He Who is Neither Nor

He Who is Neither Nor

by Nessreen

One time at lunch, a friend, who I presumed to have received some sort of bad news just then, sighed and said, “God is good."

I was all “What do you mean God is good?” because I’m always ready for a nice old argument about religion, and he was all “Just that. God is good.” 

He didn’t explain further, but we all know why we say God is good to punctuate tragedies big or small – to remind ourselves that God only gives us things that we can handle, that He puts us in difficult situations so that we may be stronger and wiser and that our faith in Him may be harder to shake. We say it as a salve to our wounded souls when beset with misfortunes. 

But what if (and the chances are very, very high, given the nature of God’s all-knowing existence versus our tiny, tiny excuse-for-a-speck ones), what if we were looking at it all wrong? 

Saying God is good is just the same as saying God is bad. After all, think about it – who is responsible for pretty much everything in life? Who do we credit for all of creation, good and evil? God. He created your demons just as he created your angels. He traced your path and destiny, and then he gave you some free will to manoeuvre it. Both directly and indirectly, He is the source of all the things. We can't credit Him for one thing and not for another – what happened to His all-encompassing jurisdiction? 

When I'm eating a really delicious meal that I paid for with money that I earned from my job which I chose myself, I credit God for it, because He created me and gave me the ability to do all of this. But when I see a photo of a dead baby washed up on a shore that was a result of a bunch of people starting a war in God's name, that is NOT the work of God, that is evil, Satan, misguided fuckers, all of whom, I must remind us all, God also created and gave the ability to do all of that.

Why pit God against His own (evil) creation? That's like saying He and Satan are on a level playing field. We all know they're not. 

My point is that God is neither good nor bad. When we say things like that, we attribute human traits to Him, shaping Him in our image. I’m not saying that’s wrong, because obviously that’s a natural reaction considering we are all Jon Snows who know nothing.

Our minds are so simple and limited that we can’t possibly absorb the idea of God in His vastness and majesty. When we think of God, we think of Him as someone who has human emotions, like compassion and anger and disappointment and pride, but at a much larger scale, and with a “better hold” on his emotions. We think of Him in ideas and concepts that we can grasp, which are relevant to us as humans. That's just our nature, that's how we make sense of our lives. (We can even only think of Him in pronouns normally reserved for humans.) 

And when we do that, He begins to seem like a micro-managing CEO who fixates unnecessarily on the small picture. 

What a disappointment that is. 

In fact, the universe is massive. And it is ALL created by God. We are just one of bazillions of other creations and things and planets, and yes, yes, in our little world, we matter because that’s all our silly little minds can comprehend. 

But there is a much, much bigger picture here (you’ve all seen this Men in Black scene), and it’s pretty arrogant of us to think that we are all that important. That God spends all His time playing chess games of our lives. It's like the ants in your house: one of them loses their family to your foot as it crushed them and they're all like YOU ACTIVELY DID THIS TO US, but in fact, you're just walking past and you didn't even notice there was an ant there. 

That is to say that when something unfortunate happens to us, it’s not a conspiracy by some beings from other dimensions, it’s a result of several things that occurred and reacted with each other. God might not have had anything (or very little) to do with it. Remember free will? 

In His infinite wisdom (also a trait we commonly attach to humans), God created us as intelligent beings with brains that are so (relatively) high-functioning that we can fold them unto themselves and be self-aware. The “goodness” of God does not lie in a series of events that unfolded in our lives and that we humans caused to transpire. Instead, it lies in that fundamental gift we were given at birth, the faculty of thinking, so that we may digest all of this as best we can. 

Even if it means attributing goodness to Him to help us through rough times (and just as strongly denying that any evil was caused by Him). 

Hey, whatever gets us through life. 

~ END ~

Nessreen believes in God and science. Read more of her posts HERE.