Quote of the Day; Liz's theological preoccupations get away from her again

[edenfalling]

Is 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.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Amen!

[edenfalling]

:-D

[annearchy.livejournal.com]

What you said:) And Epicurus really nailed it too.

[edenfalling]

I love classical Greek, Hellenistic, and Roman philosophers. They were so wrong about so much (mostly when they got into 'natural philosophy,' i.e. science, due to a lack of an institutionalized culture of experimentatation to test their ideas), but they were brilliant as all get out, and when they were talking about more abstract things (such as ethics and religion), they could be, in my opinion, bang on the money.

[rahirah]

Yeah. Except I don't even go so far as to label that cosmic sensawunder as god (I suppose I think of personifying it at all as a sort of slippery theological slope.)

[edenfalling]

I suppose I think of personifying it at all as a sort of slippery theological slope.

It may well be! After all, one reason I like using the word 'god' is that it's a way to establish a sort of common ground with Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and other more belief-based traditions -- a shorthand for saying, "Yes, my religion isn't much like yours in a lot of very important ways, but we have a concept of reverence too," even though what we revere is usually something like a cosmic sense of wonder, or the beauty of nature, or the power of community.

Of course, I am probably cheating in some people's eyes, because my other working definition of 'God' is 'a character in this really cool book of fairy-tale stories from Israel and Egypt,' which is the direct result of being handed a children's book of Bible stories at the same time and with the same level of parental guidance (i.e., none whatsoever) as a book of Greek mythology, a book of Norse mythology, an abridged collection of Arthurian legends, Grimm's fairy-tales, and Andersen's fairy-tales. So even if I start saying 'god' a lot more than I do now, it would be very difficult for me to believe in such a god, exactly the same way it would be difficult for me to believe in the objective historical reality of, say, Snow White. :-)

[snaegl.livejournal.com]

Something you might find interesting is J.M. Greer's A World Full of Gods: An Inquiry into Polytheism (http://www.amazon.com/World-Full-Gods-Inquiry-Polytheism/dp/0976568101), just for another point of view on the nature of divinity.

"Gods" to me are more like reeeeealy big ancestral spirits--they've got a different view of the universe than we do, but they are still limited in their powers and perceptions. Hence there is no cognitive dissonance as to why bad things happen--sometimes, the gods either aren't around or are unable to affect the Greater Laws of the Universe (TM) to affect the changes that have already been set in motion.

I don't believe in "God" per say for the reasons you and Epicurus have cited. It seems to me to be the equivalent of unified field theory: a nice idea but unwieldy and impractical in an everyday setting. Something like the Tao I'll buy (natural law and all that) but an omnipotent, omnipresent God?

Pass me the polytheism, please!

(And of course, this is not an attempt at conversion or any other such nonsense...just giving you some different things to play with if you choose!)

[edenfalling]

Ooh, I may read that for background research purposes -- it is much easier to create religions when one has more concrete and more varied details to work from. :-)

I find polytheism more theologically justifiable than benevolent monotheism, generally speaking, but I find it equally impossible to believe in whole-heartedly, and for the same reason: I do not believe in a... oh, let's call it a spiritual realm. I do not believe there are any powers or beings hanging around in the metaphorical ether.

I am perfectly willing to grant all deities a subjective reality -- they are real to their worshippers, and that reality affects those people's behavior and ideas -- but objective reality? No. Which is not to say that I deny all possibility of such beings, just that I find them to be extremely unlikely and probably irrelevant in any case, since for me the really important religious issues are values, a sense of reverence for the world (without needing to personalize aspects of the world), occasional rituals, and a sense of community, rather than worship or belief.

(And of course, then I go and make up my traffic pantheon, but again, while I consider those gods to have subjective semi-reality -- that is, I find asking them for favors to be a useful way of dealing with travel-related frustration -- I do not think they have objective reality outside of my own imagination. Also, when dealing with polytheism I run into the same problem I run into with the Judeo-Christian god, which is that in my first encounter with the idea of polytheism -- Norse myths and Greek myths -- those stories and deities were presented to me on the same level as fairy-tales, so for me most gods will always get filed first under 'interesting stories' and only secondarily under 'oh yeah, this is religious and therefore very important to some people, so I should remember to be respectful.')

[uminohikari.livejournal.com]

This. Especially the last use of god :D

[edenfalling]

As somebody once said (memory fails me as to the details), it's much easier to say, "Jesus Christ!" when you drop a hammer on your toe than to say, "Random fluctuations in the space-time continuum!" :-)