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I’ve been a bit busy, so I’m not keeping up on all the posts. When I visited the holocaust museum in DC shortly after it opened, I had an amazing non-experience. Usually, when I see tragedy, I get a sense of catharsis: the idea that some good may have come out of this. With the Holocaust, I felt that nothing good at all came of it — it was simply evil, unchecked by any god anywhere.
I have since read “Night” by Elie Wiesel. He saw an angelic young man hung up, tortured, and die before him — he was forced to look upon this suffering. At that moment, God died for Elie Wiesel. While I have not seen this in person, observing the sheer evil of harvesting hair, shoes, and gold from teeth from human lives puts a specific level of evil into focus. There is no universal god who is there to help intervene because an angel of death is at our bedside, or a drunk driver is going to hit us on our way, or that someone is going to bear false witness from a phone call — all the while allowing millions of jews to be killed in the Holocaust. The all powerful, all knowing, and all benevolent god of Judeo/Christian/Muslim understanding cannot exist.
What bears me a little hope is that Joseph Smith also rejected that god — that was the god of the ‘creeds’, a logical impossibility, and instead, proposed that god was a man, albeit exalted, but a man nonetheless.
Taking from this idea about god being a man, I believe we can have a more enlightened understanding of god’s role. If we are willing to set aside two important concepts: (1) that god dictates scripture (see D&C 8 and 9), and (2) that the creedal, omni-whatever god is a logical impossibility (First vision account, D&C 131), then we can embrace a god that is more human-like (King Follett), and maybe, perhaps, integrated into our own human (non)consciousness (D&C 50, 88). Such a god would not be ‘all powerful’ in the sense of intervening in events, but rather, would be a source of knowledge to those who exercise free will to seek such knowledge. But any defined knowledge would be useless in the face of random violence, either natural or human caused.
The third thing that I came to accept is that nothing supernatural exists. Again, I take some of the LDS writings for this — in Section 88, God operates and is ontologically evident within the laws of nature. When combined with the fourth thing — that the gospel is simply ‘truth’, that is, knowledge of things as they are, as they were, and as they are to come — then scientific method becomes a far more effective means to understand truth than burying our heads in the sand and trusting our burning bosom. Mind and heart need to be one, and that does not set aside reason.
Armed with a completely humanist understanding of god, by virtue of the four principles above, I can begin to realize that god does not and cannot intervene in a supernatural way into human affairs, but we as humans may be gods to each other, if we tune into the process of revelation, reject foisting our resposibilities on an invisible man, and work within the flow of nature and authenticity to help one another. As gods to one another, we can say that such a god does actively participate into human affairs — in a very real and concrete sense.
Thanks wayfarer, that definitely gives me a lot to chew on for a while. I have always accepted the servants definition of God as an omnipotent, omnipresent being full of supernatural wonders etc. I can see how thinking outside this box opens up greater possibilities for understanding and enlightenment. Lots of thinking to do now. Eman, my faith crisis was precipitated by the stillbirth of my daughter. I posted at length about this in my introduction: http://forum.staylds.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=1937 Unfortunately a good part of my relationship to the church was the “I do my part, God sends blessings, and I live a charmed life” model. When my world was rocked, part of my anguish was that perhaps I had failed to do my part…had failed to secure the necessary blessings/divine protection.
The following is from my introduction:
Quote:In my prayer journey, I have wrestled before my God. Like in the quote Brian had shared, “There is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you, and I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is now and again to visit that inner kind of sanctuary.”During these trips to this inner sanctuary, this inner temple, I have had this notion confirmed to me to a degree that I have no doubt – My Heavenly Father Loves Me.
Proceeding from this starting point gets somewhat easier. The next steps become intuitive leaps that would at least plausibly flow from the base.
Q. Does God favor the righteous? Does God favor faithful members of the church?
A. No – God loves (or favors) all his children equally. God’s love for me is unconditional!
Q. Are greater tangible blessings an indicator of greater divine favor? Does God bless those he favors? Does God withhold blessings from those he does not favor?
