Is God Dead?

[greybeta]

Sometime in the 1960’s, TIME magazine printed a headline “Is God Dead?” It lost a million subscriptions and it had to officially apologize to all of its readers.

This example is often cited by ministers as proof that America believes in God. A good Christian would say it is the God of Abraham and Isaac.

There are numerous studies showing some sort of biological necessity for God, that humans have some sort of emptiness in them that they feel a pressing need to fill. But what do most humans fill it with? Alcohol? Sex? Drugs? Mostly temporal things, right?

Wouldn’t it make more sense to fill it with something everlasting, something eternal? And yet, we know we attempt to fill our emptiness with ephemeral things. I try to fill it with anime, Magic: The Gathering, video games or blogging. And it’s never really enough.

That’s because I don’t have Jesus in my heart.

Isn’t that the answer my friends in the BSU want me to say?

I don’t have a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ, the one and only son of God. And Son of Man. And Holy Ghost. It’s that divine Trinity thing, the whole three faces as one thing.

What do people tell me when I ask them what a “personal relationship” with Jesus Christ means? Curiously enough, I get a lot of different answers.

And you know, I don’t know what to think. Or maybe I just think that it’s okay to say Jesus was a madman, liar, AND divine.

Then again, they’re asking me.

Right now, I would say I don’t know. I don’t think it’s as blindingly obvious as some people make it.

They want me to say the Bible is God’s Word. Fine, it was divinely inspired, I really can’t argue that. But what makes the Bible so special?

See, I grew up in a dualistic mindset, with both Buddism and the Baptist form of Christianity being compared side-by-side all of my life. But see, someone told me that both use circular logic. All knowledge is based on assumptions, and it is trapped within circles.

Let me explain. If my first assumption is that there is a God, well then everything I know will be in terms of that assumption. I will see patterns in the universe that reflect intelligent design. This is also known as the a priori argument, a teleological argument that our Creator must have designed everything so perfectly that we are where we are now because of it.

On the other hand, if my first assumption is that there is no god, well then everything I know will be in terms of that assumption. I will still see patterns in the universe, but I could explain those away in terms of random chance. We might not want to admit it, but we could be the result of extreme luck.

What C.S. Lewis argues is that you can’t use one circle to determine if the other circle is incorrect. There must be something outside the circles to let us know which one is correct. It’s like the piano sheet music. Do the notes on the paper let us know we are playing it correctly, or is there something outside the sheet music that informs us that we playing the song correctly?

My Christian friends pray fervently that I discover that Jesus Christ is that thing outside the circles that lets me see the absolute Truth. Something about faith, they say.

I accept the challenge. I will go and seek this Truth. Now I may not find it before the end of the semester, before I graduate or maybe not even for sixty years, but I will find it. And yet the pessimist inside me says that I will come to a conclusion that will not be agreeable those praying for my soul.

But I will try my best because they say that people seldom regret failing, but people always regret not trying.

Comments

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

And if I believed the bible is right word-for-word, then I'd believe that ;) But I don't. I believe that the bible is a tool that was used to convey laws that were meant to rule a people a long time go, and stories that were meant to help them to make sense of the world around them. And I think that the laws are outdated (I, for one, would be pissed if my father prostituted me or sold me into slavery) but that some of the stories are helpful.

[thanoslug.livejournal.com]

Your belief or non-belief in the validity of the bible notwithstanding, my point was that Christians believe that man has had available to him a knowledge of and a potential relationship with God since the beginning and so, from their point of view, there is no problem with the idea of a God sized hole since the knowledge of how to fill it has always been available.

As for the laws contained in the bible - there is a reason for the division between the Old and New Testaments or Covenants. The law is a part of the Old Covenant with God.

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

This may be true for die-hard, wholely committed believers, and if I had been addressing a comment to one of them, then I probably would have re-phrased my arguement by quite a lot. (I probably would have pointed out that, regardless of whether that knowledge was -available-, it's clear that the worship of God wasn't widespread or even really done at all in a lot of places, and yet the people still managed to function.) But I was talking to greybeta who himself is admitting a certain crisis of faith which, IMO, has been partially brought about by the "all or nothing" brand of Christianity that seems to surround him.