Guest post: No need for God to play dumb
Originally a comment by Omar on Milk, eggs, and a hug from the god.
God is held to be omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient: everywhere, all-powerful and all-knowing. If you ask me, that trilogy is actually a bit of a swamp that God has created for himself and suddenly found himself in, and with consequences. If those consequences were unexpected, then we can forgive him: he is only human (or a human creation) after all. But if those consequences were expected, then unfortunately, God only has himself to blame.
God’s omniscience means not only that he knows your thoughts, but being omniscient, he knows them before you know them yourself. That means also, that God knows exactly what any given prayer will contain, before it even forms in the mind of the faithful believer who is about to pray it. So, on the face of it, there is no need for it to be prayed out loud for it to reach the awareness of God. The preacher and the separate members of the congregation only have to think their separate prayers inside their separate heads, and God will not only know in advance what each and every one will contain, he will know before those thinking them know.
The only reason praying needs to be done out loud is because the god it is addressed to is the congregation itself. The group is worshipping itself. (h/t Emile Durkheim.) Believing is the means to belonging. It does not matter what we believe, as long as we all believe it together. 100%; no dissent, exceptions or heresies please.
When God himself set up that Garden of Eden with its talking snake, before Eve had been sweet-talked by the said snake into taking a chomp out of that fateful apple and then passed it across to Adam, God must have known that he was setting them both up for The Fall. No need for God to play dumb, and wander about calling “Adam, where the hell are you? Did you eat the fruit of that tree I told you not to touch?” or some such; while knowing all along what the answer to that question had to be.
All the disputes, murder, mayhem, wars, tyrannies and revolutions of history are down to that one decision by God. Himself; to create that tree and forbid its fruit. But does he take any blame for it all?
Is the Pope a Presbyterian?
I’ve been told that the whole rigmarole of prayer (and life, the universe, and everything else) is for us to demonstrate our capacity for faith not to God, but to ourselves. Neither the saved nor the damned are omniscient or particularly wise and we need to be able to look back and recognize why we’re ending up where we do. Didn’t pray hard enough; didn’t pray for the right things; didn’t pray at all.
God is like a kid playing with living toy soldiers.
And it’s all the more annoying (and circular, and annoying because circular) because “faith” that This One Book is the true story of how God made all the things is a stupid kind of faith to have, because how do they know? How do they know it’s not a collection of writings by humans? They don’t, of course, but they have “faith,” which they shouldn’t, because it’s a ridiculous thing to believe.
I’ve read Genesis. It is a beautiful, poetic, and incisive account of the human condition. It is a narrative, told by a pre-industrial, pre-literate people, on the cusp of the transition from hunter-gather to agriculture. And yet these people–these unschooled, unlettered people–understood and expressed the essential elements of our humanity: our mortality; having a moral sense; the struggle for survival; the conflict between men and women; the things that distinguish us from animals–there’s more, but I don’t have it all in my head.
People since have taken Genesis as a literal creation story and built a religion around it. These people are wrong, of course, but more than that, they are missing the point–they are missing the things that Genesis can tell us about ourselves–and in the process they utterly trivialize the text.
Really? I tried to read the Bible, thinking to myself “I read Lord of the Rings at age 12 or so, and have since read the entire Wheel of Time series*, I can read long things no problem.” But it was so poorly written I didn’t even finish Genesis. I found the entire thing, every line of it, devoid of writing skill. Someone could set out to write the most turgid, purple, and yet entirely bland prose they could muster and fall well short of the supreme awfulness of the Bible.
My mistake of course was in thinking that because the Bible is pure fiction, it would read like a novel. I have rarely been more mistaken in my life.
*as it stood then; the author had an annoying habit of ballooning the series out with ever more loose threads. I don’t think I will ever get round to the last four or so…
Holms, there are some truly beautiful parts of the bible, poetically interesting and beautiful. Ecclesiastes comes to mind. But I agree, a great deal of it is awful, turgid, boring, repetitive, and counter to good writing. For the most part, I prefer to stick with Shakespeare.
Holms #4:
“Good afternoon, sir — if you have a minute, we’d like to talk to you about the Book of Mormon.”
Ha!
As for the bible, it doesn’t make much sense to generalize about the book as a whole, because it’s a collection of a lot of different writings – a grab bag of them in fact – in different languages, which we read in different translations. From what I remember of the bits and pieces of religious scholarship I’ve read, the “gospels” apart from John are very crudely written; the KJV dresses them up out of all recognition.