for humans, in both warning them and the three times he asked them to explain what happened, even though he already knew what happened. There was no repentance, their self-determination was already established in a fallen state, so God promised them a savior and let them go. Throughout the entire subsequent history of humankind God has been chasing after them, but without, as Dr. Kalomiros said, taking back this gift of freedom which renders us who we are. Absolutely no constraint can be placed on our faith. Asking why God doesn’t simply make sin not matter anymore is an faulty question because you are asking why God does not constrain our self-determination, and self-determination is only one thing, not an arbitrary attribute.
8. I don’t agree with how this is worded, as explained above in 4 (the first one), and no, if God made a constrained self-determination, he would not have humans.
On God’s control and freewill: freewill is an act of will which determines who we are. Freewill has nothing to do with controlling our environment. So your definition here is incorrect.
10. You are asking why there is no self-determination without affecting who we are. By definition, self-determination determines who we are. Anything else is irrational. God is in fact omniscient, good, loving, and he is not any less omniscient, good or loving for giving us the ability to determine who we are. Do you really chose to prefer a reality where there is no choice?
In conclusion, I think the above is a sound model to describe our reality without discarding any of God’s attributes.