I have read that Trump's religious advisor is claiming that Covid-19 is punishing us for, of course, the gays, but also, for some reason, climate activists.
That's ridiculous. Clearly, God is still upset by the Dems' insistence that Trump's inauguration crowd size was smaller than Obama's.
I have been thinking about how to reply to the original post or at least to the title of the thread overnight.
My answer to it is by looking at the life of Christ. Nowhere do you see him telling those who sought healing that God was punishing them. In fact, there is the story of the person who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus who had sinned: the man or his parents. Jesus replied the man was born blind so that God's grace may abound.
I realized last night that when we suffer, God suffers. Oftentimes, when Jesus was confronted with suffering, the Gospels report Jesus was moved to his very depth--actually became physically sick. Psalm 116:15 reports "Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his saints." In Hebrew, if one is not able to enjoy life to the fullest, one is experiencing death. Since we are not able to experience life to the fullest, this says God is there with us, much like a mother taking care of her children while they are sick.
...My answer to it is by looking at the life of Christ. Nowhere do you see him telling those who sought healing that God was punishing them. In fact, there is the story of the person who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus who had sinned: the man or his parents. Jesus replied the man was born blind so that God's grace may abound.
I realized last night that when we suffer, God suffers. Oftentimes, when Jesus was confronted with suffering, the Gospels report Jesus was moved to his very depth--actually became physically sick. Psalm 116:15 reports "Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his saints." In Hebrew, if one is not able to enjoy life to the fullest, one is experiencing death. Since we are not able to experience life to the fullest, this says God is there with us, much like a mother taking care of her children while they are sick.
Thanks for that post Gramps - I find it helpful. And because I am an engineer, it reminds me of this - see item 3 on the list
Faith beliefs will have to adapt to the realisation that God/god/etc is noticeably totally absent from all of this. I wonder how they will do so.
What in the world makes you think God's any more absent from this than he is usually? It's not like we all suddenly got a "Sorry, I'm out of the office today" notice on our emails. It looks like business as usual to me.
If anybody else says that God suffers with us, I will scream. How, where? It just sounds like a semantic exercise to me. Lions are cats, cats are mammals, therefore lions enjoy origami.
And how do you know they don’t? All that tearing and rending is frustration. Give them some square paper and a little instruction and they’ll be lying down with lambs folding paper instead of tearing into antelope and twisting intestines
I'm going to take on the "huge ego" thing, because what the hell, I'm isolated and supposed to be working and cranky. So I'll do this instead.
If one assumes an infinite God--infinitely able to pay attention, infinitely interested, infinitely capable of intervening if he chooses--then it is NOT a stretch of the imagination by any means to think he has reactions to human behavior. For that matter, it's not a stretch of the imagination to think he has reactions to virus behavior, or to that of geese or mongeese (?) or supernovae. After all, he doesn't have a bandwidth problem, and he doesn't have any memory storage or access issues either. He can do just as he pleases.
With such a God, I would think it odder for him to NOT be interested in some part of his creation--to deliberately turn off his interest level--to ignore that bit, while not ignoring others. Why should he? He is not busy in the sense that we are, where priorities crowd others out. He does not suffer from ennui. Those are human problems. He doesn't run up against those kinds of limits.
So anybody (anyThing) living in a universe created by such a God would be wholly justified in supposing that he/she/it/they were the center of his attention at all times, regardless of their level of importance in the eyes of others. Indeed, EVERYBODY and everything would be the center of his attention at all times. And so there is no need to presuppose massive ego.
That's how I square that circle. I do think God pays close, minute attention to what I do--to what you do--to what the mouse in my kitchen (gulp!) does--because he's that kind of God. Not because we are in ourselves so awesome, that has nothing to do with it.
Now add in the postulate that God is a moral God and cares about moral, ethical, compassionate, sensible behavior on the part of his creatures (including us), and suddenly you have grounds for believing in the possibility of divine punishment. Or reward, of course, but nobody complains about THAT!
So no, it is not necessarily egotistical to look at some event and wonder if it is divine punishment. It is unwise to jump to those conclusions without a damn good reason (such as divine revelation), especially when the folks getting punished are people you don't much like. That would be uncharitable. But it would not necessarily be either illogical or egotistical.
And now I'm going to go do the Thing I'm avoiding, because whether God ordains consequences for not doing it or not, I would still feel like a putz if I didn't.
True, but the God you're describing stretches my imagination well beyond breaking point. It's not so much that I do not and could not ever believe in such a God (both of which are true) or that a God such as you describe makes my skin crawl with revulsion, but that I regard such a God as utterly fantastical. By comparison, it makes the collected theories of Erich von Daniken and David Icke look utterly plausible.
Belief in a god that made stuff happen and then buggered off I can just about understand. Belief in your kind of God I can't even begin to get my head round.
I'm going to take on the "huge ego" thing, because what the hell, I'm isolated and supposed to be working and cranky. So I'll do this instead.
If one assumes an infinite God--infinitely able to pay attention, infinitely interested, infinitely capable of intervening if he chooses--then it is NOT a stretch of the imagination by any means to think he has reactions to human behavior. For that matter, it's not a stretch of the imagination to think he has reactions to virus behavior, or to that of geese or mongeese (?) or supernovae. After all, he doesn't have a bandwidth problem, and he doesn't have any memory storage or access issues either. He can do just as he pleases.
With such a God, I would think it odder for him to NOT be interested in some part of his creation--to deliberately turn off his interest level--to ignore that bit, while not ignoring others. Why should he? He is not busy in the sense that we are, where priorities crowd others out. He does not suffer from ennui. Those are human problems. He doesn't run up against those kinds of limits.
So anybody (anyThing) living in a universe created by such a God would be wholly justified in supposing that he/she/it/they were the center of his attention at all times, regardless of their level of importance in the eyes of others. Indeed, EVERYBODY and everything would be the center of his attention at all times. And so there is no need to presuppose massive ego.
That's how I square that circle. I do think God pays close, minute attention to what I do--to what you do--to what the mouse in my kitchen (gulp!) does--because he's that kind of God. Not because we are in ourselves so awesome, that has nothing to do with it.
Now add in the postulate that God is a moral God and cares about moral, ethical, compassionate, sensible behavior on the part of his creatures (including us), and suddenly you have grounds for believing in the possibility of divine punishment. Or reward, of course, but nobody complains about THAT!
