But maybe the big question is what is God's goal. God's goal seems to be relationship. That's why He gets jealous after all. The whole bible is about relationship, creator with creation. If we define God as all loving, at the top of the list then our understanding of love makes God look bad. But if the first definition we have for God is relationship then maybe He's not such a bad God. We screw up Eden every day by trying to be God. Good old free will. Pain is a reasonable part of us. Pain keeps us safe. I have no problem with pain. We have so polluted and corrupted this garden no telling what we will face tomorrow. The pain of cancer and other diseases needs to make us stop and look at what we've done to bring it on ourselves. The pain of a loved one killed in a car accident should make us stop and reconsider the value of driving cars but alas we want to be gods and we seem to think the way to do that is with power and knowledge.

I don't know if these thought processes are hanging together well, I really don't have time to spend on being more detailed; I have hungry children that I need to go feed.

Robin

***

Rebecca Thompson writes, Re. GOOD AND EVIL COFFEE:

As to Don's:

"God himself testifies to his weakness by 'I am a jealous God.'"

No, no, no. God is not testifying to a weakness. God and God alone has every right to be jealous, i.e. wanting what should be rightfully His. With God and only God, jealousy is not a weakness, with man jealousy is indeed a weakness.

The statement furthermore attests to man's free will to choose, meaning man can choose to take or act in such a way that is or is not God's intention.

For example, if I were a slave or if my family or others treated me like a piece of property, then I would find great comfort in knowing God says, "I am a jealous God"; because I would know in my heart no matter what man says or does to me, I belong to God and Him alone.

...and I have taken great comfort in that very phrase... many many times.

***

Sam Swank writes, Re. Gibson's "Passion" the gift that keeps on giving:

Tom,

Speaking of suffering...

The latest issue of Vanity Fair has an article by Christopher HItchens on Mel Gibson and the Passion of Christ movie. You should check it out, I'll lend it to you if you like, just give me a couple of days to peruse the other articles and drool at the models.

You ever read any of Hitchens' stuff? He doesn't screw around.

Much Love

Sam

...

Sam -

Pretty hard not to think of Christopher Hitchins as the guy who dissed Mother Theresa at book length - and so got appointed Devil's Advocate by the Vatican for her sainthood hearings (canonization process, whatever).

I read enough of Hitchins' Prepared for the Worst to write an adulatory review of it for the Texas Observer. Since he dealt with his discovery that he was, thanks to his mother's ancestry, a Jew, I gave the book to poet Jack Myers with a copy of the review & a query somewhat as follows: "I didn't cover the title chapter (re. Hitchins' discovery) because I felt I had nothing intelligent to say on the matter. I thought his response was over-done but it wasn't my job to say so. Perhaps you will have an opinion, and will get back to me with it." He never did.

Since the book appeared soon after on a display stand at Half-Price Books' check-out desk, I suspected Jack had simply said, "I don't have time for this" and got his dime from Half-Price. Since I'd said in the review that it was the sort of book one would read & keep, not sell to the used-book store, I felt a bit chagrined.

Water under the bridge.

Tom

***

Good morning Tom:

I wasn't going to reply to your e-mail Re: Good & Evil, but after much reflection I have decided to add my 2 cents. For what it's worth, I am a new born again Christian, having only recently come to the Lord. You would not know me if you saw me today. I am at peace with myself and the world.

Well, here goes.

I've known you and Don since grade school and I cherish those memories. I still have the picture of You, Larry and Jimmy Bell and Me by the bay. It's incredible how young we look. If the following offends you or Don in any way, I apologize in advance.

But, Tom, I have never read such drivel in my entire life. It appears to be written by people at a much higher intellectual level than I would claim for myself - but the conclusions are those of a lunatic. I cannot believe that the writers comprehend the nature of God or know Him on a personal level.

God is omnipotent and omnipresent, He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. We are the ones that change our opinion of Him, whenever there is a situation we can't handle. We blame Him for our troubles and praise Him when things go well.

