What’s Up with God?
May 14, 2023 Leave a comment
“What’s up with God?” This question has been posed in various forms throughout history, often in the context of the problem of evil. And often with God’s existence being made contingent upon man’s assessment of God in relation to evil, as was posited by Greek philosopher Epicurus in what has become known as the “Epicurean paradox”:
If God is willing to prevent evil, but is not able to
Then He is not omnipotent.
If He is able, but not willing
Then He is malevolent.
If He is both able and willing
Then whence cometh evil.
If He is neither able nor willing
Then why call Him God?
What’s up with theodicy? Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazov, one of The Brothers Karamazov in Dostoyevsky’s masterful novel, is a sullen and withdrawn 24-year-old rationalist afflicted with great inner conflict. He rejects the world as it is because it doesn’t line up with the moral reasoning of his “Euclidean mind, an earthly mind”:
“I accept God […] It’s not God that I do not accept, you understand, it is this world of God’s […] that I do not accept and cannot agree to accept.”- Ivan, The Brothers Karamazov, Part 2: Book 5, Chapter 3
Where is the vindication of God’s goodness and justice and the idea of a loving God in the horror of unjust human suffering—particularly the suffering of children?
Going further than Ivan, professional God-denying atheist Richard Dawkins thinks he knows what’s up with God. He’s done a “1619 Project” on God:
“The God of the Old Testament 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 P.31.
It’s not just philosophers and characters in novels and atheists who question “What’s up with God?” Those who have walked in God’s presence have also thought that God as God should act in certain ways.
Job and his friends had strong inclinations as to how God should act. Their back-and-forth dialogues disclose that they thought that God should act with the retribution principle: the righteous prosper and the wicked suffer. Do your due diligence, bring offerings and sacrifices and God will return the favor. If you suffer misfortune, it is because you have made God unhappy and you are not as righteous as you thought you were.
Quid pro quo religious rituals were common throughout ancient Near Eastern history. Ancients interested in attaining a god’s favor offered sacrifices in order to receive it. Sacrifice as a form of bribery was also common during the Greek and Roman times when there were many gods to feed and take care of. The religious practitioners thought of the gods as being like them – needy. Now let’s go back in time to the first What’s up with God? situation recorded in Scripture.
As you read Genesis chapter 4 you find that the narrator, without adding any moral qualification of his own, wants the reader to assess what is said and done. Note: this Mother’s Day story doesn’t end well.
The setting: just outside the garden of Eden.
We read that brothers Cain and Abel offer the fruits of their labor to God as a sacrifice. They may have placed the offerings outside the flaming sword-protected gate of the garden. Abel offers the best cuts from the mature firstlings of his flock. Cain offers portions of what’s been growing. They both offer yields from God’s good creation, but there is an issue with one of the offerings. The narrator doesn’t give us the motives behind the offerings but we do get Cain’s reaction and God’s response.
When his offering is not considered by God, Cain became hot with anger. His face became downcast. What’s behind Cain’s response? Likely two very human attitudes: “Why was Abel’s offering accepted and not mine – No fair! Inequality! I am the oldest! What about my rights?!” and “God isn’t supposed to act this way when I give him something. What’s up with God?!”
Cain likely felt that he had rights by placing God in debt to him with his offering. He did what he felt was required and now God must do what is required and return the favor. He had made a deal with his offering perhaps thinking “If I feed God then I get a return on my investment”. As noted above, this was a typical Near Eastern attitude of brokering with the gods for favor (I am not assuming that there are only four humans on earth at this time.)
Then the Lord said to Cain, “Why are you angry? Why is your face downcast? If you do what is right, will you not be accepted? But if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must rule over it.” Genesis 4: 6-7
God gives Cain a free-will choice. I read it as “Do you want to be accepted or are you just looking to get your conditional ritual brokering accepted? If you want to be accepted, then do what is right with regard to me and you’ll be accepted. You doing right is infinitely more acceptable than a plateful of greens.”
Or, “Cain, you can continue going you own way. Just be ready to be pounced on and be overtaken by more of the same “What’s up with God?” behavior that overcame and killed your brother Abel. You would then live like a wild animal. Isn’t that how you imagine yourself now –as one of them, free to roam and ready to pounce? I told your parents to continue what I began – bring order to the as-yet-to-be-ordered world, to subdue and rule. Will you choose to be disorder and the sower of suffering for yourself and others?