So no, it is not necessarily egotistical to look at some event and wonder if it is divine punishment. It is unwise to jump to those conclusions without a damn good reason (such as divine revelation), especially when the folks getting punished are people you don't much like. That would be uncharitable. But it would not necessarily be either illogical or egotistical.
And now I'm going to go do the Thing I'm avoiding, because whether God ordains consequences for not doing it or not, I would still feel like a putz if I didn't.
True, but the God you're describing stretches my imagination well beyond breaking point. It's not so much that I do not and could not ever believe in such a God (both of which are true) or that a God such as you describe makes my skin crawl with revulsion, but that I regard such a God as utterly fantastical. By comparison, it makes the collected theories of Erich von Daniken and David Icke look utterly plausible.
Belief in a god that made stuff happen and then buggered off I can just about understand. Belief in your kind of God I can't even begin to get my head round.
I don't think that's a problem. I mean, I can't wrap my head around calculus or light theory, but demonstrably they work.
First of all, Mother Nature is not an actual thing and doesn't have a conscious will.
Secondly, the way that viruses move between species has absolutely nothing to do with our general fuck-up of ecology, unless you count us interacting closely with other species as part of that fuck-up.
Most of our worst diseases are things that have a happier home in some other species. Influenza, for example, is a bird virus. There are lots of things that are pretty happy in us and don't make us sick at all or give very mild symptoms. Killing your host is not a good strategy for an organism that depends on you.
In other words, to the extent that one can attribute any kind of intentionality to a virus, the virus is thinking "shit, this new host I've hopped into isn't as good, maybe I shouldn't have mutated".
I have read that Trump's religious advisor is claiming that Covid-19 is punishing us for, of course, the gays, but also, for some reason, climate activists.
I have some difficulty getting my mind about why He doesn't like them.
I have some difficulty getting my mind around how people reaching for those sorts of explanations explain why Iran is one of the worst affected countries.
Of course, they don't explain it. They just have an immunity to cognitive dissonance so powerful that we might be able to use it to develop a vaccine.
Catching up on yesterday's readings, I was brought to a halt by this in Isaiah 28:
When the overflowing scourge passes through,
Then you will be trampled down by it.
19 As often as it goes out it will take you;
For morning by morning it will pass over,
And by day and by night;
It will be a terror just to understand the report.
22 Now therefore, do not be mockers,
Lest your bonds be made strong;
For I have heard from the Lord God of hosts,
A destruction determined even upon the whole earth.
Faith beliefs will have to adapt to the realisation that God/god/etc is noticeably totally absent from all of this. I wonder how they will do so.
... because it seems to reveal a curious understanding of God(/god/etc). As others have pointed out, it’s not as though this is the first time catastrophe has swept the world, and it is far from being the worst. But it’s also not as though suffering is absent from the Bible. We are right now in the middle of Lent, remembering Christ’s seclusion in the desert. And it culminates in Good Friday: my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Followed, of course, by redemption. But not the one, without the other.
True, but the God you're describing stretches my imagination well beyond breaking point. It's not so much that I do not and could not ever believe in such a God (both of which are true) or that a God such as you describe makes my skin crawl with revulsion ... Belief in your kind of God I can't even begin to get my head round.
Well, it would be a pretty shrunken and shrivelled sort of God, to be bound by the limits of the human imagination.
But speaking personally, I can well imagine a God who loves even @Colin Smith, horripilation or no. And I suspect @Colin Smith himself might not find this such a challenge, were he not always fighting quite so hard against it.
Whatever our faith/politics/culture nearly all of us have forgotten that we are part of the Earth, part of biology - not above it.
For too long we’ve assumed we can keep on taking from the natural world without giving anything back. Eating what we like, building where we like, throwing our waste where we like. We are cruel to each other and cruel to animals, ravaging the land and the forests for our own pleasure and wants, rather than needs.
This virus is just a coincidence - no higher body ‘sent’ it. Viruses are a normal part of life on Earth. It’s us and our ways of life that have caused it to be able to devastate us.
This is a reminder that life is fragile and that all life is interconnected and should be respected and cared for.
Well, many animals and birds get devastated by viruses and other pathogens. Anyone interested in birds will recall how greenfinches were hit hard by trichomonosis, which caused a steep decline. This parasite also attacks other birds, as many bugs attack different species. For example, the well known tobacco mosaic virus attacks different plants, not just tobacco. I think this was the first virus to be discovered. But I reckon that God thought that tobacco should be particularly punished.
Well, it would be a pretty shrunken and shrivelled sort of God, to be bound by the limits of the human imagination.
But speaking personally, I can well imagine a God who loves even @Colin Smith, horripilation or no. And I suspect @Colin Smith himself might not find this such a challenge, were he not always fighting quite so hard against it.
I'm not fighting against it. "Imagination", mine or anyone else's wasn't quite the right word. It's more that the existence of such a God isn't, to me, conceivable within the universe as we understand it. Oddly enough, it's quite easy to imagine a god, but one has to disregard a hell of a lot of logic and reason in the process.
And quite apart from that, I am one person among eight billion others on one planet among many billions of planets scattered across billions of galaxies in a universe over 13 billion years old so even if a posited God did have an interest in me the question then arises of 'why?' I mean, to what point? Such a God, to me, seems more like an obsessive or a 'Big Brother' character.
By comparison, assuming that God/belief is a human construction which has helped humans understand their environment and given comfort and purpose to their existence and continues for many to provide a psychological framework seems much more reasonable.
Yes, I find the idea of fighting against the idea of God odd. Oops, didn't mean to rhyme there. It does remind me of the great Herbert poem, the Collar, where the fight of Herbert is calmed at the end, "Methought I heard one calling, Child, and I replied My Lord".
However, I find it fairly easy, not to resist God, but be without him. It's like falling off a log, or if you like, not falling. Life seems enough.
Although I'm not a Roman Catholic, and owe the Pope no allegiance, it's only fair to acknowledge that he does have some very inspiring, and encouraging, things to say at the present time.
And George Herbert's poetry (for those of a more traditional Anglican bent!) is well worth reading, or re-reading.
Yes, I find the idea of fighting against the idea of God odd. Oops, didn't mean to rhyme there. It does remind me of the great Herbert poem, the Collar, where the fight of Herbert is calmed at the end, "Methought I heard one calling, Child, and I replied My Lord".
However, I find it fairly easy, not to resist God, but be without him. It's like falling off a log, or if you like, not falling. Life seems enough.
Yes. It's like being determined not to believe in unicorns.
Whatever our faith/politics/culture nearly all of us have forgotten that we are part of the Earth, part of biology - not above it.
