I wonder how often I worship false gods without realizing it. I love how Susan says, “the false god looked a lot like the real one.” Can you think of a time when you’ve had a similar realization?
If God’s goodness does not guarantee happiness, would you want to be a part of it?
Updating…
Susan Isaacs tells more of her story in her book Angry Conversations with God: A Snarky but Authentic Spiritual Memoir.
Craig,
I find your question hard to wrap my head around. So I’ll answer this question instead: Am I willing to be part of a goodness if being part of that goodness means I’m sad. No.
@Ben – you don’t like sadness? Wow. Does this mean that you do not like to cry? While I don’t mind being happy, I do like to be sad, love being sad…
Martin,
You ask brilliant questions.
Posited: one can be happy and sad at the same time.
I see I must restate my position. I am not willing to be part of a goodness if being part of that goodness means I cannot be happy.
I’m a two time cancer survivor. Years ago (before cancer) I took hold of these two undeniable truths:
1. God is good
2. God loves me
everything else begins at # 3, even cancer.
it has helped me significantly, especially in my darkest days.
like susan, i can envision a good, loving god. but i also have some crazy old testament stories rolling around my head that i tend to keep out of my “envisioned god”. i admit, i think i break that command of no false gods all the time because the god in my head is probably one i created.
i like the happy question, i think i can live without the experience of happiness, depressed folks like me consider this norm! no guarantees, but i guess i makes me happy to at least pursue
God, even if the destination is not happiness.
Karl,
Are you saying the God you create in your head is necessarily false, *because* he’s created in your head? What would a God that *wasn’t* false look like, to you?
What about pursuing God makes you happy?
love this story! this is so common in the evangelical world…I cannot tell you how many people, including myself, who have had various degrees of this distortion of the Creator.
Thanks for capturing her story and her voice…and thank you Susan for the telling of it!
for me, i’d have to say ‘yes’… if we are talking about the ‘God of the bible’… in job 2 it says ‘Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.’
i guess i can accept good and bad from God cuz i see a point in it (even when i don’t see a point in it!)… in the last chapter of job, after all this crap has happened to him and he and God have had a heated exchange, job says to God “I had only heard about you before, but now I have seen you with my own eyes.” and in this present reality this is what works for me… getting to know the heart of God through the good and bad makes sense… are we pawns or are we objects of love? i believe objects of love… but others may read the same thing and believe pawns… i understand that position… but why is happiness the bar we tend to set??? why not contentment??? i believe sustained happiness comes through contentment. but personally i happen to love and embrace all the emotions that i have… it makes life interesting… with devastating results at times and unbridled joy in others… but full and real… i can definitely follow that kind of God. i do not understand his thought process, but i also am not willing to sculpt a God out of my own emotions and make that my reality… others can. but it just doesn’t work for me… that’s my conviction/choice… if i have to take the bible out of play with my beliefs, i still believe i would have to come to the same conclusions… something had to make it all… good and bad, joy and pain… i think without the bible though, it would be very easy for me to hate that kind of god.
Tom,
That is a pretty kewl set of first and second beliefs to hold. Why do you believe them?
Derek,
Why do you believe we are objects of love?
Why would it be easy for you to hate a god who made everything, good and bad, joy and pain, if you didn’t have the Bible?
hey benjamin,
i’ll take the second question first… for no other reason than i just kinda want to… the bible gives me a framework that makes sense to me and shows me a creator that wanted/wants relationship… it tells me i am/we are the objects of his love… not by one specific verse but by the whole narrative… the fact that he gave us the ability to ‘choose’ is one way that he shows me that he loves me… The bible maintains that God is good… that God is love… etc, etc… it says nothing about God being evil… it does say that nothing was created outside of him… so evil had to be an option that God created… but God gave us the gift of choice… it’s my belief that he wanted mankind to freely choose to love him… and in order for “love to mean anything, it had to be done from a truly free heart… or else it would be forced and robotic and what would be the point of that… and obviously we are not robots… now if this was not my frame of reference, I would be inclined to think that whoever created this, was sadistic and uncaring… i’m not saying i wouldn’t find some sort of coping mechanism – religion – actions to appease that deity, but i definitely wouldn’t love him…
i think that hits the first question too…
benjamin, what’s your take on the God of the bible having us as objects of love? i’d love to get your perspective.
thanks
Derek,
I’m really curious as to why you would be inclined to believe god was sadistic and uncaring if you didn’t have the story in the Bible as a frame of reference. Can you examine that a little bit for me? I mean did you formerly not have the Bible as a frame of reference, and back then you believed that way? If that’s the case, why did you believe that way back then?
To answer your question–I have a really hard time wrapping my heard around the phrase “the God of the Bible”. I used to think I understood that phrase. But somewhere along the line I lost whatever understanding I had of it. I guess I mean to say that it seems to me that the Bible presents this astoundingly complex, variable person called by various names but generally referred to by a lot of people now as “God”, and that different people experience this person very differently, just as different people who know me (or you) experience me (or you) very differently, because of their own beliefs and life experience and so on.
