Continued… (Part III?)
Wednesday, March 7th, 2007So i have (in my last few posts) been throwing thoughts together, trying to organize them as i go (which I enjoy doing better), but i understand if i lose people. let me know and i will explain something more thoroughly.
so i just re-read my old post and want to continue, but it is hard because i am having different strains of thought right now. i will do my best.
i just barely touched on heaven in my last post, but have to say, it is a large part of why i think the way i do. heaven makes this place (earth or ‘not heaven’) ‘not fully right’. what i mean by that is, it could have been better, but with a loving, all-powerful god, god didn’t want it to be. again, i feel the need to back track. i may not have explained my interpretation of ‘all-powerful’ enough yet…
(i believe that is how this post might end)
my understanding of all-powerful, is to be in complete control of every aspect of everything. just realy quick, yes that includes sin. all powerful is not a lazy term that i throw around lightly, i believe that if i say that god would be all powerful than god contains this characteristic of being in control of absolutely everything. well (as i touched on in the last post), this seems rather obserd as this free-will B.S. stands in my way of a belief in an all powerful god. i have to say that with this point, i tend to stray rather close to the crc belief (the one i always argued against) of predestination. now, everyone hears the word ‘predestination’ and thinks they know whats up. i am not, and will not waste time arguing about whether or not god ’sends’ people to heaven or to that other place most christians believe in. god being all powerful makes that a non-argument. i could move in a circle here and argue god being just and people going to hell unjust, but i will wait a little longer. the point i am trying to make here is that our faith in god CAN be so strong that we believe god ‘is’ and was in control of everything. now i should, again, clarify this statement. ‘is’ is somewhat debatable. i am not stricktly convinced that god right now does stuff/changes events, however my belief in god at one time controlling today makes the ‘is’ work. yeah i know, that was horribly articulated… please read on.
i move with the deist here and believe that god, being all-powerful, created the world in such a way that i would be sitting here writing this post and you would be (now?) sitting here reading it. i am in the firm belief that the only way god can control today, (since i see god nowhere currently in action or body) is to have spun the world, such that we are here today. this is a tough concept to grab a hold of and i welcome questions for better explaination. i see no reason why an all=powerful god couldn’t have accomplished this move. this would explain why god is in control of everything, and why god isn’t concerned with showing god’s-self to us in any physical voice/being/action/light/etc. god’s already in control.
however, this definitely puts god in charge of the sin that was included in god’s spin of this world (aka. creation) and it also makes a lot of people feel sour because they don’t feel in control of their actions, or that others (hitler, murderers etc) aren’t responsible for their actions. for this explaination and reasonaing i jump away from theology and look around me. it seems like i, and everyone that i know, is sitting in the position that they are sitting in based on experiences that they have encountered, somewhere in their life. they have accomplished NOTHING on their own and are only affected by situations/happinstances in their life. for myself… i am a white middle class citizen of the U.S. This alone means that… christian? moral? financial? (well maybe those) those are the direct effects of only 2 situations that i was brought up in. more? i had loving parents that tought me well and treated me like an adult even when i wasn’t one. that can easily explain why i can handle myself in social situations, why i do not look for blood to give me an orgasm etc. etc. etc. the people that we look at as the most ‘insane’ in our modern world are those that had situations that made them the way they were. do they have a choice? well maybe. i guess that depends on the definition of a choice. when eric’s parents tell him he can eat from the cookie jar, can eric be blamed for not eating from the cookie jar, just the way many people believe that jihads are a’okay, and why many people thought that black people were inferior to the whites. it has nothing to do with personal thought or belief, simply situations that brought about that belief. even me sitting here writing shit against what i have been taught all my life is because i was taught to question what i was told and to be persistent with debate and understanding.
i digress. anyways, as you can see i could write for a long time on what seems very little. either way, it seems, even if the argument may be that people have natural brain malfunctions or whatever, that people are not entirel culpable for the actions that they do, or commit. i don’t think that this is where i intended to end up tonight, but i did. one more step. the experiences that people have, to make them they way that they are (i see this to be plausible) happen only because other people act a certain way (caused by their situations). so african-american’s today being sour against the white culture can be explained by little johnnie in the 50’s acting how he was taught to act by his father, etc. (one of many many many reasons) and johnnie’s father by his father etc etc etc. the father teaching the son how to treat another race is only part of the ’situation’ johnny had to deal with, there were millions of them, school, bus rides, restaurants, street discussions, etc. all of which i believe god set up in the beginning and therefore, controls.
i hope i am making some sense and am not ranting, saying the same things over and over. i will quit now and maybe outline my next post. please let me know if you have questions or problems with what i have stated so far. i will do what i can to explain better.
and i believe that he wants us to use them.
firstly, i am realizing that i do believe in “predestination”. i never used to even growing up in a crc home. i refused to have an opinion and avoided the topic as i believed it was a “non-issue”. meaning if in the end nothing changes whether i believed in it or not, then why bother having an opinion at all. i guess maybe in some ways i still do think that way a little. well i think that could dip into every type of philisophical or theological debate.
i’m in the process of redefining my beliefs as you are. i used to believe God was this way in that situation and that way in this situation. defining him based on my emotions and how i felt he should respond. which now looking back is childish and very controversial. being our creator, who are we to “put him in box” so to speak. allowing him to affect our lives only when we ask him to. i believe God deserves more respect than that.
you touched on “nature vs. nurture” and a few other things such as the existance of hell. i look forward to discussing these in person when i come down next weekend. hopefully we’ll have time to talk despite your busy performance schedule.