For too long we’ve assumed we can keep on taking from the natural world without giving anything back. Eating what we like, building where we like, throwing our waste where we like. We are cruel to each other and cruel to animals, ravaging the land and the forests for our own pleasure and wants, rather than needs.
This virus is just a coincidence - no higher body ‘sent’ it. Viruses are a normal part of life on Earth. It’s us and our ways of life that have caused it to be able to devastate us.
This is a reminder that life is fragile and that all life is interconnected and should be respected and cared for.
But to be fair, part of human history is that we have to a certain degree, overcome nature. If humans did not develop in civilization, nature would have had us all dying by the age of forty, due to disease and starvation.
I am wary of the tendency within environmental circles to decry civilization and industrialization, but it's a lot more complex. Generally speaking, the advances in medical science and civilization were taken with the intent to promote human well-being, Their excesses were problematic to be sure, but as a creature, we are designed to will our survival and livelihood.
The idea that eating bats is somehow disgusting or unnatural seems parochial to me, and probably with a racist undercurrent. When I was a kid, people regularly ate brains, stomachs, udders, of animals. Of course, the latter were from farmed animls, bats, not.
The idea that eating bats is somehow disgusting or unnatural seems parochial to me, and probably with a racist undercurrent. When I was a kid, people regularly ate brains, stomachs, udders, of animals. Of course, the latter were from farmed animls, bats, not.
No I don't think that's correct re racism. While China is a large country, there's been a trendy tendency to want exotic "warm" meat. Meaning that chicken and pork are not exotic enough for a burgeoning middle class, and they go to markets to choose a live wild animal to eat on special occasions which might be no more special than wanting to impress your supper guests. The wild animal is killed in front of you and bled out with the blood possibly a separate food. Blood being thought to strengthen.
The cultural aspects are the beliefs that foods and animal products of various types have medicinal purposes or quasi. Like in my childhood being fed bone broth when sick to build me up, or the idea that fish are brain food. And as you note. But the current traffic in wild animals to eat is a new trend. Lucrative.
There is a huge traffic to China of exotic animals for both food and medicine. It doesn't actually matter if rhino horn, panogolins, bear paws and gallbladders**, gorilla hands, or locally, the bats are part of a burgeoning food culture. It has to stop. For both the extinction reasons and frankly secondarily because of the diseases which threaten humans.
Have you ever eaten alligator? It does taste like chicken.
As I recall, China has suffered a number of severe famines in the past to the point where the people learned to eat what was available, even if it would not have previously been considered. Thus, these "wet" markets have been quite common in Chinese cities.
China has now said it will close down these markets, but time will tell.
The West has also had its share of illnesses that came through unsanitary business practices. It seems whenever we relax our best practices in food handling, we suffer the consequences.
I am not so much concerned about what a particular ethnic group is eating as much as the food handling practices they are using in processing the item.
Would I eat a bat? Probably not, because of my Western sensibilities. But there was one time when I said I would never eat an alligator. And it really did taste like chicken.
Oh, I also ate the hind part of a woodchuck once, part of survival training.
It's looking likely that COVID-19 is a chimera; from what I understand from reading recent paper summaries a bat virus without the ability to invade human cells infected a Pangolin which also was infected by a separate Coronavirus which had the ability to invade humans. The cells of the Pangolin in question thus produced a new virus combining genetic code from both.
I am not a virologist so please do your own research.
Consumption of bats, in or out of soup, doesn't really appear to enter the picture.
Over the last few thousand years - featuring plagues, wars killing million upon million, the Shoah, sytematic oppression and misery across nations - has no-one has speculated on where God is in all of it, or worked out how their faith continues through it? ...
Virtually everybody has. It's important. However, over 30+ centuries no one has 'solved' it. So, it's unlikely we will on this thread. It's something we're going to puzzle over but ultimately have to live with.
If I might just throw in my own pennyworth, some people do bad things, and other, quite different people, perhaps millions of them, suffer the consequence. Evil doesn't do justice. It's of its nature not to.
Yes, that doesn't answer @Cameron's question, but I'm not the first person who can't answer it.
Whatever our faith/politics/culture nearly all of us have forgotten that we are part of the Earth, part of biology - not above it.
For too long we’ve assumed we can keep on taking from the natural world without giving anything back. Eating what we like, building where we like, throwing our waste where we like. We are cruel to each other and cruel to animals, ravaging the land and the forests for our own pleasure and wants, rather than needs.
This virus is just a coincidence - no higher body ‘sent’ it. Viruses are a normal part of life on Earth. It’s us and our ways of life that have caused it to be able to devastate us.
This is a reminder that life is fragile and that all life is interconnected and should be respected and cared for.
Yes. It just does seem more than a coincidence to me that we've been "choking the lungs" of the planet for years, with our pollution and our plastics, and this virus chokes us and is so contagious we need to shut ourselves in and not burn so many fossil fuels with all our travelling etc.
I'm not saying it's a judgement, nor even that it was "sent." It's more a sense of some balance being redressed.
It's looking likely that COVID-19 is a chimera; from what I understand from reading recent paper summaries a bat virus without the ability to invade human cells infected a Pangolin which also was infected by a separate Coronavirus which had the ability to invade humans. The cells of the Pangolin in question thus produced a new virus combining genetic code from both.
I am not a virologist so please do your own research.
Consumption of bats, in or out of soup, doesn't really appear to enter the picture.
Yes. It's like being determined not to believe in unicorns.
Well, sure. But that's just it. I went through most of my life as a desultory atheist; I simply didn't care about God, or gods, or deities, or whatever, and I couldn't see why anyone would. They/He/It did indeed fit into the 'unicorn' category.
So .... how did I spend my time? Well, arguing politics and literature and telling jokes, mostly. What did I *not* do? Spend any time on Christian or Islamic or Jewish forums, because I didn't see much point in talking about the monotheistic unicorns. I wanted to explore reality as I understood it at the time, and had no interest in someone else's fantasies.
By contrast, you're on here posting against the unicorns. A lot. And sure, that's your right.
Why you'd bother I don't know. But that's what you're doing.
Yes. It's like being determined not to believe in unicorns.
Well, sure. But that's just it. I went through most of my life as a desultory atheist; I simply didn't care about God, or gods, or deities, or whatever, and I couldn't see why anyone would. They/He/It did indeed fit into the 'unicorn' category.
