By Joshua Shrode, Reason and Meaning
How odd that a compassionate God uses such a mode … a book … to communicate with his mostly illiterate creation. By odd, I mean ridiculous…not of God but of us to look at a book written in a real human language and think, “Perfect! Obviously God’s word!” A real human language is a constantly evolving thing. Meanings drift. Spellings change. Pronunciation shifts. Metaphors and even definitions lose their intelligibility or gain totally different ones.
….
A truly good God would just speak to us … all of us .. whenever we had a question. When someone was misrepresenting his intent, he’d correct them in real-time and discuss why he felt a certain way or gave such an injunction or command or allowed such evil to occur due to some greater good. If he did suffer himself to write a book, it would be self-translating and modify itself to the belief system of the reader, such that it could reveal itself with the clarity and distinctness of raw, uninterpreted sense data. We could still choose to believe or not believe, worship or not worship, follow or not follow, of our own free will, but there would be no disagreement that God was real, and this is what he says about himself and his creation. In fact, this is the only way a good God, a compassionate God, a God who did not revel in billions of blind men, women, and children stumbling in ignorance towards their eternal doom, would act.
We call this “informed consent”. When I have more information and more knowledge, I can make better choices or at least make more informed choices. As I’m writing this now, I am being misinterpreted by every reader at some point in my argument. But anyone need only ask and I’ll clarify…personally. How is it that I, a being so much more limited than God, can do what God never does? I want people to interact with as accurate an interpretation of my ideas as is possible. To do that most effectively, I must know that misunderstandings will happen, and I will try to correct them to the best of my ability. If I am unwilling to clarify even the grossest misunderstandings, I cannot hold someone responsible for failing to understand my intent or my belief.
Unfortunately, we decided at some point that our stories were Truth and that science was a threat because both make claims about the natural world, and often these claims conflict. There is a battle for the future of humanity. If Science wins, we may actually have a future. We will at least face our problems in the here and now and tackle them in a manner up to the task and not colored by theological squeamishness. If Theism wins, then God help us all. My money, as much as it saddens me to say, is on theism stamping out progress. Theism has a long and glorious dalliance with fear and has cultivated its use to high art. And as science has shown, fear is the most motivating of forces.
My contention then is that God is but a sideshow; I highlight the absurdity of a supposedly compassionate God relying on ambiguous scriptures to guide us. Theological —Islamic, Jewish, Christian—stem from the same flawed medium I rail against. A divine presentation would know each reader, communicate, update, and respond. It would’ve spared us centuries of book-burning and observatory-wrecking. Instead, we’re left with human squabbles over divine intent, proving my point: a good God wouldn’t play hide-and-seek with truth. And so we can dispense with the notion.
Bruce Gerencser, 69, lives in rural Northwest Ohio with his wife of 48 years. He and his wife have six grown children and thirteen grandchildren. Bruce pastored Evangelical churches for twenty-five years in Ohio, Texas, and Michigan. Bruce left the ministry in 2005, and in 2008 he left Christianity. Bruce is now a humanist and an atheist.
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