Mar 5, 2010

Is there a God?

Thank God it's Friday - I say that almost every Friday. Yet I don't know who I am thanking.
He took away my dad years ago, He took away my grandma 4 days ago. Is He real?
Why do we run to Him whenever we need time to regain our strength to face the world?
Why do we run to Him if he is the Almighty and hence responsible for our loss of strength in the first place?

I do believe in Him. Not a Christian Him... I don't do religion. But I believe in Him... whoever He might be.



"I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march


It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah"

- Leonard Cohen. 1984 -

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Interesting...
I'm doing a philosophy of religion course at uni this semester. All about the theist religions and omni-god's etc. I'll fill you in on what we do. :]
In other news, Jeff Buckley's version pwns.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3-_DbEYe7A

naturgesetz said...

My condolences on your losses.

Those are good questions.

To take the last one first, I think God is responsible in the sense that he created the world with laws of physics, chemistry, biology that cause things to happen in a certain way (and the predictability is a great help to us — if everything were random or miraculous we'd never be able to prepare for anything) and he also created human beings with free will, which enables them to do good things and bad things.

But I don't think he sits somewhere saying, "Okay, today I'll kill Nic's dad." I think that's the result of the working out of the laws of created nature together with the collective effect of all the decisions he and others made that affected his life.

I think where God does most of his work with us is in our spirits. I think he "talks" to us (Inspires us); and if we listen, we get guided to do what it best for us and other people in our lives.

I think that God knows better than we do what is truly good for all of us, so his guidance (inspiration) is better than we could come up with on our own.

God could intervene in events miraculously, to stop nature from following its laws, so that some bad thing would not happen to someone. But then — nature would be unpredictable if he prevented all those things; if nothing bad ever happened to anybody, there would be no room for us to help them out which is what we need to learn to do, and there would still be the things that looked bad from our limited understanding but not from God's complete understanding, so we'd still be questioning him.

I'll add that as a Christian, I also believe that we continue to live beyond our lives on this earth, and that a happiness far surpassing any we have here awaits us when we pass from this life. So we can look forward to being with our loved ones again in a life that never ends. God wants us to have this, I believe. All we need to do is not refuse it.

So we run to him because he is the one who can give us the strength of spirit to deal with our troubles and sorrows.

Dean Grey said...

Nic!

I often wonder the same things.

Maybe we'll never really know the answers until we pass on from this world and see for ourselves.

Sorry to hear about your grandmother!

(((HUGS)))

-Dean