Why do we make excuses for God? I'm weary of trying to find reasons why God would allow evil, suffering, disasters, accidents and diseases or even send them. I don’t know how we can explain the death of children and ruining of families due to ‘acts of God’? I went to seminary and learned theology, studied the Old and New Testaments, studied Greek and Hebrew trying to get answers about God. Like why does he give and allow suffering? Why is he so silent? Why do our prayers get answered positively so infrequently and sporadically? Why did God sacrifice his son? If God loves the world why would anyone be sent to hell? If God can save, why doesn’t he save everyone, why does he fail at saving us all? What is it with his wrath that killed entire cities as explained in the Old Testament? Studying did not provide me with the answers. I know the common answers for these questions. I know the theological explanations and the trite sayings about how it is above our understanding and we just need more faith.
Many will try to say, it isn’t God, it is people. But that seems like we let God off the hook and blame everything on us. Why did God allow sin or create people to be sinful in the first place? Free will is of course the answer but if God needs or wants us to freely choose him, then God has desires we need to fill, and that doesn’t sound to me like he is whole and perfect.
If Christians study any other god or religion they can see how the logic problems, the flaws in the religion and the incredulous need for faith. People worshipped Zeus, Satan, Allah or many other gods. The followers of other gods were convinced and didn’t see the inconsistencies or fallacies. But looking from the outside, Christians easily evaluate and see these are false religions. The same is true for Christianity. You can’t see it from the inside. When you are a Christian you stay that way because you don’t have an outside perspective and your religion is giving you something, so you don’t want to see flaws or cracks. Christians are quick to have questions about other gods, but not about their own.
I don’t blame people for wanting to stay in the safety of believing the same thing. It’s the easy path. Believing in a good God who is in control and providing everything to bless you and blaming Satan and people’s sin (including your own) for evil provides simple explanations to make sense of life. However, it is more complicated than that. The questions about God encompass the whole story of God and redemption as well as the character of God. Without satisfactory answers, I found deconstructing and deconverting was my best option to live a peaceful life. Look at this quote from @JennJohnson20 on Instagram. She says “Life without God is chaos and confusion. Life WITH God is peace and clarity. It’s not all the answers…there’s mystery…but there’s peace.” Well there has been more peace for me outside of the unsolvable mystery and more clarity and I am so thankful to have it!
I came across a poem about Job’s wife. A brief recap of the story of Job is that Job is a wealthy, blameless and upright man. Satan wants to know if his piety is because he is so blessed with riches. So Satan and God make a wager to see if removing the blesses will cause Job to curse God. Job’s livestock, children, and servants all die. Then his health is taken away. His wife curses God, but Job doesn’t. He has conversations with three “comforters” and God and then God returns his health, gives twice as much property, new children and a very long life. The poem is called “A Requiem for Job’s Wife” by Kaitlin Shetler. She can be found on Facebook under "Kaitlin Shetler Poetry".
A Requiem for Job’s Wife
lay her softly in the soil, sisters
softly and kindly, lay her down.
dig where her tears have already made mud;
lower her into the same earth her shouts rent into two—
there’s nothing more sacred than a mother’s grief.
and when you sing this story, use a drum.
use a hundred.
deafen heaven;
make a nuisance,
be a shrew.
when you mourn this truth, tell it boldly—bear witness to the sins of neighbors and husbands and God.
witness: it was Him. in his “infinite wisdom”, he gambled away the lives of innocents in the name of fun and ego.
witness: her husband chose self-righteous moping over her.
witness: god chose self-aggrandizing power over her.
witness: she didn’t deserve this. they didn’t deserve this. no one deserves this.
witness: deconversion. a fucking necessary deconversion.
write her obituary in the blood of her babies—nail it to heaven’s gates.
drip. drip. drip. the innocent blood
and pray god slips and falls and dies from the mess he capriciously made.
lay her gently in the ground, sisters
and make a house out of her bones.
decorate it with trinkets and spells, and curse those who call it sacrilege—
there’s nothing more sacred than a woman’s pain.
and in the middle of the night—
while her husband and satan and god play non-consensual games lacking safe words and sanity—
gather up your children,
hide them away,
and get ready to fight.
here lies Job’s wife:
may her spirit be a thorn in God’s side for eternity.
may our spirits.
amen.
Thanks to Kaitlin Shetler for her post this week on making excuses for God and her poem on Job’s wife. She helped me think this through.
I don’t know that I’m ready to say that God isn’t real. I do think that the Christian concept of God is the problem. Jim Palmer, who also posts on Facebook spoke of God this week. He says,
“God is love.” This does not say "God DOES love", which would make God's love transactional. Meaning, that God's love is a transaction between God and you or whoever. No, it says God IS love, which means that a quality of God's incorporeal being is everything good we mean by the word "love".
He goes on to say,
You might also need to hear this. You will never find a moment in life when you are not held in love by the deepest and ultimate reality at the heart of all things. You came from love, you live in love, you return to love.
His whole post is worth reading.
This week, along with questioning the Christian God, I continue to wander and wonder if there is a God. What could “God” be called, what would “God” be like and why do I care about this question? Is God/Religion an opium for the masses and/or a social construct? I’m not alone in asking these questions and neither are you.
Val Martens
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