Although I have previously used the following poem of mine on Meander With Me, I am using it once again. After reviewing my reasons for not being able to accept the “God” of the Christian Bible as a Creator I can believe in, I have a few questions concerning how Christians managed to take the Jewish adversary Satan, who appears to have been on friendly terms with God—at least in the book of Job—and turn him into the Christian devil. Have you noticed, fellow-females, how “Mother Nature” is completely left out of the creation process and how women, from the very first chapter in the very first book of the Bible has but one role to play in God’s great “Plan”? I am going to allow your imaginations to take over at this juncture…? That’s it, for now.
THREE TIMES AND YOU ARE OUT
God is Good. God is Love,
or so Believers say
and all who hear and doubt this Truth
are doomed to Hell on Judgment Day.
In the Beginning there was God,
naught but God and God, Alone.
If God is Good and God is Love
then surely Sin was yet unknown.
If God with Holy Powers made,
to keep Him company,
a Heavenly Host of Angels, Pure,
as sinless Pure as He
then How and When, then What and Who
caused Lucifer to fall from Place?
Who tempted him, as he is blamed,
for Eve and Adam’s Fall from Grace?
Without the Devil’s Wily Schemes
we’re told that Eden still would be
the Realm of Man with Sin unknown,
with only Good for Thee and Me.
But Satan foiled God’s Plan for Earth
but how was Satan tempted?
Will Heaven see God’s Plan perfected
and the Saved from Sin exempted?
When once this World has passed away
and Goats and Sheep are separating,
the How and When, the What and Who
will still be out THERE waiting!
Mary,
Checkout Matthew Fox’s writings. He believes in Original Blessing not original sin. I think you might appreciate his view point. I hope this link works, if not you can cut and paste it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCSn6iJdlqI
Sybil
Thank you Sybil. I will, indeed, check out what Matthew Fox has, or had, to say about the Bible. Without ever having, to my knowledge, read any of his work on the subject, I am wondering if, in the case of so many others, Mr. Fox read the Bible
rejecting what displeased him, filled in what he believed to be missing and interpreted to his own satisfaction that which he wanted to believe.
Faith is a curious phenomenon: it warps judgment, ignores logic, reason, sound thinking and, reality. Faith may bring perfect peace to the believer, but I want the peace that does not require faith.
Mary – thank you for stopping by The Trailer Park and leaving a comment! i’ve done a quick read through a few of your recent posts, and i’m DEFINITELY coming back for more! your comment about wanting “peace that does not require faith” strikes a strong chord with me… i’ve never made that “leap of faith”, and believe that humans are basically equipped to solve their own problems… i look forward to reading more!
Daisyfae, really pleased to have you stop by. I sometimes wonder if I am doing the right thing when choosing some of the subjects I do, but then along comes a comment as yours and others, and, I’m vindicated.
It isn’t that I wish to disparage the Christian faith, I want Christians to understand that someone can have a view of the Bible that in no way denies God’s existence,but at the same time, cannot accept the “god” portrayed throughout the Christian’s “Holy Bible” as … God. No human living today can know any more of God than what early Semitic nomads, as brutal and as savage as any of their neighbors, chose to write about him.
No, perhaps that final sentence was a bit too strong. Jesus, who believed himself to be the Jewish chosen Messiah, did attempt to “humanize” God’s image, but then along came Paul and almost single handedly, turned Jesus into a a replica of Apollo, the sun god, Mythra, and the debate was on, and on, and on, and still going strong.
Your point about ‘Mother Nature’ or any or female deity being overlooked is a very valid one. No wonder ancient societies like the Celts had such a hard time with Christianity. Excellent poem.
Well writen, really!
Selma, always pleasant to hear from you. It’s bloggers such as you who keeps me blogging. Shortly after one of my grandson’s set up this blogsite for me, I was so disappointed when, what must have been a wonderful person to have for a friend, and the first person to greet me and to tell others about me, simply withdrew and never came back. She called herself something like “Walks Far Woman”. I shall always remember her kindness to me.
“Walks Far Woman”; I remember her. I remember that something intrigued me about her. Maybe it was just her name; sort of native-American sounding.
Was she the one who said that she was withdrawing, for a time and for some particular reason, a reason that she only alluded to? I remember that it sounded ominous to me. Was that her?
Yes, Jacques, Walks Far Woman was the person in question. I felt so bereft when she left off blogging, and will treasure forever the memory of the email she sent to me in reply to one I sent to her. I still send a few words every couple of months and since my email letters to her are not returned, I know somebody “on the other end of the line” is reading them. I promised her I would never divulge her email address and I never will. But, I miss her.
I must admit that I share your skepticism about some parts of the bibical story of Creation , which is why I am a theist but not a literal biblical creationist persay.
I do believe there is a Creator, and I do think that God has a greater plan for humans both as a group and as individuals, but I would be very careful before I ascribed particular traits to that creator. I expect that any Creator/ Designer powerful and wise enough to make the universe and everything in it would be far enough beyond our concept of gender to render the question moot on that point.
I am not willing to follow skepticism about literal biblical creationism down the slippery slope to atheism for two reasons-
1. I cant accept that our lives have no meaning beyond random particle collisions and natural selection. I think most of us have an innate understanding that life has a higher metaphysical meaning than that, and that there is such a thing as right and wrong beyond mere survival of the fittest. There is just too much that is good and wonderful in this life for me to say that it doesnt matter as part of a higher plan. Obviously if our lives have no design or intent, then there would be no plan or idealogical framework for any concept of right and wrong to even exist, and I know innately that they do. Everything we are in a Godless universe would be reduced to nothing more than random particle interactions and I jsut dont accept that.
2. The odds of the complex, specified information present in the human genome self-assembling in a finite universe to create everything we are, are basically nil. And selction cant account for irreducible complexity like the self-replicating information processor that would have had to pre-date that self-written information and the unguided selection process that supposedly created it.
If you apply Ocam’s razor to the Fermi Paradox, the most likely answer is that we are more than just the end result of an unguided naturalistic process. There probably is a God.
Which is great, because then science and faith can be complimentary and we can believe both what our eyes and our hearts tell us about life and it’s relevance.
So basically I share some of your objections to the biblical charachterizations of a creator and that Creator’s plan for humans, but I still do think that there is a God, and that there is a plan for all of this. I also am not going to even attempt to apply Gender to the Almighty.
Nor do I think you are going to hell for not beleiving in the Biblical story of Creation. If anything, you will probably get some kind of bonus points in whatever comes our way in the hereafter for not believing in ridiculous stories like all of the zombie minions who just blindly accept everything they are told in life.
If you are interested in the notion of Design without respect to ascribing particular anthropomorphic charachteristics to that Creator/Designer, you might find some interesting facts to chew on here…
http://www.uncommondescent.com
Also, I encourage you to not throw out the baby with the bath water completely as pertains to Christianity as a whole. Maybe the most profound thing anybody ever said was this- ” Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” What problem in this world would NOT be solved if we all just lived by that one simple rule? There is a lot of wisdom in the Good Book. You just have to dig around and be willing to set aside some of the more hard-to-swallow parts I think.