What Sort of a God…?

Agnostics.  Don’tcha just love ‘em?

Always grappling with the fundamental truths of the universe and feeling their religion as an itch, just below the surface of the skin which, try as they might, they can never get satisfaction from.  Such thinking, in fact, was displayed by an old Irish photographer once upon a time who said, when confronted with this carnage or that natural disaster: “what sort of a God would allow this tragedy to happen on such a large scale?”

If a person was raised a Christian – as this person was – then s/he is particularly prone to this thinking, which stems from the thorough drilling-in of an all-powerful, all-benevolent deity smiling benignly from some cloud on his minions, with a cheery wave from be-robed cherubim, seraphim and other angelic beings.  Of course, this is a highly simplistic view of the upper-echelons of, no doubt substance-inspired, Judeo-Christian philosophy; but being so it has the advantage at least of being pleb-friendly – always assuming, of course, that the pleb in question is happy being led by the theological nose, so to speak.

It will not do for the agnostic.

The agnostic, you see, will always seek to philosophise, to scratch that itch.  And the problem with Christianity is that it doesn’t stand up to such brutal treatment.  It can give no answers because, having blocked itself into a logical dead-end, there is no answer to give.  However, there is many a bluff, experienced cleric who can nevertheless tie all but the most persistent of agnostic aggressors into intricate knots which not even Alexander the Great (he of the Gordian Knot) could undo.

Then again, such pests are not the sole preserve of Christianity’s boundary walls, for we have them in Paganism too.  Oh some, I’ll grant you, are beautiful people, struggling to grasp the fundamental truths – especially if they’ve just escaped from a lifetime of Judeo-Christian ring-through-the-theological-nose propaganda.  But great swathes of such people delight in what we like to call “fluff-bunny” behaviour which means, ultimately, that they burn easily.  For them, “what sort of a God” has the same hallowed air as accepting direction from a politician purely because they let him rest his tucus on a green bench, when he can remember to turn up, regardless of whether he’s actually any good or not.

Why, then, does “God allow bad things to happen to good people”?

Well, one way of looking at it is that the soul’s journey is eternal; if we accept this premise, we can accept that we reincarnate, whether here or elsewhere doesn’t matter for our purposes.  Now, each incarnation has a purpose – and that purpose is a lesson we have to learn in order for our souls to progress.  Think of it a bit like riding a bicycle.  When you learn to ride a bicycle, you fall off a couple of times as you learn to control it – and bad things are the same as falling off your bike, although obviously writ a bit larger.  So even if we are killed – and even if we are killed with some brutality – it’s still a lesson; painful, maybe, but a rung up the ladder of the soul’s evolution.  Of course, it’s not pleasant – if we look at it through narrowed, human eyes – but if we see it from a wider perspective, our 360° vision will help us to understand.

In matters of religion: whatever the elders say, it’s always good to question.