Re: [asa] The Old Testament God is ..

> "arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud
> of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty
> ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,
> filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously
> malevolent bully"
>
> Richard Dawkins "The God Delusion".
>

This may come as a surprise, but, to some extend, there is
reason to share sympathy with him. It is difficult to understand
suffering.

Moreover, though I have not read the book, this is a typical
work up over all the parasites that have evolved, natural
disasters that have claimed the lives of the innocent, the cruel
dictators who have gone to their graves praised and honored,
some passages of the old testament where for example God curses
Ham, etc. As he works to a climax, and thus follows the rant.

These things are matters that are appropriate to make our
private complaints to God about. We don't understand why
evil things happen in this world, and it is hard to reconcile
it with a righteous God (and certainly a Dawkins' divine
Santa Claus type god).

I don't have an answer to his complaints but one of the differences
we have as ones who believe in God, is that we have faith
that we can bring our complaints to God. Dawkins can rant,
rave, wail, and moan, but it is to no one; certainly no one
who can save any of us. Everything reduces to chance, and
for this lot, we live afflicted, strutting a fretting our
life upon the stage, and soon are seen no more.

Calvin writes of Psalm 102:
To pour out our complaints before him [God] after the manner of
little children would certainly be to treat his majesty with very little
reverence, were it not that he has been pleased to allow us such
freedom.

On Psalm 39:
We have here a very profitable and instructive lesson. Nothing is better
able
to restrain violent paroxysms of grief than the realization that we deal with
God
and not with mortal man. God will always maintain his own righteousness, even

in the face of everything men may say against him in their complaints and
accusations...

Some, then, ascribe their miseries to fate or fortune, others to other
people, and
others account for their troubles from a variety of causes suggested by their
own
imaginations. Scarcely one in a hundred recognizes in his troubles the hand
of God.
So men allow themselves to indulge in bitter complaints without ever thinking
that
they offend God in doing so. David, on the contrary, seeking to subdue every
unholy
desire and sinful excess, returns to God and resolves to keep silence,
because the
affliction which he is now suffering proceeded from God. As David, who was
afflicted
with the severest trials, resolved nevertheless to keep silence, let us learn
from this that
it is one of the chief exercises of our faith to humble ourselves under the
mighty hand
of God and to submit to his judgments without murmuring or complaining.

I know this doesn't answer Dawkins' rant completely; nor
I expect many of our personal complaints to God. But the key
is that we trust that we can bring our complaints to God and
ask for wisdom on what to do on them. Moreover, we trust that
that God will somehow __hear__ them! Though truly perplexed and
confounded by the misery and horrors of this world, we still
have courage to say "here am I". We are assured that what we
endure is not in vain, however similar our lives may appear to
conform to the vicissitudes of this world.

So, as both Calvin and Augustine have written long ago,
it is not easy to understand what we see in the world as it
happens on others, and as it happens on ourselves. If they
wrote similarly so long ago, so we should reflect that it
will surely not be any easier now. Yet we are urged to carry
on all the same. We have hope that there is meaning in all
of this madness that we see, but I perceive not even the hope
of a dawning sunrise in Dawkins' world: only a slow and torturous
gasping as time and nature slowly sink into the eternally dark
oblivion of nothingness.

by Grace we proceed,
Wayne

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Received on Tue Oct 3 20:31:43 2006