Human beings come together in love and action to comfort and bind wounds. We often lament, “why us?” But there is no “why.” There is just an “is.” When disasters occur, God can especially be seen in the ongoingness. Some people live and some die when they occur, but it is never the case that a God chooses to kill some and let others live. Events like earthquakes, hurricanes, tornados, or pandemics exist in the world. You are being punished for having disobeyed God. If something bad happens and you are gay, or if you believe anything other than the precise doctrine they believe in, they say that you deserved it. God is relentless, never failing “ongoingness.” The idea of a God that contains us also protects your kids from one of the major atrocities of conservative, fundamentalist Christianity-its ability to inflict guilt and pain upon both children and adults using a tyrannic, authoritarian God.
Single-celled organisms move toward nutrients. But I can tell you that this is a cosmos where, if you fall and cut yourself, the wound will heal. As theologian Henry Niemann once wrote, it is “creative power.” I cannot comfort you with a God who holds you in his hand or counts the hairs on your head. The cosmos that is this God has intentionality. What would that even mean? God must incorporate or subsume all things both “seen and unseen,” as one Christian creed has it-this universe and any other universes that might exist.ĭoes this mean God is just some abstract idea or synonymous with the universe itself, not something living? Far from it. God is more than the sum of the cosmos (in ways we have difficulty understanding), but God cannot in some way be other than the material, energy and spirituality of the cosmos. ” Pan = everything en = within theism = God. It is, instead-and this is the only big theological word I’ll use in this piece-“ panentheism. You have probably heard of the philosophy of pantheism, which contends that God is in all things-rocks, trees, rivers, mountains. What’s more plausible than a Santa Claus or puppeteer God? It’s a God in which all is contained. A religion that says that humans can never be more than puppets controlled by a master puppeteer is not worth believing in. He has already dictated that you just picked up that cup of coffee or that you will go to the theater this evening. Moreover, he dictates everything you do because he had pre-knowledge of it and therefore caused it to be. If he is not responsible for you being born, then he is not omnipotent. Looking into the future, he knew you would be born. This means that your existence on earth was ordained and fixed by God. The second is that God is omniscient-he knows everything about the universe, past, present and future. One is that God is all-powerful and omnipotent. Let’s say we agree with two things about God that are believed by traditional Christianity. Here is a thought experiment that could be discussed with middle school or high school kids. If bad things happen to “saved” people, then it’s a “mystery.” If you put your faith in this type of God, those kinds of believers say that you will be richly rewarded. One who hands out rewards and punishments based on those behaviors. An entity with special knowledge about people’s moral behavior. The God believed in by many Christians is often just a slightly more sophisticated form of Santa Claus-a being who has magical powers. Remember an important lesson from child psychology: fear is the lowest form of motivation in moral development. Just think about the arrogance of the so-called “saved.” Think about a God that would send the majority of humankind to suffer in agony for eternity because they do not accept what one small group of fundamentalist-literalist Christians say. A big reason they have persisted is control-control over individuals, communities, or broad swaths of the population to keep them under the thumb of religious authority. These are very old myths that most peoples across history have created, but they do not exist in reality. Kids need to know that there is no such thing as hell.
0 kommentar(er)