So .... how did I spend my time? Well, arguing politics and literature and telling jokes, mostly. What did I *not* do? Spend any time on Christian or Islamic or Jewish forums, because I didn't see much point in talking about the monotheistic unicorns. I wanted to explore reality as I understood it at the time, and had no interest in someone else's fantasies.
By contrast, you're on here posting against the unicorns. A lot. And sure, that's your right.
Why you'd bother I don't know. But that's what you're doing.
Well, I also write fiction featuring all manner of supernatural phenomena loosely based on the mythology, folklore, and religious beliefs I've been fascinated by for nearly forty years. I also live in Glastonbury, the centre of alternative beliefs, and I'm a volunteer librarian at this place https://libraryofavalon.org.uk/
The short answer is, I am intrigued by the variety of, and the connections between, beliefs of all kinds and wish to pick it all apart and figure out what it means for people and why it endures. And along the way I'll make use of it in my writing.
And the Christian unicorn is just one mythical beast among a whole bestiary.
Esprit d'escalier, but ... you say that the idea of the Christian God 'makes your skin crawl with revulsion'.
These are not, to my ears, the words of someone lightly dismissing a figment. This sounds to me more like someone in the grip of a nightmare.
Which would at least IMV account for the need to keep combatting it.
No, not the Christian God, per se. I don't understand why any one would want to live with anyone or anything constantly prying into their life. Healthy relationships, imo, require each party to give the other privacy and a lot of time alone.
The short answer is, I am intrigued by the variety of, and the connections between, beliefs of all kinds and wish to pick it all apart and figure out what it means for people and why it endures.
Well, perhaps. I suppose all I can do is invite you to reread your posts and ask yourself if it really seems to you that that's what you're doing.
No, not the Christian God, per se. I don't understand why any one would want to live with anyone or anything constantly prying into their life. Healthy relationships, imo, require each party to give the other privacy and a lot of time alone.
To my mostly-picked-up-from-footnotes-in-Dante theological understanding, this just looks like conventional Augustinianism : the possibility of sin exists because a perfect love must be free.
I try to avoid thinking that "I can't wrap my head around it" can be logically followed by "therefore it can't be real." Ironically one would have to have a very swollen head to think that's true, which should make it possible to wrap around more, not less.
Esprit d'escalier, but ... you say that the idea of the Christian God 'makes your skin crawl with revulsion'.
These are not, to my ears, the words of someone lightly dismissing a figment. This sounds to me more like someone in the grip of a nightmare.
Which would at least IMV account for the need to keep combatting it.
No, not the Christian God, per se. I don't understand why any one would want to live with anyone or anything constantly prying into their life. Healthy relationships, imo, require each party to give the other privacy and a lot of time alone.
Somehow I missed the "crawl with revulsion" statement. I suppose I can see that, but I think you're wrong. Let me explain.
There are things in the universe that have both a good form and a bad form. Take dependency, for example. Most people shudder at the idea of hosting a parasite--tapped into your bloodstream, making use of your body, contributing nothing, taking everything, growing ever bigger... Eeurghh!!!
But call it an unborn baby, and there's a sudden shift in the emotional content. Yet everything I just said is still true. What has changed? IMHO, the difference is that the mother/fetus relationship falls into the mental category of "things that are supposed to be that way," while the bloodsucking tapeworm falls into the category of "Bleurrgbghhhh emphatically NOT!"
(By the way, you can't get out of this by saying that the tapeworm is doing damage while the fetus is not. Ask any pregnant woman what price she pays for carrying a baby. Ask any father who loses a wife in childbirth. We still think of pregnancy as normal, natural, and good.)
Okay, so there are two relationships which are both of the form "host/parasite" which nevertheless have vastly different emotional implications. That shows you (I hope) that it is possible to have relationships that share most of the same characteristics but that are poles away from each other in terms of being good or bad.
Now let's look at the God/creature relationship. It has tons of facets, but the ones I want to focus on here is the one that you mentioned as specifically creepy: "constantly prying into their life" and not giving "the other privacy and a lot of time alone." To put it as clearly as I can, you object to God's omniscience, his constant presence, his personal interest, and (I'm fairly sure) his interventionist tendencies.
Okay.
As long as you think of God as an equal (or, God forbid, an inferior), this is totally on the money. Who wants a colleague, even a spouse or sibling, to be that close and constantly in one's face? Plus what gives that person the right or responsibility to know that much about me, and even to interfere, either directly or by telling me what to do? It would be an outrage. It would be, in fact, for them to act like.... well, like God.
Oh dear.
And that's where we wind up again. Because if God IS God--that is, if he is the one who planned you, made you, delights in you as a craftsman delights in his work, expects the best of you as a teacher does of a student, is ready to lay down his own life for you as a parent for a child, has the calm relentlessness of a GP chasing you, his patient, until you agree to have that colonoscopy you KNOW you should have had three years ago...
You see where this is going. We are not in fact looking at a collegial relationship, a relationship of (more or less) equals. We are looking at a superior relationship, where the greater of the two people has rights and responsibilities over you (me, anyone) simply by nature of what he is.
The problem might be this: In the kind of cultures you and I come from, we do not readily accept superior relationships in which we ourselves are not the superior. Oh sure, we admit parents to be our superiors, but only up to a certain age--and then we bug out as quickly as we can, anxious to be independent. We most of us refuse to accept a political leader (king, queen, president, whatever) as superior-in-fact; at most we acknowledge that somebody's got to do the job (with a certain amount of eye rolling and a deep inner conviction that we ourselves could do much better). And I don't know anybody who considers their boss to be superior in anything but amount of power (and if you're lucky, skill).
So we're not used to this sort of thing. We revolt against it, with an unthinking knee-jerk reaction. We are so unhappy with it (as a culture, I mean) that we put our children through extreme crap in our old age because we don't want to surrender any of our own independence and come once again under the control of a superior, however kindly and wise. Some of us won't even surrender the car keys, even when legally blind.
But if there is in fact a God... If he is as described... if we are the wonderful yet flawed and limited creatures we secretly know ourselves to be.... then the superior aspect of the relationship is a given, and we're going to have to crawl out of our tantrum and deal with it. Otherwise we're ignoring reality, and that never turns out well.
I can speak from experience that it's really not as bad as you think--in fact, it's wonderful, given the personality of the God in question ("come on in! the water's fine!"). But there's no denying it's a wrench for people brought up in Western cultures.
1. Yep, I'm not a Catholic but Pope Francis is a good one.
2. What you find disgusting to eat is very much cultural.
2A. We actually use the term 'bat' to refer to two fairly different types of creature, so your mental image might not be entirely accurate.