Cain made his free-will choice. It appears that he decided that God was petty and unfair. So, he weaponized his anger toward God and destroyed his image. He brought Abel to a field and murdered him. But what happens on the field does not stay on the field. Abel’s split blood cried out to God and the “petty and unfair” God came looking for murderously unfair Cain.
“Then the Lord said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the Lord said, “What have you done? Listen, your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!”
Cain admits no culpability. As a consequence of Cain’s attitude and actions, God curses Cain. The curse in Genesis 4 is very similar to the one in Genesis 3, except that it’s not just the ground that is cursed it is a human being that is also cursed.
“And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.”
It seems that the punishment God gave Cain was Cain’s heart’s desire: to be his own man and to go his own way. But Cain balks, perhaps realizing that what goes around comes around. And so, for protection, Cain’s implied plea is for God to act like a “brother’s keeper”.
“Cain said to the Lord, “My punishment is greater than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the Lord said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the Lord put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.
The Lord shows undeserved goodwill toward Cain, favor that Cain had once assumed should be automatic with his offering. The Lord treats Cain as Cain should have treated his brother Abel.
Cain should have received the death penalty. (Did Richard Dawkins ever read Genesis 4?), but instead is banished from living near the garden and the Lord’s presence. The mark placed on Cain by God means that God promises to look after Cain in exile, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. The Lord promises Cain justice in avenging his split blood.
These are very sad words: “Then Cain went away from the presence of the Lord and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden.” (“Nod” = “wandering”)
In the land of wandering, Cain has a chance to repent and return to God. But . . . the willful Cain goes his own way. Instead of wandering, Cain defies God and builds a city. The city for him equals protection, security, being surround by allies, and a lack of trust in God’s character.
When God didn’t respond to Cain’s offering, Cain could have asked “Why” to gain understanding but his attitude kept him from doing so. He had decided about how God should act. If Cain had asked God “Why?”, would God have answered “Just because I chose your younger brother’s offering this time doesn’t make me petty and unfair? It doesn’t mean that I don’t accept you. You don’t know me. Three dimensions cannot contain me. The fourth dimension of time allows for your understanding of me. And Cain, you assumed something about me with your petty conditional thinking. Had you asked you would have found out what I am like and what I desire. My lack of response was meant as a challenge. I wanted you to respond with questioning humility and to patiently wait for my response.”
What does the Genesis 4 narrator want to us understand? That we must begin our understanding of God with the acknowledgement of and respect for God as God? That God is Other than us? That because God has made himself present to us never means that one is on equal terms with God? That we must not try to domesticate God with our assumptions about him? That Cain thought that God would be as needy as he was for attention and that was the motive for his offering?
God prescribed a “fugitive and a wanderer on the earth” life for Cain. Exile to the land of exclusion was done, I believe, as a means for Cain to take time to reflect on his attitude and on what he had done and to come to the point of repentance and to returning to the presence of God. But self-reliant Cains hunkers down and builds a city for protection. As we shall see in a future post, cities magnify what is in the human heart.
In the Cain and Abel account, the question of “What’s up with God?” is met with “What have you done?”
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“The suffering and evil of the world are not due to weakness, oversight, or callousness on God’s part. But rather, are the inescapable costs of a creation allowed to be other than God.” – John Polkinghorne
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“The cross of popular evangelicalism is not the cross of the New Testament. It is, rather, a new bright ornament upon the bosom of a self-assured and carnal Christianity whose hands are indeed the hands of Abel, but whose voice is the voice of Cain. The old cross slew men; the new cross entertains them. The old cross condemned; the new cross amuses. The old cross destroyed confidence in the flesh; the new cross encourages it. The old cross brought tears and blood; the new cross brings laughter. The flesh, smiling and confident, preaches and sings about the cross; before the cross it bows and toward the cross it points with carefully staged histrionics but upon that cross it will not die, and the reproach of that cross it stubbornly refuses to bear.” — A.W. Tozer
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Informed Dissent:
Vaccine Atrocities
Former Pfizer VP Dr. Michael Yeadon
How to Save Your Life and Those You Love When Hospitalized – LewRockwell
Patient Documents | OurPatientRights.com (protocolkills.com)
The American Sovereignty Declaration: It’s Time for America to Exit the W.H.O.” – Dr. Robert Malone
“ . . . in the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the WHO lied about the nature, origins and effective responses to the Wuhan Virus. The “China Model” of lockdowns, masks and vaccine mandates and digital enforcement mechanisms was endorsed. And the WHO approved the use of expensive and inadequately tested gene therapies as “vaccinations” and the suppression of readily available, effective and inexpensive treatments. Thanks in part to such misconduct, the pandemic has resulted in the deaths of over a million Americans and many more elsewhere around the world, an untold number of whom perished needlessly.
