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Not the only massacre that day apparently… seems some young man did much the same with a knife in a Chinese school… Surely not Sam, according to the government…it was the lack of gun control and China has plenty of that. Many are wondering if this god of miracles and god of healing couldn’t have prevented this.
Some say he could, but chose not to.
If that’s the case, what is the point of praying for someone? Surely some of these parents prayed that their children would be kept safe.
Just a thought:
Does this reveal priesthood “blessings” as wastes of time….since He is going to do, and allow, as He sees fit despite any of our pleas?
How about putting someone’s name on a temple roll?
Seems rather futile.
But we should have “faith” and shouldn’t question. I guess.
Again, please read the post. The first half is all about the feeling of hopelessness caused by the idea that God literally is omnipotent and simply chooses to allow extreme suffering, while the second half is about what can be taken from the idea of “the weeping God of Mormonism”. I wanted that to be the discussion, with the chance to excerpt from it and discuss those excerpts, not just a rehash of hopelessness and/or a world of unicorns and sunshine. I knew there was a chance we could discuss the actual post and a chance that it wouldn’t happen. As the person who posted this, I will shut it down if it isn’t about the post to which I linked.
Sorry the discussion didn’t go the way “you wanted it” Ray. Maybe everyone isn’t up to your level of spiritual understanding.
Well, Jacob speaks several times of “comfort”. How is one to “comfort”?
“Healing the sick” is mentioned but I don’t suppose we should ask for that either.
Unicorns and sunshine, I suppose.
That wasn’t directed at you alone, Bruce, and I apologize for not realizing both of my comments followed yours until I went back and looked. It was coincidental to the timing of my own logging on and checking, and it hadn’t hit me that it would look like I was directing the point only to you. Having said that, please lay off the sarcasm. It also isn’t wanted – in the least.
I said I want this post to be about the post to which I linked. Anyone who posts something here has the right to ask that the accompanying thread be about the actual post. That is simple courtesy, and we have asked for that courtesy more than once when the poster has expressed concern over the direction of the thread. This isn’t about “the way I want it”; it’s about respecting the wishes of the person who posts something. “Spiritual understanding” had absolutely nothing to do with the request.
This is the last comment I will make about that issue. Everyone, please respect the intent of the post. I really would like a conversation about the post to which I linked, so if someone else wants to post something more open-ended about God and suffering, feel free to do so.
Bruce in Montana wrote:Surely not Sam, according to the government…it was the lack of gun control and China has plenty of that.
The guy in China killed a similar number of children, with a knife.
😯 Which is worse than a gun IMHO, since killing with a gun provides a metaphorical as well as physical distance perhaps… (Don’t quote me on that please… could be taken the wrong way.)Is any good going to come from this?
Well, I suspect while some people may be alienated from God, yet others will draw closer to him.
We tend to forget that our ancestors not so long ago, and many people elsewhere deal with death on a weekly, if not daily basis. They see a lot of it. But our life expectancies are so high, and child mortality so low that we don’t experience it much in early life. Because of this, many young people are divorced from death, and don’t experience, let alone think about the concept of an afterlife.
Sickly cliches about “little angels” aside (and there have been a few of them in the media), does any of us really believe any of these children are bound for hell? Apart from the fact that many of them were six (which puts them below the age of responsibility in Mormonism), I really don’t think most of the others have had a chance to commit grave sins.
Bruce in Montana wrote:Many are wondering if this god of miracles and god of healing couldn’t have prevented this.
Some say he could, but chose not to.
If that’s the case, what is the point of praying for someone? Surely some of these parents prayed that their children would be kept safe.
Just a thought:
Does this reveal priesthood “blessings” as wastes of time….since He is going to do, and allow, as He sees fit despite any of our pleas?
How about putting someone’s name on a temple roll?
Seems rather futile.
This is exactly the sort of thing that precipitated my faith crisis and that is probably why it is so important to me. What does God’s failure to act mean about our “arrangement” (righteousness=blessings)?