3. Mixing of genetic material in that way is pretty much the standard way for viruses to jump species. How lethal and how transmissible the results are varies. There have been at least a couple of examples in Australia of viruses getting from flying foxes (fruit bats) to humans with VERY nasty results, but with human-to-human transmission not occurring. And no, we don't eat flying foxes.
Somehow I missed the "crawl with revulsion" statement. I suppose I can see that, but I think you're wrong. Let me explain.
There are things in the universe that have both a good form and a bad form. Take dependency, for example. Most people shudder at the idea of hosting a parasite--tapped into your bloodstream, making use of your body, contributing nothing, taking everything, growing ever bigger... Eeurghh!!!
But call it an unborn baby, and there's a sudden shift in the emotional content. Yet everything I just said is still true. What has changed? IMHO, the difference is that the mother/fetus relationship falls into the mental category of "things that are supposed to be that way," while the bloodsucking tapeworm falls into the category of "Bleurrgbghhhh emphatically NOT!"
(By the way, you can't get out of this by saying that the tapeworm is doing damage while the fetus is not. Ask any pregnant woman what price she pays for carrying a baby. Ask any father who loses a wife in childbirth. We still think of pregnancy as normal, natural, and good.)
Okay, so there are two relationships which are both of the form "host/parasite" which nevertheless have vastly different emotional implications. That shows you (I hope) that it is possible to have relationships that share most of the same characteristics but that are poles away from each other in terms of being good or bad.
Now let's look at the God/creature relationship. It has tons of facets, but the ones I want to focus on here is the one that you mentioned as specifically creepy: "constantly prying into their life" and not giving "the other privacy and a lot of time alone." To put it as clearly as I can, you object to God's omniscience, his constant presence, his personal interest, and (I'm fairly sure) his interventionist tendencies.
Okay.
As long as you think of God as an equal (or, God forbid, an inferior), this is totally on the money. Who wants a colleague, even a spouse or sibling, to be that close and constantly in one's face? Plus what gives that person the right or responsibility to know that much about me, and even to interfere, either directly or by telling me what to do? It would be an outrage. It would be, in fact, for them to act like.... well, like God.
Oh dear.
And that's where we wind up again. Because if God IS God--that is, if he is the one who planned you, made you, delights in you as a craftsman delights in his work, expects the best of you as a teacher does of a student, is ready to lay down his own life for you as a parent for a child, has the calm relentlessness of a GP chasing you, his patient, until you agree to have that colonoscopy you KNOW you should have had three years ago...
You see where this is going. We are not in fact looking at a collegial relationship, a relationship of (more or less) equals. We are looking at a superior relationship, where the greater of the two people has rights and responsibilities over you (me, anyone) simply by nature of what he is.
The problem might be this: In the kind of cultures you and I come from, we do not readily accept superior relationships in which we ourselves are not the superior. Oh sure, we admit parents to be our superiors, but only up to a certain age--and then we bug out as quickly as we can, anxious to be independent. We most of us refuse to accept a political leader (king, queen, president, whatever) as superior-in-fact; at most we acknowledge that somebody's got to do the job (with a certain amount of eye rolling and a deep inner conviction that we ourselves could do much better). And I don't know anybody who considers their boss to be superior in anything but amount of power (and if you're lucky, skill).
So we're not used to this sort of thing. We revolt against it, with an unthinking knee-jerk reaction. We are so unhappy with it (as a culture, I mean) that we put our children through extreme crap in our old age because we don't want to surrender any of our own independence and come once again under the control of a superior, however kindly and wise. Some of us won't even surrender the car keys, even when legally blind.
But if there is in fact a God... If he is as described... if we are the wonderful yet flawed and limited creatures we secretly know ourselves to be.... then the superior aspect of the relationship is a given, and we're going to have to crawl out of our tantrum and deal with it. Otherwise we're ignoring reality, and that never turns out well.
I can speak from experience that it's really not as bad as you think--in fact, it's wonderful, given the personality of the God in question ("come on in! the water's fine!"). But there's no denying it's a wrench for people brought up in Western cultures.
I never wanted or had children and I think a principle reason for that was I never wanted to be subordinate to something or to anyone. It follows that the idea of a God to which I am subordinate appals me.
I'm nor sure that's down to Western culture, so much as me being an individualist. Ultimately, I can't accept the possibility of something existing that's more important, subjectively speaking, than me.
We actually use the term 'bat' to refer to two fairly different types of creature, so your mental image might not be entirely accurate.
Pedantic tangent: While fruit bats don't look a lot like microbats, past the obvious, apparently they are in fact the same type of creature contrary to some theories. (Horseshoe bats are more closely related to fruit bats than they are to other microbats.)
The short answer is, I am intrigued by the variety of, and the connections between, beliefs of all kinds and wish to pick it all apart and figure out what it means for people and why it endures.
Well, perhaps. I suppose all I can do is invite you to reread your posts and ask yourself if it really seems to you that that's what you're doing.
No, not the Christian God, per se. I don't understand why any one would want to live with anyone or anything constantly prying into their life. Healthy relationships, imo, require each party to give the other privacy and a lot of time alone.
To my mostly-picked-up-from-footnotes-in-Dante theological understanding, this just looks like conventional Augustinianism : the possibility of sin exists because a perfect love must be free.
But YMMV, I suppose.
Another reason behind why I'm here (one I clean forgot about) is my unconscious habit of getting into groups and 'social' situations where I am the outsider or contrarian. Whereas I suspect most people become more like their immediate acquaintances, or at least adopt a pretence of being like them, I tend to do the opposite. I enjoy the abrasiveness of it. My mother sometimes said that I would be different or awkward for the sake of being different or awkward, and there is something in that.
Somehow I missed the "crawl with revulsion" statement. I suppose I can see that, but I think you're wrong. Let me explain.
There are things in the universe that have both a good form and a bad form. Take dependency, for example. Most people shudder at the idea of hosting a parasite--tapped into your bloodstream, making use of your body, contributing nothing, taking everything, growing ever bigger... Eeurghh!!!
But call it an unborn baby, and there's a sudden shift in the emotional content. Yet everything I just said is still true. What has changed? IMHO, the difference is that the mother/fetus relationship falls into the mental category of "things that are supposed to be that way," while the bloodsucking tapeworm falls into the category of "Bleurrgbghhhh emphatically NOT!"
(By the way, you can't get out of this by saying that the tapeworm is doing damage while the fetus is not. Ask any pregnant woman what price she pays for carrying a baby. Ask any father who loses a wife in childbirth. We still think of pregnancy as normal, natural, and good.)