Given the WHO’s appalling record, it is outrageous that the Biden administration is working to give the WHO and its Director-General more power over sovereign nations, including the United States. Yet, U.S. government officials are actively negotiating amendments to existing International Health Regulations and a new treaty governing future pandemics. These accords would effectively repose in Dr. Tedros the authority unilaterally to dictate what constitutes an actual or potential Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) and to order how affected nations must respond.” (Emphasis mine.)
The American Sovereignty Declaration (substack.com)
The American Sovereignty Declaration: It’s Time for America to Exit the W.H.O.
Sign at this link>> Sovereignty Coalition
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What’s the Unitarian?
May 5, 2012 Leave a comment
It is little wonder that the well-known ‘angry’ atheist Richard Dawkins wrote the anti-thesim book The God Delusion. It is easily understandable especially after one reads the interview (excerpted and linked below) between a Unitarian Minister Marilyn Sewell and another anti-theist atheist the former Christopher Hitchens (Hitch).
As evident from the interview, Marilyn Sewell, a minister, is utterly delusional in her understanding of God and Christianity. And it is blatantly obvious that Hitch has a better understanding of Christianity than this Unitarian minister.
Apparently from her bio Sewell has studied theology but I contend it is not Biblical theology. Her questions and remarks as interviewer reveal her embrace of syncretism – a diversity of false beliefs and humanism blended with the truth of Christianity. Unitarian could be another term for syncretism.
From her eponymous blog we are told that liberal believer and retired minister of the First Unitarian Church of Portland Marilyn Sewell is a former teacher and psychotherapist. She has authored numerous books. Over a period of 17 years Sewell helped grow Portland’s downtown Unitarian congregation into one of the largest in the United States. At this point I must say that the fact that this woman and the Unitarian Church are misleading many is of serious concern to me. I must contend for the truth of Gospel of Jesus Christ.
It troubles my spirit greatly when people like this liberal Unitarian minister use the name of Jesus Christ to preach “another gospel” and not the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her message is a mish-mash of new age religion, liberal theology, social justice and cheap grace. The ultimate message becomes half lie half truth: “It’s not what you believe but how you live.” Ergo an embrace of diverse beliefs and social justice activism are at the forefront of Unitarian creeds. As you’ll read, for Sewell just like the Episcopalian minister ghost in C.S. Lewis’, “The Great Divorce” all is metaphor, and therefore, cannot be taken seriously
The deity of Christ, His death on the cross, His atonement for sins, judgement, heaven and hell, all are dismissed as being metaphorical, as not relevant to present human need and too exclusive a message to preach and teach. Clearly this is syncretistic thinking and delusional with regard to the truth. And because of its soft, socially acceptable version of theology the tentacles of Unitarian tenets are quickly creeping into evangelical churches across the nation.
As a follower of Christ I am posting this information expressly to note the deception hidden in Sewell’s misguided words. I have no problem talking about this interview in no uncertain terms. From the public record it can be noted that Sewell is a social activist and polemicist as was Hitch. They are/were each able to dish out pious platitudes at will and certainly, as their backgrounds would support, are/were able to hold their own in conversations regarding issues of faith and God. So here goes.
The interview took place prior to Christopher Hitchen’s January 5th, 2010 appearance as part of the Literary Arts’ Portland art and lecture series at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall. Hitch was political columnist for Vanity Fair, Slate, and other magazines, and known for his frequent contributions on the political TV circuit. Hitchens’ pointed attacks against all religion has earned him regular debates across the country, often with the very fundamentalist believers his book, “God is Not Great”, attacks. Sewell, the interviewer, though, knows nothing about the fundamentals of Christianity. It would seem that Hitch is in a joust with Jello.
Here are excerpts from that interview, linked here:
Marilyn Sewell: In the book you write that, at age nine, you experienced the ignorance of your scripture teacher Mrs. Watts and, then later at 12, your headmaster tried to justify religion as a comfort when facing death. It seems you were an intuitive atheist. But did you ever try religion again?
