God Will Kill You With a Fox… Guest Blogger – Will Hunter

22 May 2011 1 Comment

by Jennifer "Jay" Bull in Musings

My husband, Will wrote the following.  Keep in mind he is Christian, so this is very much from that perspective, but as I believe that all paths lead to Deity I think it still fits.

Try, for a bit, though it’s futile, to see things from God’s perspective.
Think about God, and all the implications.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: God kills everybody in the end.
Everybody who has ever lived, and everybody who has ever died, and everybody who will ever live and die, God kills ALL of us.
He kills us in the womb, in the crib, in our schools, in our cars, in our yards, in our homes or abroad.
He kills us with accidents, illness, and genetic flaws.
He kills us with cars, with cancer, with guns and with claws.

God would kill us with a fox.
God would kill us in a box.
God would kill us here or there,
God would kill us anywhere.

When you come right down to it, as I have said, God kills every single one of us.
I can’t seem to drive this point home hard enough, because people still keep focusing in on specific examples, like Soddom and Gomorah, like the firstborn of Egypt, like the Holocaust.
But every single one of these examples pales to the overall issue; God created death itself.

Citing specific examples of God killing people doesn’t make much sense to me, because of that fact;  God created death.
The sons of Egypt weren’t the first innocent people to die; that would be Abel.
If you want to point fingers at God, start pointing there because God stood right by and let Cain murder his own brother. God helped, in fact, because God created the very laws of reality that allowed Cain to do the deed.
God invented blood, and God invented bloodshed.

Granted, I’m coming at this all from a deterministic point of view (actually, from a compatiblist point of view). Those of you who are big on Free Will being the end-all be-all of creation are probably taking issue with me putting things as strongly as saying, “God kills everybody.”
Don’t worry; we don’t agree on that, but I got your backs.
Because if you’re big on Free Will, then you’re probably big on the notion that God let Adam and Eve fall from grace out of an unwillingness to interfere with their Free Will decision to disobey him.
And THAT is where death really started, at least for humans.
Up until the Fall From Grace, Humans didn’t die- they ate from the Tree of Eternal Life.
So when you get right down to it, you can pin it all back on humanity.
Sure, God invented Death, but he told Adam and Eve the rules; if they ate from a certain tree, they would die.
And they did eat.
And they did die.
Because they chose to.

Which is the same ultimate reason why the sons of Egypt died; because Adam and Eve just couldn’t resist listening to that talking snake.

Anyway, back to my less Free-Will-oriented view of things:
Alright, so God created us all, every living thing that lives, that has lived, and that ever will live, just so He can kill us.
That must make him the ultimate villain, right?
I mean, he’s worse that Hi-…. uh, worse than some evil dictator who killed a lot of people.
He created evil dictators.
That must mean he’s worse, right?

Nope.
Not necessarily, anyway.
It all boils down to the philosophical Problem Of Evil:
“Why would a God that is all-powerful and all-good create a world in which there is evil?”

It’s a good question for people to think about.
Seriously.
But ultimately, it’s not a question that we can answer.
(I don’t buy the whole Free Will bit)

The only way in which we could ever get a meaningful answer to why God would create a universe that had Evil in it would be if we knew why the hell He built the damned thing in the first place.
Why would God, a perfect being, need or want a universe?
Heck, aren’t “need” and “want” loaded terms that ultimately stem from human failings?
If you’re perfect, you shouldn’t need anything.
You shouldn’t want anything.

So why DO anything, especially something as interesting as creating a universe?
Don’t bother to answer; you don’t know.
Neither do I.

The point is that the question of whether or not God is a bastard (metaphorically speaking) depends entirely on what the reasons are for His actions in the first place.
Just because we don’t know what His reasons are doesn’t mean He doesn’t have any.

But getting way, way, WAY back to the original conversation that I’m interjecting into:

Was it harsh of God to kill off (insert example of God killing one of the effectively infinite number of His victims)?
Is God Harsh?

Well, “Harsh” is a relative term.
Obviously, things could be much more pleasing for us.
Obviously, things could be a lot less pleasing for us.

I agree that a lot of His actions certainly seem harsh.
As my father has been getting older, I’ve been thinking more and more about his mortality and the fact that he’s going to die some day.
The fact that God is going to kill him.
It sure feels harsh to me; my father is a great guy, and it makes me angry that anybody would want the guy dead. Even God.
Especially God, since my own father will be just a drop in the ocean of corpses.

But then again, the level of harshness depends on what exactly death entails.
All we know is that it’s a cessation of life in this plane.
It’s unpleasant. Usually for the people who die, and even more often for those left behind.

But then again, if the whole resurrection bit is true, if we all get to go to Heaven or another eternal life, then it’s not that big of a deal.
The price of one death in exchange for eternity?
Not very harsh at all.
It just seems that way to us, right now, because we’re the ones in line to pay for the tickets.
Once we’re in the door to The Big Show, it’s not going to seem harsh at all.

(Unless, of course, those who believe in Eternal Damnation in a fiery Hell are correct, in which case death is pretty darned harsh after all, at least for some people.)

Ultimately, like most philosophical/theological questions, whether or not God is Harsh comes down to factors we simply do not know and can only guess at.

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