Reese 2007-02-22

From Summa Bergania

from David Bergan

to michael reese

date Feb 22, 2007 3:59 AM

subject Re: more Theodicy

---

Hi Michael,

Sounds like you have a lot of school ahead of you. Once in a while I think about doing a grad program, but the degrees themselves don't appeal to me, and I always convince myself that I can learn a lot more by studying subjects on my own. There are plenty of classics I haven't read yet, and I've vowed never to take a job that gives me homework, especially not teaching. I plan to be free at five for the rest of my life.

You're right that I like CS Lewis... but not quite as much as Pascal, GK Chesterton, and George MacDonald. If you're interested, I would be willing to do a book swap... I read one of your choosing, while you read one of mine. I've heard of Spong and Tillich, but haven't read either. I think my aunt told me that Tillich's The Courage To Be was the greatest book she has read (outside the Bible).

I believe that it is reasonable to state that God is absolute and nothing else for the same reason that it is reasonable to say that God is the uncaused cause, and nothing else is [the uncaused cause]. I do not see how God could be God otherwise, the entity/being/creator/beginning and end that stands outside of the fabric of the universe, whose existence is not dependent on the universe as we know it. Because God is God, there just has to be something exceptional about God that would allow a mere mortal such as myself to claim that only God is absolute. In fact, if you agree with the notion that God is the uncaused cause, then God would have to be the ONLY uncaused cause (how could there be 2,3,4 uncaused causes?), that sounds like a singular absolute to me… absolute enough to believe that only God is absolute.

I can agree on the uncaused-cause part... but I still don't quite see the reasoning on the only-absolute part. Couldn't God be just the original absolute, from whence all other absolutes are derived... just like He is the original cause from whence all other causes are derived? The multiplication tables are quite absolute... they aren't going to change in the next 10 years. That means there are either two absolutes in the universe, God and multiplication, or one is a sub-set of the other. I actually can go with number 2... saying that all a priori reasoning is all a sub-set of God. That fits perfectly with this essay I wrote. But I can't say that all a priori reasoning is relative just because you want God to be special... at least not without a sound deductive argument (which, ironically, would refute itself).

On the days when I have aspirations of leaving my agnostic turtle shell and leaning towards theism, I agree completely with your analysis of the theodicy triangle. It is actually exactly what I used to teach kids when I was working as a youth pastor (my internship for the theology degree). I used to teach that God loved us so much that God wanted to give us the ability to decide whether or not to love God back. In order to do that, God had to give us the ability to make bad choices as well as good. It felt good to type that.

The argument is as old as Genesis. In philosophy, all truth is ancient and only error is original.

I just felt a pang in my heart again as I remembered what it felt like to believe in the level of intimacy God wants to have with us and the means God employed to accomplish it.

If joy exists, why shouldn't God want us to abide in it forever?

It is just that I have internalized an intimate understanding of the manner of evil of which the wicked step sisters are capable. It's just too fucked up. There is too much suffering, too much injustice. I could tell you shit that would turn you green. I guess that's why I'm a deist.

I believe you. I have had a very fortunate life... great family, great friends, great job, great nation, great technology, and a sharp mind. I've made choices to keep things nice and cozy. Sure I have had grief here and there... and depression runs in my family... but I smile at least a thousand more times than I cry. I'm not at all equipped to deal with really tough circumstances... I hardly feel like I have earned a right to even sympathize.

When I was an adult table leader at TEC a few years back, I had a candidate who confided to us that when she was three, her parents left her with her grandpa for a week. Second day into the week, Grandpa killed himself. She went five days alone, confused, and hungry, before her parents returned. I think they found her holed up in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. Anyway, that was just her beginning... before the drugs, sexual abuse, and suicide attempts. How can someone in my shoes relate to that? My theology felt like a sand castle in the storm of her sorrow. I don't remember saying anything for the rest of the night... yet I do remember that TEC changed her life. In the final ceremony she hugged me for at least 5 minutes... crying on my shoulder with tears of joy. The only thing I remember saying there was something to the effect that with the resurrection, Christ turned all His pain, and all our pain, into glory. Apparently that was what she needed to hear.

