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.