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edenfallingIs God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent. Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent. Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil? Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?
---Epicurus
And that, in a nutshell, is why I cannot understand the belief in a personification of divine power that is omnipotent, directly involved in the ongoing process of the universe, and good/loving/compassionate. One can argue, of course, that such a deity also believes in free will, and therefore allows humans to play out the consequences of our choices, but that doesn't explain things like natural disasters, or why the consequences of evil choices are allowed to affect more than just the person who makes them.
One can also say that without pain and suffering and ugliness and evil and hatred, people can't truly appreciate joy and happiness and beauty and goodness and love... but really, if you'd never encountered evil, would you miss it? Somehow I don't think so.
One can say that there is a goodness beyond our comprehension of goodness, a vast cosmic Plan that we are too limited to understand, but that's missing the point, which is that an omnipotent god who allows suffering and evil and natural disasters is not good as we define goodness, and that such a god therefore has a fair amount of explaining to do.
I use the word 'god' relatively freely, for a UU. I think this is because unlike an awful lot of people in my religion, I was raised UU, and therefore I am not fleeing or shouldering the burden of broken faith. I can make 'god' mean whatever I want it to mean, because I don't have that baggage, that pain, that shame, that spite.
So when I say 'god,' I usually mean something like 'a generalization of the wonder of the universe, the unlikeliness of life, the scope of time and space, and the grandeur that moves me to awe when I contemplate the world and the presence of goodness and faith and love and hope despite all the suffering that pettiness and spite and random chance can throw in our paths.' That's a rather unwieldy concept, so I tend to summarize and say 'the wonder of the universe' or 'the spirit of life/hope/love/whatever' or 'the boundless' or just 'god.'
'God' is as good a word as any other for that concept, and it has the added benefit of letting me comfortably borrow metaphors and figures of speech from many other traditions. I like that in a word. *grin*
Sometimes I also use 'god' to mean 'the personfication of blind chance that organizes that universe and therefore is ultimately responsible for the bad shit that is currently bothering me.' This is useful because it gives me a person to address when I want to unburden myself of frustration. It is a lot easier to curse 'god' than to curse 'random chance and generations of historical and social forces and the difficulty of coping with a species that evolved certain instinctive/habitual behaviors in response to an environment vastly different from the technological and relatively egalitarian society in which I now live.' So again, 'god' is a convenient shorthand.
But I never have and never will believe in the standard Christian conception of 'god' as a personality that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. Because as Epicurus pointed out more than two thousand years ago, that conception makes no sense.
...
And now I am off to do laundry and then maybe buy U2's new album. Yay music!
ETA: This post is on a topic I think about relatively often -- I really, really like comparative religions, theology, philosophy, ethics, etcetera -- but it probably crystallized today because I was woken by Jehovah's Witnesses this morning, and I was rereading UU World last night.
---Epicurus
And that, in a nutshell, is why I cannot understand the belief in a personification of divine power that is omnipotent, directly involved in the ongoing process of the universe, and good/loving/compassionate. One can argue, of course, that such a deity also believes in free will, and therefore allows humans to play out the consequences of our choices, but that doesn't explain things like natural disasters, or why the consequences of evil choices are allowed to affect more than just the person who makes them.
One can also say that without pain and suffering and ugliness and evil and hatred, people can't truly appreciate joy and happiness and beauty and goodness and love... but really, if you'd never encountered evil, would you miss it? Somehow I don't think so.
One can say that there is a goodness beyond our comprehension of goodness, a vast cosmic Plan that we are too limited to understand, but that's missing the point, which is that an omnipotent god who allows suffering and evil and natural disasters is not good as we define goodness, and that such a god therefore has a fair amount of explaining to do.
I use the word 'god' relatively freely, for a UU. I think this is because unlike an awful lot of people in my religion, I was raised UU, and therefore I am not fleeing or shouldering the burden of broken faith. I can make 'god' mean whatever I want it to mean, because I don't have that baggage, that pain, that shame, that spite.
So when I say 'god,' I usually mean something like 'a generalization of the wonder of the universe, the unlikeliness of life, the scope of time and space, and the grandeur that moves me to awe when I contemplate the world and the presence of goodness and faith and love and hope despite all the suffering that pettiness and spite and random chance can throw in our paths.' That's a rather unwieldy concept, so I tend to summarize and say 'the wonder of the universe' or 'the spirit of life/hope/love/whatever' or 'the boundless' or just 'god.'
'God' is as good a word as any other for that concept, and it has the added benefit of letting me comfortably borrow metaphors and figures of speech from many other traditions. I like that in a word. *grin*
Sometimes I also use 'god' to mean 'the personfication of blind chance that organizes that universe and therefore is ultimately responsible for the bad shit that is currently bothering me.' This is useful because it gives me a person to address when I want to unburden myself of frustration. It is a lot easier to curse 'god' than to curse 'random chance and generations of historical and social forces and the difficulty of coping with a species that evolved certain instinctive/habitual behaviors in response to an environment vastly different from the technological and relatively egalitarian society in which I now live.' So again, 'god' is a convenient shorthand.
But I never have and never will believe in the standard Christian conception of 'god' as a personality that is omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent. Because as Epicurus pointed out more than two thousand years ago, that conception makes no sense.
...
And now I am off to do laundry and then maybe buy U2's new album. Yay music!
ETA: This post is on a topic I think about relatively often -- I really, really like comparative religions, theology, philosophy, ethics, etcetera -- but it probably crystallized today because I was woken by Jehovah's Witnesses this morning, and I was rereading UU World last night.