Okay, so there are two relationships which are both of the form "host/parasite" which nevertheless have vastly different emotional implications. That shows you (I hope) that it is possible to have relationships that share most of the same characteristics but that are poles away from each other in terms of being good or bad.
Now let's look at the God/creature relationship. It has tons of facets, but the ones I want to focus on here is the one that you mentioned as specifically creepy: "constantly prying into their life" and not giving "the other privacy and a lot of time alone." To put it as clearly as I can, you object to God's omniscience, his constant presence, his personal interest, and (I'm fairly sure) his interventionist tendencies.
Okay.
As long as you think of God as an equal (or, God forbid, an inferior), this is totally on the money. Who wants a colleague, even a spouse or sibling, to be that close and constantly in one's face? Plus what gives that person the right or responsibility to know that much about me, and even to interfere, either directly or by telling me what to do? It would be an outrage. It would be, in fact, for them to act like.... well, like God.
Oh dear.
And that's where we wind up again. Because if God IS God--that is, if he is the one who planned you, made you, delights in you as a craftsman delights in his work, expects the best of you as a teacher does of a student, is ready to lay down his own life for you as a parent for a child, has the calm relentlessness of a GP chasing you, his patient, until you agree to have that colonoscopy you KNOW you should have had three years ago...
You see where this is going. We are not in fact looking at a collegial relationship, a relationship of (more or less) equals. We are looking at a superior relationship, where the greater of the two people has rights and responsibilities over you (me, anyone) simply by nature of what he is.
The problem might be this: In the kind of cultures you and I come from, we do not readily accept superior relationships in which we ourselves are not the superior. Oh sure, we admit parents to be our superiors, but only up to a certain age--and then we bug out as quickly as we can, anxious to be independent. We most of us refuse to accept a political leader (king, queen, president, whatever) as superior-in-fact; at most we acknowledge that somebody's got to do the job (with a certain amount of eye rolling and a deep inner conviction that we ourselves could do much better). And I don't know anybody who considers their boss to be superior in anything but amount of power (and if you're lucky, skill).
So we're not used to this sort of thing. We revolt against it, with an unthinking knee-jerk reaction. We are so unhappy with it (as a culture, I mean) that we put our children through extreme crap in our old age because we don't want to surrender any of our own independence and come once again under the control of a superior, however kindly and wise. Some of us won't even surrender the car keys, even when legally blind.
But if there is in fact a God... If he is as described... if we are the wonderful yet flawed and limited creatures we secretly know ourselves to be.... then the superior aspect of the relationship is a given, and we're going to have to crawl out of our tantrum and deal with it. Otherwise we're ignoring reality, and that never turns out well.
I can speak from experience that it's really not as bad as you think--in fact, it's wonderful, given the personality of the God in question ("come on in! the water's fine!"). But there's no denying it's a wrench for people brought up in Western cultures.
I never wanted or had children and I think a principle reason for that was I never wanted to be subordinate to something or to anyone. It follows that the idea of a God to which I am subordinate appals me.
I'm nor sure that's down to Western culture, so much as me being an individualist. Ultimately, I can't accept the possibility of something existing that's more important, subjectively speaking, than me.
Well, that grieves me, but it's not precisely a logical answer to the issue. You can't tolerate such a God emotionally--okay. That's a shame. But what will you do if such a God exists?
That was a hypothetical rhetorical question, by the way. You need not answer. Just pointing out that the universe doesn't generally accommodate itself to our wishes.
Comments
That's ridiculous. Clearly, God is still upset by the Dems' insistence that Trump's inauguration crowd size was smaller than Obama's.
No on both counts.
My answer to it is by looking at the life of Christ. Nowhere do you see him telling those who sought healing that God was punishing them. In fact, there is the story of the person who was born blind. The disciples asked Jesus who had sinned: the man or his parents. Jesus replied the man was born blind so that God's grace may abound.
I realized last night that when we suffer, God suffers. Oftentimes, when Jesus was confronted with suffering, the Gospels report Jesus was moved to his very depth--actually became physically sick. Psalm 116:15 reports "Precious in the eyes of God is the death of his saints." In Hebrew, if one is not able to enjoy life to the fullest, one is experiencing death. Since we are not able to experience life to the fullest, this says God is there with us, much like a mother taking care of her children while they are sick.
Thanks for that post Gramps - I find it helpful. And because I am an engineer, it reminds me of this - see item 3 on the list
Dang. I knew I should have gotten someone to bet me.
What in the world makes you think God's any more absent from this than he is usually? It's not like we all suddenly got a "Sorry, I'm out of the office today" notice on our emails. It looks like business as usual to me.
True, but the God you're describing stretches my imagination well beyond breaking point. It's not so much that I do not and could not ever believe in such a God (both of which are true) or that a God such as you describe makes my skin crawl with revulsion, but that I regard such a God as utterly fantastical. By comparison, it makes the collected theories of Erich von Daniken and David Icke look utterly plausible.
Belief in a god that made stuff happen and then buggered off I can just about understand. Belief in your kind of God I can't even begin to get my head round.
I don't think that's a problem. I mean, I can't wrap my head around calculus or light theory, but demonstrably they work.
Secondly, the way that viruses move between species has absolutely nothing to do with our general fuck-up of ecology, unless you count us interacting closely with other species as part of that fuck-up.
Most of our worst diseases are things that have a happier home in some other species. Influenza, for example, is a bird virus. There are lots of things that are pretty happy in us and don't make us sick at all or give very mild symptoms. Killing your host is not a good strategy for an organism that depends on you.
In other words, to the extent that one can attribute any kind of intentionality to a virus, the virus is thinking "shit, this new host I've hopped into isn't as good, maybe I shouldn't have mutated".
I have some difficulty getting my mind around how people reaching for those sorts of explanations explain why Iran is one of the worst affected countries.
Of course, they don't explain it. They just have an immunity to cognitive dissonance so powerful that we might be able to use it to develop a vaccine.
This would have to be one of the worst pieces of bunkum I have ever seen on the Ship.
When the overflowing scourge passes through,
Then you will be trampled down by it.
19 As often as it goes out it will take you;
For morning by morning it will pass over,
And by day and by night;
It will be a terror just to understand the report.
22 Now therefore, do not be mockers,
Lest your bonds be made strong;
For I have heard from the Lord God of hosts,
A destruction determined even upon the whole earth.
Which leads me back to this ...