A. Tangible, earth-life, fortune or misfortune is completely independent of God’s love.
My current view is that most of the particulars in this life are left to chance. God restrains himself (except when absolutely necessary to carry the “plan” forward) from pre-determining, interference, intervention, or altering events as they would otherwise occur in the natural order of things and heavily influenced by random chance. Perhaps as in the “Good News according to Tom,” the randomness and unchartedness of a stint in this world is a necessary part of glorifying heaven. (I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth Tom)
Similar to what Silent Dawning has said, “I believe God often stands back and lets people goof up, tragedies happen etcetera because it’s the best outcome eventually when you consider variables like free agency, permanent learning and character change, etc.” If God stepped in with any degree of regularity, then the balance and conflict of the “opposition in all things” experience might be disrupted.
In order for this to work for me, I must choose to believe that others’ accounts of direct divine intervention are not accurate (unless they are in the form of benign feelings of peace, wellbeing, or love). To do otherwise would open old wounds and basically put me in a bad place. I am not saying that miracles do not exist (I am not qualified to make such assertions), I am just saying that I choose to believe that they don’t exist generally- and allow all others the same privilege to choose their beliefs (This means that I don’t dispute with others on the subject).
So when I get the type of email forwards like has been posted here. I usually interpret that to mean that the person that sent it to me cares about me and is acknowledging a relationship with me. I will respond back with something like, “Thanks for sharing.”
I also like Wayfarer’s ability to tie these things back to a Mormon framework and Mormon scriptures. The purpose of this site is not only to help individuals process and heal, but to do so in a way that will allow them to maintain ties and bridges to the LDS Church in so much as that is possible.
wayfarer (and anyone else who is interested), there is an interesting post on By Common Consent based on Pres. Uchtdorf’s recent talk in General Conference, “Of Regrets and Resolutions”. The post is entitled, “Creation out of Givenness” – and I thought about your comment when I read it. The link is: http://bycommonconsent.com/2012/11/25/creation-out-of-givenness/ One of the central points is that this world is the best possible world for us – not because we can’t conceive of anything better (which we can) but because it was all that could be created. It is a given, and a big part of happiness is learning to accept its “givenness” and model God’s creation by creating our own existence out of what we have been given without demanding or pining for something else that simply cannot be.
Old-Timer wrote:One of the central points is that this world is the best possible world for us – not because we can’t conceive of anything better (which we can) but because it was all that could be created. It is a given, and a big part of happiness is learning to accept its “givenness” and model God’s creation by creating our own existence out of what we have been given without demanding or pining for something else that simply cannot be.
FWIW, I do believe that believing in God’s protecting hand in your life (just world hypothesis) is a valid and even useful way to approach life. It worked well for me for 30 years and I’m sure had things gone differently – it might have worked well my entire life. It works until it doesn’t, sometimes very suddenly.
So I guess my question: Assuming that we currently view reality accurately, could we come up with an alternate but less accurate perspective that would yield desirable results? Once having attained that visualization, could we manage to believe in it sufficiently to make that our dominant perspective and attain the results?
Of course, like Way says – some things are unknowable. Among those unknowable things we are free to hope for whatever makes the most sense to us individually.
ray, i don’t buy it. leibnitz is completely speculating, and it still puts a puppetmaster god responsible for the holocaust in this “best if worlds we could handle” — he could have averted it but didn’t. such a god s unworthy of worship. i think it much more teneble of a humanist/materalist god-self within… such a limited god could not avert the holocaust, yet on a personal leel, makes much more sense.
The post doesn’t talk of the “best of worlds we can handle” and neither does my reading of it. It says that perhaps the “best world possible” is the only world possible – the result of what is “given”. My reading of the post is that it says perhaps God had material with which to work and there were laws and limits “given”. This creation was the best God could do with what was given without regard at all for “what we can handle” – meaning that it was impossible to create the perfect world of our imagination and desire that would conform to what we can handle. That changes dramatically the idea of a puppet-master God into much more of a clockmaker God, imo – and I like a clockmaker God who “intervenes” only through His creation’s inspiration / revelation / instincts / actions / whatever. For me, it’s another way of saying God isn’t omniscient and omnipotent but subject to what constitutes “the given”.
It says, in essence, life is what it is – and it’s up to us to make of it what we can, whether or not a separate God exists.
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