God's Incompetence

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually.  And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart.  So the Lord said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created - people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them." (Genesis 6:5-7, New Oxford Annotated Bible)

These  words introduce the story of Noah, which according to traditional interpretations, places the blame for the sorry state of human existence on humans.  We are willful, we subvert God's purposes, we are selfish, we are disobedient, we are fearful, we are greedy, and we are violent.  And all this misbehavior is a function of gifts, the God given power to make decisions and the God given freedom to do as we please.  And what did we do with our power and freedom?  In theological terms, we failed to honor our creator.  However, in the above passage, God deemed his own efforts to create creatures, who would steadfastly and bravely return his love, as a complete failure.  God blamed himself.

Strangely enough, it never occurred to God that the creatures might use free will to protect and serve themselves, to love their own kind and find pleasure in each others' company.  It never occurred to God that humans might band together in different groups and seek to dominate one another.  It never occurred to God that humans might be fearful and use their groups to fight each other.  The great designer, the prime mover, the source of all the finely turned laws of the universe, miscalculated the place of human emotions in the grand scheme of things.  And even with the advantage of foresight, God seemed to have been surprised at the results.

All of this is curious given the current day touting by conservative Christians that the perfection of creation is evidence that evolution could not possible be true.  They say we are fearfully and wonderfully made, far more complicated than a watch or a computer.  But at least, watches and computers do what they are designed to do and many are quite elegant.

Now back to the above passage, the Genesis story has it that there was one exception, one righteous man, namely Noah, with whom God was pleased.  So God decided to wipe out all the failures and begin afresh with his one success.  But again, God miscalculated because he assumed that the offspring of this one good man would be spiritual clones.  Well, the rest is history, humans went astray again.  But the Bible always blames humans for the mess;  not the creator.  And the biblical apocalypses inform us that God intends to correct his second huge mistake by destorying the universe and replacing it with two eternal locales, namely heaven and hell.

And what does not get highlighted is that the sufferers in hell will outnumber the saints in paradise.  And when we step back and assess the plan from start to finish, the design God put together, it doesn't seem to be a very good one.  In order to create a group of people who of their own free will would love God, he had to create a vast number, perhaps as much as 97% of the human race or more, whose destinies necessitate being tortured for eternity.  Couldn't this all powerful, all knowing God create creatures with dispositions to love with any more efficiency?

And theologicans consider this to be an expression of God's love for the world?  And conservatives consider this to be finely tuned divine design?  If this were a human plan, it would be judged as incompetent; a three percent success rate is unacceptable in any industry.  Genesis tells us that God was sorry that he made us.  Well, if the Bible's narrative, traditionally interpreted, is the truth, then I also share that sentiment.  We, that is the human race, would be better off never having been created.

Epic Battle Literature

I have been watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy on television and noticed that literature of epic battles seem to be a mark of our age. Fantasy literature, perhaps the genre most in touch with the modern subconscious, seems to revolve around forces pitted against each other in a way that threatens to destroy or enslave whatever exists. The good of course ends up triumphing over evil and usually introduces an era in which many of the familiar forms give way to the new created out of the fiery crucible of the war. Other examples are the Star Wars Saga, Harry Potter, Christopher Paolini's Inheritance Saga and many others. What they reflect is a subconscious awareness that we are living in age of momentous transition. Politically this has been vocalized in what the conservatives call the "Culture War".

An older order is being replaced by a newer order, but the roots of this conflict reach back hundreds of years and are not shallow or recently conceived. In a nut shell, the conflict is between science/reason and revealed religion. All of the liberation movements from the outlawing of legalized institutional slavery, African-American liberation, to women's liberation to gay rights, are justified on the basis of a scientific view of human life which categorizes each of the people involved as equals. And the conservative forces which have opposed advancements in each of these areas has always pointed back to the Bible as justification for not changing things. And of course, there are many people who have tried to bridge the differences, but as time goes by that tactic seems less attractive. Thus, the modern flowering of the epic battle literature which heakens back to the great myths of past transitional ages such as King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. Like it or not, we are in the midst of great social change.

This Fundamentalist Age

Somewhere back in my youth, I made choices which created distance between my church/family and myself. I was reared as a fundamentalist Baptist and my choices, which arose out of a sincere piety, ended up being a pathway to liberal thought. At the base of it all was a story from the life of Jesus where a Talmudic scholar asked him what was the greatest commandment and Jesus responded that it was to love God with all your soul and that the second greatest commandment was to love your neighbor as yourself. Then Jesus stated that all of the Law and the Prophets are based on those two. (cf. Matthew 22:34-40) The Apostle Paul went a step further when he declared that all the commandments are summed up in the following words, "Love your neighbor as yourself." (Romans 13:9) Thus, Paul's statement omitted the first commandment and thus defined religion in one sentence.

To me that sounded both simple and right. Furthermore it offered a benchmark against which we can judge theological debate and behavior. Love of God and neighbor, whenever the pious lose sight of these two commandments and become hateful or fearful, they have clearly lost their way. So I made those my operating principles and took my first giant step away from fundamentalism. It never occurred to me at the time that my decision would create any problems with either my family or church. However, my spiritual journey began that day and it has broadened me beyond my imagination.

However, from the 60's to the present, America and the world has gone in the opposite direction. The people, the traditions and mindsets I left behind have triumphed politically and materially not just among Christians, but also among Jews and Muslims. Fear, hatred, greed and cynicism have triumphed as a means of trying to protect certain traditions against change. We need to think about this and the kind of people we as a society are becoming. We need to challenge the pious with their own teaching and reverse their direction. To put it into religious language, they need to repent.