God is the Creator and He created Both good and evil. We can't attribute one to him without the other. Once we realize that He is in total control, it becomes easier to cope with life. I tried to fight him on this issue and lost. So I finally surrendered on October 3, 1995.

Believe me, I have been on both sides of the fence. In my 25 years as a trail lawyer, I have defended and prosecuted a lot of scumbags. Why did I do it? Because everyone deserves to have a fair trial. Like Judge Roy Bean said: "Give the man a fair trail, then we'll hang him".

God however, does not operate in the same manner, He judges us fairly and justly. Remember, He died for our sins, so we don't have to pay the price. There is only one caveat, If you don't accept him as your Savior, you will be condemned to eternal hell. I choose to accept Him, because I've been to hell and didn't like it. I call it "Life Before Jesus."

My Life Before Jesus was like that jungle Don talks about. It was pure chaos. I went from one relationship to another, not caring what others thought about me nor considering their feelings. If it felt good, I did it. In restrospect, this was not good and I probably burned a lot of people. Like a wave over the ocean carries a lot of water. My wave left a lot of bodies in it's path.

But now I have Life After Jesus. My wife, Rita and I work together. We have two beautiful sons, Jose aged 16 and Chris aged 14. And it's now time for us to drop them of at school and go to our office in downtown, Tucson. So, hasta la vista, my friend.

I hope that those who read this will choose to follow Jesus and know Him as I do.

Jose Zurita, Esq.
***

VILE COFFEE

God is the Creator and He created Both good and evil. (Jose Zurita)

Really? God created evil? Does an all good all loving God create evil? WOW that's a new thought. If Jesus is our clearest revelation of God then I would have to say that God doesn't create evil. Never once did Jesus do an evil act, or create an evil moment. Evil was done against Him by people.

I thought it was free will. The free will of Satan that unleashed the havoc? If you believe in Satan. If not then it's all on us, the free will of man.

Does God allow evil? But then that insinuates that God just steps back and watches, kinda a hands off God. The God that was popular in the industrial age. The God that made it all then walked away. Humm that's contrary to the very hands-on God seen in the incarnation.

Seems to me that we create the evil and God is up to His elbows in the muck trying to bring us into the kingdom.

But then what do I know. What do any of us really know about God? My favorite metaphor is out of the book The Divine Fox

We are like oysters trying to comprehend a ballerina.

First of all we don't even have legs.....or eyes......and are underwater buried in the sand.

You are a brave man Dad to open this can of worms <BG> I tip my hat to you.

Hugs,

Robin

...

Robin -

Okay <BG> = Big Grin. And I take it "this can of worms" = The Problem of Evil. As Sam says of Gibson's Passion, it's a "gift that keeps on giving."

God as the immediate and direct author of evil equally with good is more than a little problematic. When I read that quote to Father Ed, he said, "That's dualism, that's not Christain." I offered Jose a safer phrasing - "Let us say that God, as creator of all, is ultimately responsible for evil." But he insisted on his original formulation. So I'll give it the best defense I can.

Fitzgerald's Omar Kayyam addresses God, "who with Eden didst devise the snake," and says God must "man's forgiveness give - and take!" (i.e., man's ability to forgive God is God-given). But that's a Sufi mystic in a 19th.-Century English translation.

The back-story on the snake is a questionable extrapolation from Isaiah 14: 12-15 (who may have actually been talking about the arrogance of the King of Babylon and his consequent fate). As Milton's Paradise Lost tells it, Satan was an Archangel who counted equality with God a thing to be grasped and was cast from from Heaven into a pit created for him by God on the way down. He took a full third of the angelic host with him (extrapolated from the dragon who dragged a third of the stars from the sky in Rev. 12). There was a war in Heaven, angels were chucking mountains at each other, etc. - All that is John Milton, not scripture.