... because it seems to reveal a curious understanding of God(/god/etc). As others have pointed out, it’s not as though this is the first time catastrophe has swept the world, and it is far from being the worst. But it’s also not as though suffering is absent from the Bible. We are right now in the middle of Lent, remembering Christ’s seclusion in the desert. And it culminates in Good Friday: my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?
Followed, of course, by redemption. But not the one, without the other.
Well, it would be a pretty shrunken and shrivelled sort of God, to be bound by the limits of the human imagination.
But speaking personally, I can well imagine a God who loves even @Colin Smith, horripilation or no. And I suspect @Colin Smith himself might not find this such a challenge, were he not always fighting quite so hard against it.
For too long we’ve assumed we can keep on taking from the natural world without giving anything back. Eating what we like, building where we like, throwing our waste where we like. We are cruel to each other and cruel to animals, ravaging the land and the forests for our own pleasure and wants, rather than needs.
This virus is just a coincidence - no higher body ‘sent’ it. Viruses are a normal part of life on Earth. It’s us and our ways of life that have caused it to be able to devastate us.
This is a reminder that life is fragile and that all life is interconnected and should be respected and cared for.
I'm not fighting against it. "Imagination", mine or anyone else's wasn't quite the right word. It's more that the existence of such a God isn't, to me, conceivable within the universe as we understand it. Oddly enough, it's quite easy to imagine a god, but one has to disregard a hell of a lot of logic and reason in the process.
And quite apart from that, I am one person among eight billion others on one planet among many billions of planets scattered across billions of galaxies in a universe over 13 billion years old so even if a posited God did have an interest in me the question then arises of 'why?' I mean, to what point? Such a God, to me, seems more like an obsessive or a 'Big Brother' character.
By comparison, assuming that God/belief is a human construction which has helped humans understand their environment and given comfort and purpose to their existence and continues for many to provide a psychological framework seems much more reasonable.
However, I find it fairly easy, not to resist God, but be without him. It's like falling off a log, or if you like, not falling. Life seems enough.
And George Herbert's poetry (for those of a more traditional Anglican bent!) is well worth reading, or re-reading.
Yes. It's like being determined not to believe in unicorns.
But to be fair, part of human history is that we have to a certain degree, overcome nature. If humans did not develop in civilization, nature would have had us all dying by the age of forty, due to disease and starvation.
I am wary of the tendency within environmental circles to decry civilization and industrialization, but it's a lot more complex. Generally speaking, the advances in medical science and civilization were taken with the intent to promote human well-being, Their excesses were problematic to be sure, but as a creature, we are designed to will our survival and livelihood.
AIUI, nicely-cooked ship's rats were considered something of a delicacy in the 18thC/early 19thC British Navy. They tasted like chicken, it seems.
No I don't think that's correct re racism. While China is a large country, there's been a trendy tendency to want exotic "warm" meat. Meaning that chicken and pork are not exotic enough for a burgeoning middle class, and they go to markets to choose a live wild animal to eat on special occasions which might be no more special than wanting to impress your supper guests. The wild animal is killed in front of you and bled out with the blood possibly a separate food. Blood being thought to strengthen.
The cultural aspects are the beliefs that foods and animal products of various types have medicinal purposes or quasi. Like in my childhood being fed bone broth when sick to build me up, or the idea that fish are brain food. And as you note. But the current traffic in wild animals to eat is a new trend. Lucrative.
There is a huge traffic to China of exotic animals for both food and medicine. It doesn't actually matter if rhino horn, panogolins, bear paws and gallbladders**, gorilla hands, or locally, the bats are part of a burgeoning food culture. It has to stop. For both the extinction reasons and frankly secondarily because of the diseases which threaten humans.
**https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan/5-people-convicted-of-smuggling-bear-parts-from-sandy-bay-sask-to-toronto-1.5466322
The anti-whaling and anti-sealing campaigns in Europe might compare?
As I recall, China has suffered a number of severe famines in the past to the point where the people learned to eat what was available, even if it would not have previously been considered. Thus, these "wet" markets have been quite common in Chinese cities.
China has now said it will close down these markets, but time will tell.
The West has also had its share of illnesses that came through unsanitary business practices. It seems whenever we relax our best practices in food handling, we suffer the consequences.
I am not so much concerned about what a particular ethnic group is eating as much as the food handling practices they are using in processing the item.
Would I eat a bat? Probably not, because of my Western sensibilities. But there was one time when I said I would never eat an alligator. And it really did taste like chicken.
Oh, I also ate the hind part of a woodchuck once, part of survival training.
https://www.sciencealert.com/coronavirus-discovery-in-pangolins-shows-why-wildlife-markets-need-better-regulations
It's looking likely that COVID-19 is a chimera; from what I understand from reading recent paper summaries a bat virus without the ability to invade human cells infected a Pangolin which also was infected by a separate Coronavirus which had the ability to invade humans. The cells of the Pangolin in question thus produced a new virus combining genetic code from both.
I am not a virologist so please do your own research.
Consumption of bats, in or out of soup, doesn't really appear to enter the picture.
Edit: good link here: https://www.sciencealert.com/genome-analysis-of-the-coronavirus-suggests-two-viruses-may-have-combined
If I might just throw in my own pennyworth, some people do bad things, and other, quite different people, perhaps millions of them, suffer the consequence. Evil doesn't do justice. It's of its nature not to.
Yes, that doesn't answer @Cameron's question, but I'm not the first person who can't answer it.
Yes. It just does seem more than a coincidence to me that we've been "choking the lungs" of the planet for years, with our pollution and our plastics, and this virus chokes us and is so contagious we need to shut ourselves in and not burn so many fossil fuels with all our travelling etc.
I'm not saying it's a judgement, nor even that it was "sent." It's more a sense of some balance being redressed.
Given the amount of suffering heaped on the poor benighted pangolin by humans one almost wants to cheer for the little bugger that got one over on us.
I note, with dry amusement, that pangolin falls foul of spellcheck.
Well, sure. But that's just it. I went through most of my life as a desultory atheist; I simply didn't care about God, or gods, or deities, or whatever, and I couldn't see why anyone would. They/He/It did indeed fit into the 'unicorn' category.
So .... how did I spend my time? Well, arguing politics and literature and telling jokes, mostly. What did I *not* do? Spend any time on Christian or Islamic or Jewish forums, because I didn't see much point in talking about the monotheistic unicorns. I wanted to explore reality as I understood it at the time, and had no interest in someone else's fantasies.