I really resonate with the depiction of God, the afterlife, and Godhood from the linked article. Our theology has an impact on how we live our lives. I resist the depiction of individual “covenant keeping” salvation in part because it can isolate and insolate us in a silo mentality (“as long as I am doing my duty and carrying on like a normal latter-day saint, I am fine”). I’ve even heard recently that if your spouse doesn’t live up to your standards you will be given to (later amended to “you will choose”) a different and more worthy spouse in the afterlife. How I feel it cheapens our relationship if DW is simply relegated to being my +1.
So then with this new view of God and Godhood how might we approach worship and life differently? First and foremost, we would open our hearts to others. We wouldn’t be able to hide behind saying a prayer for someone, doing a priesthood blessing, or putting their name on a prayer roll as if those things absolved us from caring any further. Not to say that those things are wrong, just that they can be used as token gestures when we would rather not put in any emotional investment into anyone else.
So in the context that people might be more open to loving their neighbor as themselves and stepping up to alleviate suffering as much as they are able, I would say that it has the potential to be transformational.
SamBee wrote:Bruce in Montana wrote:Surely not Sam, according to the government…it was the lack of gun control and China has plenty of that.
The guy in China killed a similar number of children, with a knife.
😯 Which is worse than a gun IMHO, since killing with a gun provides a metaphorical as well as physical distance perhaps… (Don’t quote me on that please… could be taken the wrong way.)I really hate to continue to derail the thread, but I can’t let that go. No one died in the China massacre:
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/22-kids-slashed-in-china-elementary-school-knife-attack/ ” class=”bbcode_url”> http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2012/12/22-kids-slashed-in-china-elementary-school-knife-attack/ Back to thread topic:
Quote:God rarely offers explanation in scripture for why things occur. Explanations usually come from us, trying to comfort ourselves out of fear for our loved ones and fear to face what we’ve become as a species, the darkness that lies within us. God gets down in the dirt with a shovel and a determination to do what can be done, and he does it forever. Eventually he gets a body that can’t get sick and die. Eventually he lives with his family forever. But the work that they do together and the love that they radiate –trying to persuade us to be better, love a little more deeply, help those in need–is all there is and all there ever will be.
To me all explanations of the depth of grief and sorrow that some (most? all?) experience in this life are unexplainable. All I can try and do is love a little more deeply, reach out a little more to those in need, and look a little harder for opportunities to serve my fellow man.
To me, that is the heart and soul of the post – that instead of blaming God for things like this I need to pick up a shovel and dig. Honestly, that has been weighing on me a lot lately – and I am thinking a lot about what I can do more in that regard. I think I do some of that here, but I am trying to figure out how to do more of it professionally – at the “career” level. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something out there for me to do, and this post brought that feeling into focus a little bit more.
I’m not living in the trenches as much as I feel I need to be.
Old-Timer wrote:To me, that is the heart and soul of the post – that instead of blaming God for things like this I need to pick up a shovel and dig.
Honestly, that has been weighing on me a lot lately – and I am thinking a lot about what I can do more in that regard. I think I do some of that here, but I am trying to figure out how to do more of it professionally – at the “career” level. I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something out there for me to do, and this post brought that feeling into focus a little bit more.
I’m not living in the trenches as much as I feel I need to be.
I feel that tug too. I tell myself that I need to wait until the kids are older (4 under age 9), but maybe it’s a cop out. For now I try to serve them and as they grow I will broaden more and more outward. I don’t post here much, but I do read and FWIW, I think you are uniquely talented for this type of ministry Ray.
rebeccad wrote:I read it I’m not sure I got his meaning.
What I understood him to say is that God can’t stop everything bad from happening. If that is that case I agree with him, but it completely shakes the foundation of the idea of an omnipotent God.
When something like this happens you can either ignore the question of where God was, or admit that he isn’t powerful enough to stop it, or imagine that he wanted it to happen for some reason.
