Nature is cruel; see illness and death, see animals eating each other. See extinctions and starvation and catastrophe, White Nose Syndrome in bats, Alzheimer’s in humans.
By Nature, I mean God. God is cruel. How can we accept that, and why should we?
God is not held to the same standards as humans because God is not human, and humans are not God. If a man kills another man, it is a sin. But God kills men all the time; indeed, God kills ALL men. God makes disease; that is Nature. If man makes disease and unleashes it on the world (i.e. Covid) it is a sin.
Killing, disease, cruelty: these are God’s job, not man’s. Likewise birth. Bringing Life into the world and taking it out: God. Living and dying: man.
That’s why Catholics oppose artificial insemination and other fertility interventions, as well as abortion: this is not man’s business, it is God’s. Do not play God. Do not manually create or destroy Life.
Some say we should strive to be Godlike. I think not. We should not strive to emulate God’s cruelty (though we do anyway, made in God’s image and all). God handles Life and Death and disease and catastrophe; we handle living with it. Men meddling in these affairs are “playing God.” But that is what we do, we can’t help it; we are God’s cruelty and catastrophe manifest.
Why accept, let alone worship, a God like this? Because this is how the world really is. We invent a personality called God, but we don’t invent Reality. The God of the Bible, thousands of years old, inherited and evolved from traditions even older, is a personification (or mask) of Reality, with all its horrors. He is cruel, capricious, and unfair. It is man who seeks kindness, rationality, and fairness. Man’s justice is appealing; God’s justice is nonsensical. But God’s justice is what we got, ultimately.
God is where the buck stops. God is not man. God is God.
One reason (only men need reasons, God does not) to worship God is it keeps us from worshipping man. God and only God can kill. Men may not. Men who kill may be held accountable by other men. Men are subject to men’s law and men’s justice. Meanwhile everything is subject to God’s law — to the laws of Physics, Nature, Reality.
We cannot hold Physics, Nature, Reality accountable to our laws. We are accountable to theirs, always.
God, or Reality, isn’t good or bad, unless we judge it by human standards. That is why religion advises man to not judge. (We judge anyway, as we are made in God’s image.) Human standards and laws are the only way we can have societies, which we need. (God made us social, we can’t escape that. I’ve tried and failed.)
We muddle through with our always-imperfect laws. We always aim for more perfect. We never reach it. Whenever we fix one problem, seven more open in its stead. So many unintended consequences of the best intentions: that is God’s law, Reality. Still, we must strive in this absurd environment, because God and Nature made us so.
It’s not supposed to make sense.
Not human sense.
Why accept, let alone worship, this crazy God, Nature, Reality? Because it’s the only way to relax. It’s the only path to serenity. I can’t explain why acceptance changes everything, only that it does. I will not pretend God is “good,” that “everything is okay,” or that any of this makes sense by human standards. By human standards, Life is a shit show. By God’s standards, who knows? It’s the only game in town. We cannot understand, we can only accept.
Accept, and live.
