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.
I like this.
I’ve been working on and off on a piece for Shannon’s Substack, which may or may not be published this summer, about the relationship between wisdom and sin. They’re sort of two sides of the same coin. ???? I’m using the lens of the interplay between them as representing the Divine Feminine within Christianity.
The ???? was supposed to be a coin emoji.
Hello, Nina…
I agree with you…
The Contrast of Wisdom and Folly
7 A good name is better than precious ointment,
and the day of death than the day of birth.
2 It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
5 It is better for a man to hear the rebuke of the wise
than to hear the song of fools.
6 For as the crackling of thorns under a pot,
so is the laughter of the fools;
this also is vanity.[a]
7 Surely oppression drives the wise into madness,
and a bribe corrupts the heart.
8 Better is the end of a thing than its beginning,
and the patient in spirit is better than the proud in spirit.
9 Be not quick in your spirit to become angry,
for anger lodges in the heart[b] of fools.
10 Say not, “Why were the former days better than these?”
For it is not from wisdom that you ask this.
11 Wisdom is good with an inheritance,
an advantage to those who see the sun.
12 For the protection of wisdom is like the protection of money,
and the advantage of knowledge is that wisdom preserves the life of him who has it.
13 Consider the work of God:
who can make straight what he has made crooked?
14 In the day of prosperity be joyful, and in the day of adversity consider: God has made the one as well as the other, so that man may not find out anything that will be after him.
15 In my vain[c] life I have seen everything. There is a righteous man who perishes in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man who prolongs his life in his evildoing. 16 Be not overly righteous, and do not make yourself too wise. Why should you destroy yourself? 17 Be not overly wicked, neither be a fool. Why should you die before your time? 18 It is good that you should take hold of this, and from that withhold not your hand, for the one who fears God shall come out from both of them.
19 Wisdom gives strength to the wise man more than ten rulers who are in a city.
20 Surely there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.
21 Do not take to heart all the things that people say, lest you hear your servant cursing you. 22 Your heart knows that many times you yourself have cursed others.
23 All this I have tested by wisdom. I said, “I will be wise,” but it was far from me. 24 That which has been is far off, and deep, very deep; who can find it out?
25 I turned my heart to know and to search out and to seek wisdom and the scheme of things, and to know the wickedness of folly and the foolishness that is madness. 26 And I find something more bitter than death: the woman whose heart is snares and nets, and whose hands are fetters. He who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her. 27 Behold, this is what I found, says the Preacher, while adding one thing to another to find the scheme of things— 28 which my soul has sought repeatedly, but I have not found. One man among a thousand I found, but a woman among all these I have not found. 29 See, this alone I found, that God made man upright, but they have sought out many schemes.
I disagree, on the focus. I think it’s backwards.
The sermon strikes me as more Tanakh than Catholic; God’s a jerk, but he’s the only game in town, so what can you do but take it, prosecute God like Job?
I agree that control of destiny is an illusion, and anyone who refuses to accept reality is quite mad. But I’ll not call chaos and happenstance God, and my acceptance of reality doesn’t resign me to it. We are not resigned.
We rebel against nature’s cruelty. We bend nature and physics and reality to our will. We do our best to make things better, turning that God into a servant. We don’t just strive, we succeed daily. It’s about not giving up. Every hand you’re dealt can win or lose, meaning players make their own luck. Most problems aren’t a hydra, but if so then fight it with fire. Reality is undeniable, but reality is given shape by your perceptions, experiences, interpretations, beliefs, and your actions. Accept an impossibility, then make a workaround! If you can’t change the circumstance, find a way to make it not matter when a part-time-God isn’t looking. Sometimes the best you can do is nothing, but don’t go gentle into that good night. Don’t just wrestle with God, Fight. It’s hard, but at least keep it up part-time.
Acceptance, good, that may be the final stage in filling a grief hole. But that’s not the end, that’s the start.
I’ll end my retort sermon, suggesting Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate The Positive, by the Andrews Sisters with Bing Crosby. Or Perry Como, if necessary.
We’ll feel good again. The world already improved, because of your actions. You will succeed, even though the undeniable reality is you will never be a man.
Thanks for the counter-sermon. That stuff doesn’t work for me but obviously does for many, hence popular exhortations for positive attitudes. They must work for someone! My message is to carry on even without a positive attitude. I’ve never been able to “fix” my ‘tude; turns out I don’t need to.
Strangely, I do feel good when I accept I don’t feel good.
Also I don’t want to be a man! Not sure how that relates to suffering; men suffer too.
What I will never be (that I actually care about) is perfect, or God.
I know you don’t want to be a man. I’m just trying to make you giggle with a surprise ending. Refusal to accept reality is some kinda pandemic these days, one I know you’ve been battling to cure, and to me your sermon was about accepting reality, so I hoped it’d be funny.
It’s not really a positive attitude or cheering up. Reality is more awful than is generally safe for people to realize. It’s worse than cruel, so bad that if we don’t keep up the fight, we’ll freeze to death, or be killed, or just stroke out. We’re all dying, some just more slowly. Don’t “fix your ‘tude”, it’s awesome, it’s why we’re fans. Accept feeling bad, sure. But acceptance prompts the question, now what? More suffering and striving as you carry on, yeah, but if done well, also success. Suffering, then enlightenment. With every tweak, every workaround, we can make life better. Without that, as the song said, it’s pandemonium. We swim or else we sink. I mean, the Morton Salt girl would have survived if she had just ditched her umbrella and inhaled the salt, but you figured it out and made it happen and improved. I so much want things to improve for you. We’ve all watched you work hard and wisely to fix not just your health and furnace and bicycles but our broken culture, so even if you will never be God, I have faith in you.
Aww, so sweet of you ninafan!
This is especially quote-worthy: “Reality is more awful than is generally safe for people to realize.”
This helps me accept denial, a very human trait.
Where I have a shred of faith is, in accepting Reality some magic happens, or has happened to me. Somehow when I accept the “worse than cruel”, something lifts. Maybe not right away, but over Time. I can’t explain this magic, only that it occurs and I believe in it. Fighting Reality comes naturally: I do it from instinct and early family training. Accepting Reality seems to demand more from me: mindfulness maybe, consciousness. I do both, but intentionally focus on the latter. I don’t need a sermon to fight Reality! I need one to accept It.
All of human history would not have been possible without lies. The motto of our DNA is: By deception we shall overcome. An intelligent species cursed with our unique level of consciousness would have ceased breeding as soon as it decoded the riddle of life. But not us. We invent nonsense and call it truth and vilify anyone who says otherwise.
If we have a technical understanding of the biochemical basis of the experience of curiosity, wonder, amazement, awe, and mystery themselves, does this diminish our experience of them? Do these experiences fall into the same category as myths, lies, and illusions? What rational basis is there to treat them any differently? What then, does it mean to lead a “rational life”? If science and knowledge are supposedly pursued for its own sake, then how about the knowledge that life has no discernable purpose, knowledge that happiness, wonder, and curiosity are based in material organizations that were likely selected for their evolutionary survival value.