Christopher Hitchens: I belong to what is a significant minority of human beings: Those who are-as Pascal puts it in his Pensées, his great apology for Christianity-“so made that they cannot believe.” As many as 10 percent of is just never can bring themselves to take religion seriously. And since people often defend religion as natural to humans (which I wouldn’t say it wasn’t, by the way), the corollary holds too: there must be respect for those who simply can’t bring themselves to find meaning in phrases like “the Holy Spirit.”
Well, could it be that some people are “so made” for faith. and you are so made for the intellectual life?
I don’t have whatever it takes to say things like “the grace of God.” All that’s white noise to me, not because I’m an intellectual. For many people, it’s gibberish. Likewise, the idea that the Koran was dictated by an archaic illiterate is a fantasy. As so far the most highly evolved of the primates, we do seem in the majority to have a tendency to worship, and to look for patterns that lead to supernatural conclusions. Whereas, I think that there is no supernatural dimension whatever. The natural world is quite wonderful enough. The more we know about it, the much more wonderful it is than any supernatural proposition.
The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?
I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.
Let me go someplace else. When I was in seminary I was particularly drawn to the work of theologian Paul Tillich. He shocked people by describing the traditional God-as you might as a matter of fact-as, “an invincible tyrant.” For Tillich, God is “the ground of being.” It’s his response to, say, Freud’s belief that religion is mere wish-fulfillment and comes from the humans’ fear of death. What do you think of Tillich’s concept of God?”
I would classify that under the heading of “statements that have no meaning-at all.” Christianity, remember, is really founded by St. Paul, not by Jesus. Paul says, very clearly, that if it is not true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead, then we the Christians are of all people the most unhappy. If none of that’s true, and you seem to say it isn’t, I have no quarrel with you. You’re not going to come to my door trying convince me either. Nor are you trying to get a tax break from the government. Nor are you trying to have it taught to my children in school. If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.
Well, probably not, because I agree with almost everything that you say. But I still consider myself a Christian and a person of faith.
Do you mind if I ask you a question? Faith in what? Faith in the resurrection?
The way I believe in the resurrection is I believe that one can go from a death in this life, in the sense of being dead to the world and dead to other people, and can be resurrected to new life. When I preach about Easter and the resurrection, it’s in a metaphorical sense.
I hate to say it-we’ve hardly been introduced-but maybe you are simply living on the inheritance of a monstrous fraud that was preached to millions of people as the literal truth-as you put it, “the ground of being.”
Times change and, you know, people’s beliefs change. I don’t believe that you have to be fundamentalist and literalist to be a Christian. You do: You’re something of a fundamentalist, actually.
Well, I’m sorry, fundamentalist simply means those who think that the Bible is a serious book and should be taken seriously.
If you would like for me to talk a little bit about what I believe . . .
Well I would actually.
I don’t know whether or not God exists in the first place, let me just say that. I certainly don’t think that God is an old man in the sky, I don’t believe that God intervenes to give me goodies if I ask for them.
You don’t believe he’s an interventionist of any kind?
I’m kind of an agnostic on that one. God is a mystery to me. I choose to believe because-and this is a very practical thing for me-I seem to live with more integrity when I find myself accountable to something larger than myself. That thing larger than myself, I call God, but it’s a metaphor. That God is an emptiness out of which everything comes. Perhaps I would say ” reality” or “what is” because we’re trying to describe the infinite with language of the finite. My faith is that I put all that I am and all that I have on the line for that which I do not know.
Fine. But I think that’s a slight waste of what could honestly be in your case a very valuable time. I don’t want you to go away with the impression that I’m just a vulgar materialist. I do know that humans are also so made even though we are an evolved species whose closest cousins are chimpanzees. I know it’s not enough for us to eat and so forth. We know how to think. We know how to laugh. We know we’re going to die, which gives us a lot to think about, and we have a need for, what I would call, “the transcendent” or “the numinous” or even “the ecstatic” that comes out in love and music, poetry, and landscape. I wouldn’t trust anyone who didn’t respond to things of that sort. But I think the cultural task is to separate those impulses and those needs and desires from the supernatural and, above all, from the superstitious.
Could you talk about these two words that you just used, “transcendent” and “numinous”? Those are two words are favorites of mine.
Well, this would probably be very embarrassing, if you knew me. I can’t compose or play music; I’m not that fortunate. But I can write and I can talk and sometimes when I’m doing either of these things I realize that I’ve written a sentence or uttered a thought that I didn’t absolutely know I had in me… until I saw it on the page or heard myself say it. It was a sense that it wasn’t all done by hand.