I mean to say I think that if you believe that the God of the Bible sees you as an object of love, then you are far more likely to experience him as a person who loves you, whereas if you see the God of the Bible as someone who is variably loving and cruel, then you are far more likely to experience him as a person who is variably loving and cruel. And if you see the God of the Bible as a person who is just inexplicably evil, then you are more likely to experience him as inexplicably evil. It seems to me there are stories in the Bible about people who experienced God in each of these different ways.
Recently I’ve chosen to begin believing that the universe is a place that’s arranged so that things go well for me. I haven’t fully inculcated this belief yet, but I’m getting there. I’ve chosen to believe this because believing it leads to greater happiness for me, and one of my life goals is to be a very happy and accepting person.
The above was my current best attempt to answer your question. Thank you for asking! =)
first of all… i agree with you… our perception of ‘God’ will be the way we can expect to experience him… i also love the example of the way we relate to other people… but my thought there is… some people think i’m an ass, where others think i’m an amazingly loving guy… now, for the sake of the example, let’s say at my core i’m an ass and i want people to know it
, but others may have a different belief because how they viewed their experiences with me… but if they really knew me, they’d know that i’m an ass… their experience still doesn’t change me at my core… it’s just a perception… some people are fine with that perception and don’t really care to know me on a deeper level… but what if they really did want to know me at my core, but every time they tried to get near me and they started seeing glimpses of who i really am, someone else with a steadfast belief in their perceptions of me (or a stake in the system that says i’m awesome), starts telling them that they are projecting their own crap on me, and that i’m really a super great guy that wouldn’t say or do a bad thing to anyone, and thus keeping them from knowing the real me… just some thoughts…
… my perception of God would always be ‘tainted’ by the prevailing thoughts on a deity as i grow up in a certain culture… my ‘religious landscape’ – i think we have had this convo before 
– my frame of reference has always been the Bible, but not how I understand it now… and with that, i was scared of that God, cuz i had no choice but to believe… my friend was not necessarily scared of that God, but inclined to a belief about God, influenced by those around him and coupled with his experience in loneliness and pain… his belief was that ‘a loving God couldn’t equal this reality’… and while he didn’t necessarily have a belief in ‘my God’, he unknowingly was influenced in his belief of who God was from the surrounding religious culture and had great disdain for that God… i hope i answered your questions in a way that made some sort of sense… thanks
Benjamin, you asked ‘Can you examine that a little bit for me? I mean did you formerly not have the Bible as a frame of reference, and back then you believed that way?’… Thank you for asking me to relook at that question… i needed to re-examine that. i just had a conversation last night with a friend that came to a belief in the Bible God later in life… and i believe his reference more fits along the lines of what i think… not really having the framework of the Bible growing up, he believed that the God of the Bible was sadistic and uncaring because of how the church culture around him portrayed God… (ie. stories about destruction, going to hell if you don’t believe, predestination, etc…) and i guess this is where your question was leading or has taken me
Derek,
you’re awesome. thank you for taking time to answer my questions! =).
How did you make the shift from believing that God was scary and sadistic to believing that God is lovingly kind?
It’s really interesting to me that above when you were talking about people’s differing perceptions of us, and you postulated that maybe there is an underlying objective reality that goes beyond their perceptions, you used as an example the possibility that you were an ass as the underlying objective reality. I wonder why you used that possibility as an example rather than the equally viable possibility that the underlying objective reality is that you are accepting, gracious, and present?
(grumbles about software not preserving double line breaks without ridiculous amounts of fiddling on the part of the writer. Software is meant to work for us, not against us. Makes this fascinating conversation inordinately less readable. grumble grumble grumble. sigh =)
hey benjamin,
the ‘accepting, gracious, and present’ way works, but to me it can be just white noise when sharing viewpoints about God… plus, i enjoyed writing it more the other way
the shift in my beliefs came when i REALLY started questioning everything in my late teens… i went from ‘scary God’ to ‘no God’ to ‘i don’t have a clue God’ to ‘loving God’… i’m 35 now, about 5 years into ‘loving God’, but i still hold a little ‘i don’t have a clue God’ close… i can’t really pinpoint exactly when it all happened or what exactly happened… i just know my journey seeking truth has lead me here – to these beliefs – at this moment… but i find it’s more working on my belief of myself, than my belief of God… and i mean that i find the God of love is very hard for me to shake as i continually question my beliefs… there doesn’t seem to be a lot of tweaking of that God in my thought process, but there seems to be considerable amount of tweaking of myself in participating in that belief… a lot of baggage from religious wounding…
I think that there are two different issues in the video:
1. Is the God (smoke) of the OT the same as the God of the NT (Jesus)
Jesus says ‘yes’ (if you have seem me…) but it is not obvious.
2. When God promises to protect us, uh… from what?
AND THIRD
3. Jesus does say that narrow is the way (to what) and FEW there be that find it.