Anyway, I have no idea if the conversion stuck. I'm so jaded anymore, that I can hardly believe any conversion story is for real (except, of course, for Lewis, Chesterton, and Pascal). Was what I told her a bunch of lollipop? Is Jesus's death and resurrection meant only to be understood subjectively? Was I misleading her?

Or to turn it around... are all our conversations a bunch of lollipop? Is her experience the essence of life? She longed for a personal relationship with a higher power who loves her unconditionally. She had that hole in her soul. Wouldn't it make sense that God is there for each of us to fill that hole? Wouldn't it make sense that the whole purpose of our existence is to yearn for that relationship?

Again, I can't say that I'm any better on these terms than other people. I barely ever pray. I rarely read the Bible... and when I do it is almost always with an eye searching for weaknesses. I think almost exclusively about myself and my personal goals. I hardly ever examine myself for sins. I reluctantly go to church. I usually don't like the music.

Currently, in my life, that yearning is squelched. There was a time when I couldn't wait to pray... now I tell myself that I need sleep more than prayer. I have an idea that the yearning is diminished precisely because my life is going so well. Happiness is like morphine... it conceals our real condition. The reason Jesus condemned wealth so strongly, and was relatively quiet about prostitution, is because the prostitute isn't likely to consider her life so satisfactory that she won't turn to God. It is the proud, the avaricious, and the self-righteous who are in that danger.

One other observation I have made on pain is that the sufferers themselves usually have little resistance to Christianity. The people who become atheists are instead those who are normal/healthy themselves, but see pain in another person. Alcoholics Anonymous converts Christians by the millions... it's those who observe alcoholism's destruction from the side who resist spirituality. Hardly ever does Job actually curse God... it is his friends who curse God seeing how unfairly He treated Job. And there is no cure for it... Job may heal and praise God for the healing, but Job's friends never forget and never forgive God, even when Job already did. There's nothing God can do to make it up to the witnesses... because He didn't directly harm them. The offended can cope and heal, accept his situation and move on. But the one who appears to be in danger is the guy who thinks he's a slightly better person because he feels his neighbor's pain a little stronger and a little longer than the neighbor himself. His sympathy becomes circular, and it is impossible to break out of his neighbor's pain and move on.

Funny thing is that Christ Himself was subjected to as much suffering and injustice as just about any person on Earth... and His pain is quite easily forgotten. I'll finish with what GK Chesterton said in Orthodoxy:

Alone of all creeds, Christianity has added courage to the virtues of the Creator. For the only courage worth calling courage must necessarily mean that the soul passes a breaking point--and does not break. In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss; and I apologise in advance if any of my phrases fall wrong or seem irreverent touching a matter which the greatest saints and thinkers have justly feared to approach. But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. It is written, "Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God." No; but the Lord thy God may tempt Himself; and it seems as if this was what happened in Gethsemane. In a garden Satan tempted man: and in a garden God tempted God. He passed in some superhuman manner through our human horror of pessimism. When the world shook and the sun was wiped out of heaven, it was not at the crucifixion, but at the cry from the cross: the cry which confessed that God was forsaken of God. And now let the revolutionists choose a creed from all the creeds and a god from all the gods of the world, carefully weighing all the gods of inevitable recurrence and of unalterable power. They will not find another god who has himself been in revolt. Nay, (the matter grows too difficult for human speech) but let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.

Kind regards,

David

PS Your DVD sounds interesting. My address is

X X X X X

Sioux Falls SD XXXXX

--David Bergan

"A Christian told me, 'I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and God does not expect it.'

"It would be more honest if he had said, 'I do not want to be perfect: I am content to be saved.' Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, but merely for being what they call 'saved'."

—George MacDonald (Unspoken Sermons II, paraphrased)