A gift?
But, to me, that’s the nearest I’m going to get to being an artist, which is the occupation I’d most like to have and the one, at last, I’m the most denied. But I, think everybody has had the experience at some point when they feel that there’s more to life than just matter. But I think it’s very important to keep that under control and not to hand it over to be exploited by priests and shamans and rabbis and other riffraff.
You know, I think that that might be a religious impulse that you’re talking about there.
Well, it’s absolutely not. It’s a human one. It’s part of the melancholy that we have in which we know that happiness is fleeting, and we know that life is brief, but we know that, nonetheless, life can be savored and that happiness, even of the ecstatic kind, is available to us. But we know that our life is essentially tragic as well. I’m absolutely not for handing over that very important department of our psyche to those who say, “Well, ah. Why didn’t you say so before? God has a plan for you in mind.” I have no time to waste on this planet being told what to do by those who think that God has given them instructions.
You write, “Literature, not scripture, sustains the mind and the soul.” You use the word “soul” there as metaphor. What is a soul for you?
It’s what you might call “the x-factor”-I don’t have a satisfactory term for it-it’s what I mean by the element of us that isn’t entirely materialistic: the numinous, the transcendent, the innocence of children (even though we know from Freud that childhood isn’t as innocent as all that), the existence of love (which is, likewise, unquantifiable but that anyone would be a fool who said it wasn’t a powerful force), and so forth. I don’t think the soul is immortal, or at least not immortal in individuals, but it may be immortal as an aspect of the human personality because when I talk about what literature nourishes, it would be silly of me or reductionist to say that it nourishes the brain.
I wouldn’t argue with you about the immortality of the soul. Were I back in a church again, I would love to have you in my church because you’re so eloquent and I believe that some of your impulses-and, excuse me for saying so-are religious in the way I am religious. You may call it something else, but we agree in a lot of our thinking.
I’m touched that you say, as some people have also said to me, that I’ve missed my vocation. But I actually don’t think that I have. I would not be able to be this way if I was wearing robes or claiming authority that was other than human. that’s a distinction that matters to me very much.
You have your role and it’s a valuable one, so thank you for what you give to us.
Well, thank you for asking. It’s very good of you to be my hostess.
[end of interview]
Note above that after Sewell’s reference to theologian Paul Tillich’s take on God as “an invincible tyrant” and after mentioning Freud’s dismissive take on faith (also well-known to Hitch), she wants to hear from Hitch about Tillich’s concept of God. Listen closely to Hitch’s response:
Wow! The money line: “If all Christians were like you I wouldn’t have to write the book.”
Even Hitch knows that this woman is way off the mark in her ‘theology’. In this case Hitch doesn’t drop famous names from history like Sewell. Hitch cuts to the quick with the truth of the Gospel as he knows it. He quotes from Scripture: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.” (I Cor. 15:19).
Hitch has known Christianity from standing outside looking in while. He does not like Christianity’s authority and the abuse of that authority (as I do not).
Sewell, on the other hand, knows the hodge-podge Unitarian philosophy from inside out. She knows all of its labyrinthine pathways leading to the utopian fields of humanism, new age philosophy and God is love-ism. The irony: Unitarian ‘theology’ clearly advocates the contention of atheists that religion is about wish-fulfillment and fear of the unknown.
Here is Marilyn’s take on the conversation from her blog:
I would certainly argue from the details of the interview that Hitch knows Christianity well enough to be convicted by its message – but he rejects it outright. Sewell, on the other hand, doesn’t know the truths of Christianity and appears to only embrace the parts of the Gospel that fit with the Unitarian belief in humanism – a theology of a coddling, benevolent and indulgent God who accepts you no matter what.
Gospel truth convicts people of their sin and their separation from God whereas the tepid mollycoddling theology of Unitarianism destroys lives with its abandonment of truth and its good intentions. And as we all have heard, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Or, hell is full of good wishes and desires. In the end Truth matters.
Are you seeking the truth?
To find the truth about the Gospel of Jesus Christ read the four gospel accounts that record the life and death of Jesus Christ: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These historical eye-witness accounts are not metaphors as liberal theologians (Sewell, Elaine Pagels and others) would have us accept.
Follow the Truth wherever it leads you and it will eventually lead you to Jesus Christ. He is The Way, The Truth and the Life. I have been on the road of truth with Jesus for many years now. I know Him and he knows me.
Truth and Love go hand-in-hand or not at all.
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