Dangerous questions

I try to walk for 50 or 60 minutes each morning. I walk with my head down. Colleen, another walker, asked my why my head was always down. I told her that this is my “thinking time”.

That’s partly true. The whole truth is that I walk with my head down so that I can ignore other walkers and their damn dogs. It does not work!

But this morning I was thinking. Dangerous thoughts.

You see, I get e-mails from good friends with wonderful pictures of nature, and of wondrous animals. And these e-mails often end with sentiments such as “How wonderful is the Creator who ‘painted’ these great pictures”.

(That begs the question about the fact of evolution; and the part that humans have taken in shaping ‘nature’)

But it raises an awkward question. If “God” is the Creator of all, and is to be thanked for the beauties of nature; than why is not he/she to be held responsible (i.e. blamed) for the enormous cruelties of this world?

No “we’ll all understand it in heaven” piety will help me. Maybe there is no heaven (or hell).

Maybe the idea of God is but a myth.

Or maybe we are all being drawn to a mystery: incongruous, disturbing; enigmatic - and we hope - deeply loving.

Comments

  1. Pat7 April 2008 at 14:41

    Have you ever read "Suffering" by Dorothy Soelle? She addresses these questions.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Suzer7 April 2008 at 15:28

    I have conversed many times with a friend of mine about this. He claims to be atheist, though I have my doubts about that. He got me thinking about it (and I have no answers either), "if God truly created everything in the universe, then He created the bad stuff, too; he created evil, and I can't believe a loving God would do that. So if God is the Creator, then I have a hard time believing in Him at all" is the general line of thought. The conversation is of course much to long to leave in a comment, but now I'll be thinking about this for days on end again!

    ReplyDelete

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