God Isn't Fixing This


The New York Daily News was trying to send a snarky statement of rebuke to the messages of comfort sent by both Republicans and Democrats as an initial response to the worst attack by Islamic Terrorists on American soil since 9-11.  The Daily News seems to envision (and therefore limit) God to the role of “Great Magician.”  They think that God, if He exists, should wave some celestial wand and instantly eradicate all the evil that man has created in this world. 

            What a limited, miserable, frightening existence these non-believers want for all of us.  They want us to see ourselves as the hapless flotsam in the sea of some God’s vicissitudes and, in despair, give Him up for secular pragmatism.

            Humans are sentient beings.  Sometime along the evolutionary path we became aware that there was a force—power—entity—that was bigger and stronger than we were.  It may have started just as a need to understand disease, thunder, the seasons, but as those understandings grew, so did the dimensions of the power that controlled them.  Farther along that path from animal/human to human/animal we started to comprehend the soul.  Through all of this, we were and are active agents in the relationship between God and man. 

            If all good was done only by God, if all bad was allowed only by God, we would never be in charge of any aspect of our lives.  We would have no need to believe because belief would be irrelevant.  God would make every choice for us, including the choice to believe or not.  God would be in charge not just of our ecclesiastical selves, but our temporal selves as well.  We would be no different than the Eloi in H. G. Wells book The Time Machine, mindless sheep following the path of least resistance. 

            But that isn’t the case at all. 

            We are allowed to make choices.  We are allowed to show ourselves at our best or worst.  When we make good choices we are rewarded and that makes us confident.  When we make bad choices we face consequences and that makes us cautious.  We show in our temporal decisions what we truly do believe.  ISIS believes in cruelty.  Christians believe in love.  I have no idea what the Daily News believes in.

            My concept of God comes from Aristotle’s unmoved mover; a perfection of goodness and love that draws man to Him simply through His eternal, omniscient presence.  God becomes a moral authority through nothing more or less than His being.  People who have such a moral authority in their lives reflect it in their choices.  They try to fix things according to that moral authority.  They are empowered to do so; they are neither marionettes nor helpless. 

            We not only get to act, we do so according to a purposeful understanding of our actions, their consequences and their place in a larger scheme of human existence.  Modern Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, moderate Muslims and other religious groups see themselves as temporal agents in an ecclesiastical panorama.  But they all operate under an external moral authority that is humbling in its requirements.

            What provides the moral authority for the Daily News?  How desperate it must be to think that a species that creates ISIS is the best we can do, the best we can hope for, all we can look forward to. 

            God isn’t fixing this?  This terrorism?  This hate?  This war?  He is if the people on this planet acknowledge evil, love goodness and are fearless in pursuing right while subduing wrong.  

            We must keep the faith for it is under attack. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Generation of Serfs

  On October 25, 1415, Henry V of England laid some serious hurt on the French at the Battle of Agincourt at Pas-de-Calais, France.   Part of the success of this campaign was due to Henry’s use of the longbow, but part of it also goes to the creative use of military indentures.   These legal contracts required all the English captains to provide specified amounts of men, material and time to the King’s cause.             An indenture was a document, written in duplicate and then torn along a jagged line, like little teeth ( dents ), in the paper.   One portion of the contract was in possession of each party and when the required conditions and period of service were fulfilled, the parts reunited, and the debt was considered paid.   Many of the people who first came to this country from England came as indentured servants, worked off their debt and became the backbone of the country.             Today we are creating a nation not of indentured servants, someone with a carefully
Read more

Our Beautiful Constitution and its Ugly Opponents

 The Constitution is our anchor of stability in a turbulent world!   We can withstand a bad President and a petulant Congress (for the short term, at least) because our Constitution both guides and limits.   If someone asked me to provide proof of a loving God, I would simply ask them how else so many geniuses in the matter of human governance could have been clustered together in the right time and place to create both our country and the means to govern it.    Our founding fathers had the vision to devise a way to not only govern themselves, but govern a country that they could not imagine, yet believed would prevail. The constitution of the United States is like a good parent.   It has allowed us to grow up as we have grown older, with the result that the United States of America is the oldest living democracy in the world.   The miracle of this document is that it lives, breathes and moves with the times.   The three branches of our government work together while standing alone
Read more

"You Didn't Build That:" Part I

Late in the day on Friday, July 13 th , President Obama mounted the stage of Historic Firehouse Number One in Roanoke , Virginia .   The room held around 800 people but it was hot and several people fainted.   In front of a carefully screened group of supporters he gave one of the most important speeches of his reelection campaign.    It was not meant to be a major speech.   That will come in the even more carefully scripted Convention Hall in Charlotte , North Carolina this September in front of adoring media and rabid political supporters.   But this speech in Roanoke is crucial to the 2012 election because on Friday, in Virginia , President Obama went off message.   Whether through error or hubris, he abandoned his script and spoke off the cuff.   And in so doing, he showed us the man behind the curtain.   The angry but controlled, insecure yet charismatic, market fearful, socialistically inclined man that Barrack Obama really is. I am speaking, of course, of the now famou
Read more