The poor children that were killed it is easy to say that they were welcomed in to heaven, and hopefully never really understood to horror unfolding before them.
However their parents, their siblings their grandparents have just started the first day of hell.
It is them that have to figure out what they are going to do with Christmas presents already bought, sitting under the tree waiting for hands that a too cold to unwrap them. There are 27 families that will never be the same. There will be many people that can’t handle the pain and suffering and lose their lives to addictions, their will be marriages that can’t handle the devastation and will crumble, there will be people so consumed with guilt at not stopping this tragedy that they will not be able to function properly ever again.
But hopefully there will be good too. Hopefully people will be inspired by the memory to create service organizations, scholarship funds, or to treat other people with more kindness and love. Maybe, just maybe, in the end enough people will be inspired to do good that the amount of good that is inspired by this event overtakes the amount of bad, and in all the world is a better place.
In the end, if “the winds and the waves shall obey thy will” I don’t know why God didn’t make a tree fall on his house and kill him. He had a great hurricane out here just recently that would have done the job quite nicely.
Thanks rebecca, this is an excellent post.
Sorry Ray, I’ve not read the blog yet. I’m currently in denial about the episode as it’s too painful to contemplate. I have children of the same age.
If God could have and didn’t stop it, then I’m not sure I want much to do with Him.
If God couldn’t stop it, then why do we pray for protection on car journeys, why do we credit God’s goodness in apparent miraculous moments.
3 options about God intervening:
– can but does in all cases (for good and ill, His hand is even in the tragedies)
– can’t and doesn’t in any cases (so miracles don’t exist)
– can and does in selected cases, while standing passive in others (so how lucky are you feeling today?)
I’m not sure I like any of them. Anyway, Ray, I’ll take a look when it’s not so raw.
I think the shooting is Connecticut is an absolute tragedy. As hard as it may seem for us to fathom, violence is actually decreasing from a historical point of view. I wrote a post about it: See http://www.wheatandtares.org/2012/12/17/holiday-violence/ I think there is a 4th option: but perhaps it is just a variation on the third: -He is close to equally matched by a power that wants evil and bad things to happen, so while he tries to stop it, isn’t always successful.
This goes to things that are mitigating factors:
Victoria Soto was successful in convincing the gunman she was alone in the room
Many people didn’t go into work at the WTC on 9/11
etc
God tried to keep the shooting from happening Satan wanted it to be worse, they battled it out and this is the result.
It never occured to me before but this sounds close to the gods of greek mythology.
I read the article and came away with the same general feeling expressed by Ciasiab, but at least two people that I forwarded the article to felt that it presented more of a hopeless perspective–that it doesn’t really matter what we do and that heaven is not a hopeful place. I read it again and suppose one could come away with that idea as well.
It seems to me that horrific events such as this challenge our perspective of God, and can make us feel hopeless of ever having heavenly intervention. If this could happen, what’s the point of praying for a safe journey to work? But tragic events can happen under the rule of an omnipotent and benevolent, but limited God (due to free agency). I like the idea of God with a shovel, but really, this is a God in us, is it not? Deus ex anthropos? Are not heavenly interventions performed by the angels on earth? We serve, we save, we protect, we help, we counsel, we comfort, and we sometimes stop the bad guys and the bad things from happening. But not always. The tragic events shake us and we feel a collective crater in the soul of humanity, but then we pick up our shovels and we search for solutions, for ways to keep things like this from ever ever happening again.
And we pray and seek for answers, and God directs us toward the solutions, working with us but never intervening to the point of taking away our basic ability to choose for ourselves.
And I believe there is a science to prayer, to the collective power of our connected souls directing positive energy toward something. I’m not sure how much God does or can act to answer the prayers directly, other than through impressions and feelings, and directing his earthly angels (us) to do His work, or the things that will comfort, help, and bring joy to His children. Again, Deus ex anthropos.
We are god.
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