The scriptural God is no ever-merciful Nice Guy. He causes his captive people in Egypt ungodly problems by hardening Pharoah's heart - then brags about it. Had to show Pharoah who's boss, y'know. The free will of his people, presumably to follow the God's own directive and leave town, had nothing to do with it. The God of the prophets declares himself thoroughly & unrepentantly the author of Israels suffering - He's punishing them for unfaithfulness. He allows Satan to give his best representative, Job, ungodly hell, then bellows at him out of the whirlwind, "Who are you to question ME ?- why I hung the moon!" - at blowhard length. Maybe, as Robert Frost's take on Job, A Masque of Reason, suggests, God was trying to cover up for giving in to Satan's temptation.

Then there's Sweet Jesus - who presents the King of the Universe as an unjust judge who won't answer a widow's plea for help untill she bangs on his door half the night, and, again, as a hard-ass investor who will fire you into hell if you give simply return his money with no vigorish. As a prophetc act, Jesus withers a fig tree because it hasn't borne fruit (in early spring), and says that as a result of the Jews' treatment of him, Jerusalem will be destroyed - as it was, by the Romans, in 72 AD. Jesus also has us ask His Father, "Lead us not into temptation," knowing, I would assume, that the Eternal Bastard is quite capable of doing so. Who needs a snake when you've got God?

"Ballerina" my butt!

Happy Valentine's Day,

Tom

***

From: Ginnie Bivona

***

From: ROBIN GLYNN, Re: VILE COFFEE

"'Ballerina' my butt!" (Tom McClellan)

LOL Good try! I am still convinced God is the good guy. You can pick and pull a few examples here and there but in context God's goodness remains clear to me.

Happy Valentine's to you too!
xoxoxoxoxox
R

Robin -

See if you can sell God-as-Good-Guy to Lot's wife, who - surely a woman can understand this - looked back one last time to the place she'd once called home. Oops, sorry, nothing there but a block of salt!

When it comes to slandering the Almighty, no one does it better than whoever wrote the Bible. Except maybe Mark Twain.

***

Bonnie Swank writes RE: Theodicy: The Issue That Could Not Die

Dear Dad,

All of you Christians will make a Hindu of me yet! I find a satisfactory answer in thinking that there is evil in the world because witout it we would be living in paradise - in paradise, every need is met, everything is perfect, so who needs a god there? For that matter who even needs the company of other humans?

I hear yah! After four years of college level theology I know that really I know very little............

Write on, Robin.

Robin Glynn writes, Re. OVERNIGHT JAVA

In a message dated 02/15/2004 3:04:48 AM Central Standard Time, trcbmc@verizon.net writes:

Sam Swank writes, Re. God is in the Details.

Hi Tom,

I don't quite know what to think of all this religious talk. All I do is think of cliche's that I've heard over the years: "men plan, God laughs", "I looked for God everywhere, and when I finally found him, that's where he was, everywhere", "if God didn't want us to kill animals, he shouldn't have made them out of meat".........wait, that was Ted Nugent, but you get the idea, I'm not much of a theological thinker.

For me, the problem comes with organized religion. Now, I emphasize the "for me" in that sentence. I'm more of a Christian than anything else, although there are aspects of Buddhism and Judaism that I find attractive, not the least of which is if I don't believe their specific way, they don't tell me that I'll spend eternity pressing license plates in Hell.

So who's right? Here's my answer......I don't care!

He had a massive stroke in 1992, and met exactly that fate for the last seven years of his life, unable to read, draw, walk, talk coherently, take basic care of himself, or do anything that gave him pleasure (except eat ice cream and drive my mother nuts).

Now, I know I'm a heathen myself, but I expected better from God for my dad. So I decided, somewhat selfishly in retrospect, that He wasn't all He was cracked up to be, if He existed at all. I tried on this "passive atheism" for awhile and found it akin to deciding I was, say, homosexual. Problem was, in much the same way that I have
no sexual attraction to men, that my basic belief system was informed by a fundamental existence of God, and there wasn't much I could do about it.

Sam,

I'll just quote Jose Cruz's response to your above essay:

Hay mucho respecto, 'migo!

Tom

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