I read the diary entitled "is god responsible?" about the lady with cancer and her questions regarding belief, sin, and responsibility. As a believer, I was so moved by this post, I wanted to write a little longer thought about the different ways God's "responsibility" can be seen from the perspective of the modern, conservative church. That is, the church I no longer believe in or accept. The church, that has become the mouth piece for the GOP led corporate machine which denigrates and devalues the work of the Creator.
Like the lady in the posting, I too have struggled with the question of God's culpability in human suffering. Why create us to endure such suffering, disease, homelessness, hunger, and violence? We are told that God didnt, that this was the result of our own choices - the wages of sin (as it were). But not quite. What of innocents, children that die every day due to neglect? Well, that is attributed to the "original sin." You remember, Adam and all of that. So it would seem as though we are all held accountable for something Adam did - NOT an individual choice, but rather a collective one? And there was only one human that didnt inherit this particular "gift" from the past, that was Christ. But He had to die, because God exacts, as a price for Adam, death to us all. And there was only one death that would do... Christ's.
While I will not pretend to fathom the workings of God's mind, surely it should strike us all that an omniscient being would have seen this coming. And so we come to the logical impasse of Thomas Aquinas - that free will somehow trumps God's will and knowledge. But, with due respect to Mr. Aquinas, he was playing by a set of rules that were staged in large part by human minds. We see this enigma through the eyes that we are given by the people that made this religion up. (OK, to whom it was revealed). Trouble is, no matter how you look at it, revealed, or constructed, it was done with an incomplete knowledge of God's nature and meaning. It was done within the confines of the Human mind. This leads naturally to the idea of a good God or a bad God, a responsible God or a God of ambiguous neglect. If however, you happen to hold that Christ's message was as close to the mind of God as one could get, then we find (I believe) a very different relationship between God, sin, and Humans. This relationship is one of individual responsibility between humans for each other. Such a responsibility trumps all others.
So what if WE were responsible for death and destruction? What if we admit to ourselves that there was more that we could have done, and should have done for the plight of the world around us. No need to put it on the shoulders of God at all, but rather our own inability to see the truth... that we are all connected to each other, and that diminishment of one (black, hispanic, gay...) is diminishment of the whole. Afterall, the money we spent in Iraq has been estimated to be more than enough to wipe out, say, juvenile diabetes. And we would have had some left over to feed the world. Most wars are fought (at their core) for resources of one form or another. We build "ideals" around that, to justify the means, but in essence what we want is Oil, water, gas supplies or coal.. whatever. So, if we had invested in green alternatives to energy supply would there have been any need for protecting such resources under the sands of an Iraq, or for propping up governments like the Sauds? Sure the chess game of such politics is complicated, but mobilization of resources to protect resources isnt so much. We fight each other because of OUR greed. Or more precisely the greed of a few that "explain to us" why the Palestinians are "bad." Those resources COULD have fought cancer. They could have fed the poor. They could have begun to provide reasons for living rather than a reason to die.
No doubt there are some bad people out there. Hitler for instance. But these people are few, and they are powerless against a well fed, safe, and enlightened population that understands the nature of living... that we are all a part of the same thing. Without the angry mob, the mental illness of the few power greedy that would do us harm, has no teeth. So if you are such a dictator, what is to be done... keep the world angry, underfed, suffering and facing death, and un-educated. Utopia for such people.
Today, too, we fight a hidden war. Against the things that would harm human existence on this planet. The plague that we fight is dwindling resources, ignorance, violence, disease that evolves to attack us ever more efficiently. This war has taken far more lives and caused more suffering than we ever faced in the world wars. And the cost isnt just that people die, they do that at some point anyway. Instead the cost is that they die without realizing the potential of their lives, so that their last days are ones of pain, instead of being filled with the reflection and wonderment of a God that has granted them everything.
To be sure, they could have passed from this world in such wonderment. God has really provided for us all. But today only a few may have it, and the rest of us must insure that those few continue to enjoy it. This to my mind, is the tragedy of todays "religion" and all those that embrace it. It is the tragedy of today's political parties with their jingoistic revelry in the defeat of others. The kings of earth, the powers and principalities of our species, shudder at the thought that we pawns would embrace the true nature of Christ's message... and stop blaming God for the things we have done... stop fighting their wars. To the 1%, the worse thing that could ever happen is that we all believe in a loving God that has provided a planet with the means to help each other but that we have refused to do it.
You might say this is all well and good, but competition for resources exists in the world. The US can give up its claim to them, but that will simply leave us out in the cold. To that I say... find the cure to cancer and see how out in the cold you are. Remove the specter of disease and hunger from your shores and see if the wolves of destruction will really result in the elimination of our population. Lead by example and though cooperation and discover if we really face that certain death. We have been told over and over that it will by our churches, by our government, by Fox News. We have been told that spending more than 6 times what China does on a military arsenal is necessary. But all the while we have been defeated by that hidden war, the one of neglect to our fellow man.
Now I dont advocate having no defenses. And I dont advocate being "idealistic" in the face of certainty. Likewise, I do not understand how our leaders can advocate the ignorance of a basic truth of interdependence. How our religious "leaders" can advocate a belief system that denies the fundamental nature of God, then blame Him when it all goes wrong. Unless, we all admit to ourselves that such systems were designed, by man, to engender war and suffering. And that their theocratic embrace is simply another way of preventing us from doing the hard work we have before us - to make very human life count.