Reading someone’s facebook post about ‘God’ allowing bad things to happen…prompted this reply —
Hi…”It’s reassuring to know that in a small way you are able to ‘play God’ to your menagerie and that you are so caring. I also try to do the same for the small group of other beings that live here with me… BUT (and it’s a big but)… your response still indicates that (whilst I appreciate you may identify more as an atheist, or at least agnostic) the facile misapprehension of what ‘God’ might be: seemingly identifying God as if ‘He’ were some kind of powerful, extrinsic (apparently) ‘male’ deity who should be actively engaged in continuous interventionist parenting of his wayward creation! I can appreciate that this is the kind of concept of God that many people who (like me) were notionally raised and registered at School as the bland and almost meaningless ‘C-of-E’ in the UK were brought-up on… Even as an adult I entertained and welcomed young Mormons into my home to hear their ideas, and was gobsmacked at the infantile ‘graphical’ ideas they tried to persuade me to accept – with ‘God’ on His elevated cloud and only baptized Mormons being the ones who could populate the cloud closest to Him!… but this, of course trite and, I think, misleading nonsense!
Without getting too bogged down in lengthier riposte, that really deserves to be discussed over a bottle of wine (wherein I think we both know resides Truth… as the great philosopher once suggested) I would just say that (imho) God (if there is one) is not an external/extrinsic being/force but It (because It is genderless — and perhaps the most deserving ‘entity’/’non-entity’ to have the appropriate personal pronoun attributed to It) is a all-pervasive …God is ‘in everything’ — nothing would exist without God (The One, the Source, The Font of all Cosmic energy and everything that is either material or immaterial!) and nothing exists that does not contain the essence of God. So… everything and everyone is a manifestation of this Cosmic Source… and hence technically speaking, everything any Human may do (from you caring for your pets as if you were their own small god … to the man whose finger hovers over the button that could destroy humanity) is potentially the work of God, and it is in this way that God’s influence and potential benevolence is perpetrated on Earth… BUT the difficulty is that it is mediated via the baser desires of man and we are still working towards to fully accepting and living by the Golden Rule that would cure-all-ills overnight (including worms that make you go blind!)
The ‘problems’ that occur for individuals here on Earth may often seem unfair and unjust when looked at in the most simplistic way… but over time as Man has evolved and as Man’s knowledge has grown we have been increasingly inspired to unveil the remedies and solutions for those problems… eventually we will be able to resolve ‘all possible problems’ – in fact we probably already can – but we signally fail to do so because too many people still inhabit self-centred ‘universes’ where they prioritize their own rewards, material enrichment and a personal quest for ‘power’ over and above the benefit of the whole human population. We have become incredibly knowledgable –but we have not yet married that with commensurate wisdom!
The problem with simplistic anthropomorphizing of God is that by dint of trying to relate God to a large but powerful version of a ‘Man’ it also brings with it the inherent deficiencies of H.sapiens. In my own ruminations on this topic I acknowledge the difficulty for the Atheists who demand ‘proof’ of God in the way they might apply ‘scientific method’ to explore, examine, assess and investigate the world around them.. But because God is intrinsic to the Universe in which we exist, and yet ultimately unknowable to the natural limitations of the human mind, ‘hidden in plain sight’ yet also ‘the most hidden of the hidden’, and is implicitly beyond our ability to comprehend: i.e. we can never have the proof you may seek!… Yet in every selfless act, in every altruistic undertaking, in everything you, I or anyone else does that benefits the majority before ourselves there is some proof of the impetus and potential that the presence of God creates within us.
As we (as a species) continue to evolve at the microcosmic level as a ‘thinking species’ we will EITHER gravitate towards fulfilling the potential that being wrought from flesh and blood that is also the ‘ark’ for a Divine Spark (and which it is our duty to acknowledge and nurture throughout our ‘brief candle’ of a lifetime), and as we more seriously grasp the need to make ‘better decisions’ in relation to every action we take, measuring its optimal nature against the one-and-only Golden Rule… (and we will become conscious that it is the way we choose to live that becomes the very proof — of God — that we seek)… OR…Failing to do this (as we – as a species – well might) we will simply become another extinct relic, likely much less successful than the dinosaurs in terms of temporal existence, a cosmic experiment that flickered, glowed momentarily, flashed with potential but that ultimately guttered-and died out due to what may ultimately prove an insurmountable tendency towards selfishness, greed and blame… God alone knows which way the flame will finally flicker!” 🙂