By contrast, you're on here posting against the unicorns. A lot. And sure, that's your right.
Why you'd bother I don't know. But that's what you're doing.
These are not, to my ears, the words of someone lightly dismissing a figment. This sounds to me more like someone in the grip of a nightmare.
Which would at least IMV account for the need to keep combatting it.
Well, I also write fiction featuring all manner of supernatural phenomena loosely based on the mythology, folklore, and religious beliefs I've been fascinated by for nearly forty years. I also live in Glastonbury, the centre of alternative beliefs, and I'm a volunteer librarian at this place https://libraryofavalon.org.uk/
The short answer is, I am intrigued by the variety of, and the connections between, beliefs of all kinds and wish to pick it all apart and figure out what it means for people and why it endures. And along the way I'll make use of it in my writing.
And the Christian unicorn is just one mythical beast among a whole bestiary.
No, not the Christian God, per se. I don't understand why any one would want to live with anyone or anything constantly prying into their life. Healthy relationships, imo, require each party to give the other privacy and a lot of time alone.
Well, perhaps. I suppose all I can do is invite you to reread your posts and ask yourself if it really seems to you that that's what you're doing.
To my mostly-picked-up-from-footnotes-in-Dante theological understanding, this just looks like conventional Augustinianism : the possibility of sin exists because a perfect love must be free.
But YMMV, I suppose.
Somehow I missed the "crawl with revulsion" statement. I suppose I can see that, but I think you're wrong. Let me explain.
There are things in the universe that have both a good form and a bad form. Take dependency, for example. Most people shudder at the idea of hosting a parasite--tapped into your bloodstream, making use of your body, contributing nothing, taking everything, growing ever bigger... Eeurghh!!!
But call it an unborn baby, and there's a sudden shift in the emotional content. Yet everything I just said is still true. What has changed? IMHO, the difference is that the mother/fetus relationship falls into the mental category of "things that are supposed to be that way," while the bloodsucking tapeworm falls into the category of "Bleurrgbghhhh emphatically NOT!"
(By the way, you can't get out of this by saying that the tapeworm is doing damage while the fetus is not. Ask any pregnant woman what price she pays for carrying a baby. Ask any father who loses a wife in childbirth. We still think of pregnancy as normal, natural, and good.)
Okay, so there are two relationships which are both of the form "host/parasite" which nevertheless have vastly different emotional implications. That shows you (I hope) that it is possible to have relationships that share most of the same characteristics but that are poles away from each other in terms of being good or bad.
Now let's look at the God/creature relationship. It has tons of facets, but the ones I want to focus on here is the one that you mentioned as specifically creepy: "constantly prying into their life" and not giving "the other privacy and a lot of time alone." To put it as clearly as I can, you object to God's omniscience, his constant presence, his personal interest, and (I'm fairly sure) his interventionist tendencies.
Okay.
As long as you think of God as an equal (or, God forbid, an inferior), this is totally on the money. Who wants a colleague, even a spouse or sibling, to be that close and constantly in one's face? Plus what gives that person the right or responsibility to know that much about me, and even to interfere, either directly or by telling me what to do? It would be an outrage. It would be, in fact, for them to act like.... well, like God.
Oh dear.
And that's where we wind up again. Because if God IS God--that is, if he is the one who planned you, made you, delights in you as a craftsman delights in his work, expects the best of you as a teacher does of a student, is ready to lay down his own life for you as a parent for a child, has the calm relentlessness of a GP chasing you, his patient, until you agree to have that colonoscopy you KNOW you should have had three years ago...
You see where this is going. We are not in fact looking at a collegial relationship, a relationship of (more or less) equals. We are looking at a superior relationship, where the greater of the two people has rights and responsibilities over you (me, anyone) simply by nature of what he is.
The problem might be this: In the kind of cultures you and I come from, we do not readily accept superior relationships in which we ourselves are not the superior. Oh sure, we admit parents to be our superiors, but only up to a certain age--and then we bug out as quickly as we can, anxious to be independent. We most of us refuse to accept a political leader (king, queen, president, whatever) as superior-in-fact; at most we acknowledge that somebody's got to do the job (with a certain amount of eye rolling and a deep inner conviction that we ourselves could do much better). And I don't know anybody who considers their boss to be superior in anything but amount of power (and if you're lucky, skill).
So we're not used to this sort of thing. We revolt against it, with an unthinking knee-jerk reaction. We are so unhappy with it (as a culture, I mean) that we put our children through extreme crap in our old age because we don't want to surrender any of our own independence and come once again under the control of a superior, however kindly and wise. Some of us won't even surrender the car keys, even when legally blind.
But if there is in fact a God... If he is as described... if we are the wonderful yet flawed and limited creatures we secretly know ourselves to be.... then the superior aspect of the relationship is a given, and we're going to have to crawl out of our tantrum and deal with it. Otherwise we're ignoring reality, and that never turns out well.
I can speak from experience that it's really not as bad as you think--in fact, it's wonderful, given the personality of the God in question ("come on in! the water's fine!"). But there's no denying it's a wrench for people brought up in Western cultures.
2. What you find disgusting to eat is very much cultural.
2A. We actually use the term 'bat' to refer to two fairly different types of creature, so your mental image might not be entirely accurate.
3. Mixing of genetic material in that way is pretty much the standard way for viruses to jump species. How lethal and how transmissible the results are varies. There have been at least a couple of examples in Australia of viruses getting from flying foxes (fruit bats) to humans with VERY nasty results, but with human-to-human transmission not occurring. And no, we don't eat flying foxes.
I never wanted or had children and I think a principle reason for that was I never wanted to be subordinate to something or to anyone. It follows that the idea of a God to which I am subordinate appals me.
I'm nor sure that's down to Western culture, so much as me being an individualist. Ultimately, I can't accept the possibility of something existing that's more important, subjectively speaking, than me.
Another reason behind why I'm here (one I clean forgot about) is my unconscious habit of getting into groups and 'social' situations where I am the outsider or contrarian. Whereas I suspect most people become more like their immediate acquaintances, or at least adopt a pretence of being like them, I tend to do the opposite. I enjoy the abrasiveness of it. My mother sometimes said that I would be different or awkward for the sake of being different or awkward, and there is something in that.
Well, that grieves me, but it's not precisely a logical answer to the issue. You can't tolerate such a God emotionally--okay. That's a shame. But what will you do if such a God exists?
That was a hypothetical rhetorical question, by the way. You need not answer. Just pointing out that the universe doesn't generally accommodate itself to our wishes.