Disability and Faith

You make some very good points. To use the whole “why me” victim mentality as a basis for not believing in God would be faulty thinking indeed. I would hope that like me others have many reasons for not believing that transcend mere personal experience. I actually look at the suffering of all of humanity. I am especially struck by how both believers and nonbelievers alike suffer disease, bad circumstances and accidents equally. It doesn’t seem to make a difference what you believe or how you behave. Life just seems to happen with no apparent sense of justice. Justice seeming to be a purely artificial and human-made thing. I would not blame the evil men do on anyone but humanity itself. I would not necessarily expect a God to intervene in human affairs even if he or she existed. It’s my understanding that from the moment humanity partook of the tree of knowledge they were expelled from Eden and left to their own devices. It’s disease that particularly gets me. I see young children battling aggressive cancer and it makes me think that there’s either a cruel God or no God. That’s just one of my reasons for not believing. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t claim to have all the answers. There is much that we do not know and that includes The Big Bang that you mentioned. No one knows what caused that and to ask why is one of the most fascinating and possibly most unanswerable questions ever asked. You mention not getting involved in the so-called “God Industry”. I agree. If there is a god, which is possible, it is certainly not the god written of or conceived by the human mind. Surely a being that created time and light itself would be well beyond human comprehension. The word is not the thing. You are absolutely correct and put it so well when you say we should live, learn, fight and take comfort wherever we can. I know I do and it’s really all any of us can do.

Life after death may be one area I’m willing to be a tad more open about. I’ve definitely thought about it quite a bit and have determined that if there is an afterlife then it seems more likely that we would carry our emotional state. That is, unless we get our proverbial stuff together and find peace in this life, we will carry the burden of our negative emotions with us for all time. I must admit that I’m not basing this on anything rational or logical. It’s merely a hunch. However, if there is an afterlife and it contains everyone who has ever lived then it will be a crowded and confusing place. It will be full of not only good people but all the bad people that ever lived too. If this is true, then I certainly hope there is no afterlife at all. I certainly wouldn’t want to live there. I also question which creatures on this planet have souls. What’s the cutoff point? If we have souls then do chimps? Many people, such as myself, hold dogs in very high regard. Do they have souls? Pigs are as smart as dogs but they are regarded much more widely as food. Can you imagine the cacophony of noise from all the pigs that ever lived and were slaughtered that must fill every corner of the aforementioned afterlife? Do insects have souls? I guess at that point one would have to come up with the criteria to determine which life forms have some sort of eternal essence. I know it seems like I might be over-thinking it but, since the natural world has rules that govern it, then it follows that the supernatural realm has rules too and it’s only fair that it stands up to the same scrutiny. I tend to think that all organisms are purely material and finite in lifespan and that none have a place in eternity. At the end of the day no one living knows for sure. There’s really only one way to find out.

It appears as if I have been thinking three dimensionally. Your view is much more expansive and it’s one I could stand to give closer inspection to. It never occurred to me that these supposed spirits could migrate out into the universe. It’s certainly some interesting food for thought. I agree that there is a hubris among humanity that seems to say that we’re the most intelligent species on the planet and are also the only ones capable of love. That’s awfully presumptuous, isn’t it? There’s so much we don’t understand about dolphins for instance or whales for that matter. They may be every bit as intelligent and capable of love as we are. It’s so true that there is much that we could not comprehend. My thinking three dimensionally is a perfect example to support that argument. Indeed there is a force that binds us. It makes one sound a bit like Yoda when one talks in this way but there is a great wisdom to this kind of thinking and there’s actually a science to the idea that everything has cohesion and stability. It occurred to me the other day that it is very possible that there is a creator being but I am pretty sure that the one spoken of and written of, the one who cares who has sex with whom, the one who cares what we eat or how we pray or even IF we pray doesn’t exist. But the God written of is two dimensional and to try and describe a being like that would be impossible. In short, if an intelligent designer exists, it would be ineffable. Again, that’s just my humble take. As you indicate, it’s important to keep one’s options open.