I would love to believe in the God that other people believe in. As Tom Jones sings in his song to his child ‘Counting on You’ saying, “So may there be millions who feel like you do, oh my love.” It would just be easier to have a big group of people around you who continuously affirm and confirm your views. I think that it is harder to constantly have people challenge your view, but perhaps by the end of it all your own faith is stronger. I am not sure. What I am sure about is that I have most often, by fate or by choice ‘taken the road less travelled.’ As to whether it has ‘made all the difference’, I think the jury is still out. Still there are times I look at that other road, the one that everyone takes and wish that I was walking with everyone else. So this is my God less travelled.
I struggle with people feeling they have the right to tell others how to live their lives. No one knows the background of the other. What right have I got to tell someone else how they should live their lives. Now I am happy with laws and athough I break than my fair share of speeding laws, I think that laws as a whole help society work more seamlessly. But if someone chooses to break the law, then they suffer society’s consequences. But I can still understand why that law and any law really was broken and I can feel compassion for both the victim and the criminal.
There are a few things that I refuse to believe. I refuse to believe that God loves some people more than others (which I will address in another ranting post) and I also refuse to believe that God is cruel. If I have a God, it is a loving forgiving one. I mean that truly. I don’t think that you can apply the reasoning of free will and the reasoning that ‘God knows what you are going to do before you do it’. How is that free will? If God knew that I was going to choose and fail or choose incorrectly, then it is just cruel to continue the scenario. A loving God could not be so cruel. Seriously, if you knew that your child was going to choose the wrong path, would you close your eyes and let them take the path that will ruin them?
I feel that I don’t know enough to judge, well, ever. Do I know what is in that person’s past? Do I know what tools they bought with them to the table? Just because they look like they are coping, are they? I can only believe that if there is a God then that God does in fact know, not just what they bring to the table but also Why they have chosen such a path. I think that Thomas Mores’ Utopia should be required reading along with bible studies. Thomas More, or more correctly Saint Thomas More was a man who wrote controversially in Henry VIII’s time. Now that takes a brave man, sainted for taking the Catholic Church’s side against the formation of the Church of England, an act for which he also (fairly typically for HenryVIII), lost his head. But if you read into it, it wasn’t the Church of England he had a problem with; it was the acceptance of the king as Supreme Head of the Church of England.
In Utopia, Thomas More says:
“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.”
Is that not what we are saying God does? That he makes sinners and then punishes us for that. I refuse to believe that God would be so cruel. That he creates someone homosexual, but then punishes them for that. Can you really believe that God would hate his creations as much as you fear them? That he has someone born in the Ghettos and then punishes them for swearing. Can you really believe that God would punish his creations when, by virtue of their birthplace alone, they have not learned any other language? That he has someone born beautiful, but disrespected, so that she chooses to use sex as a way out. Would he really punish her for that, even when she has never been taught self respect and knows no other option? That he would have a child born in a place where life is worth nothing and then punish him for taking a life, that to him was worthless?
When did we get given the right to say that this person deserves compassion but not that one? I think the beginning of grace is the ability to forgive people their choices. The beginning is being able to see that there may be another side to the story, a belief that just because your life is completely blessed, that perhaps there are others out there who were not blessed enough to want to or be able to ‘walk the one more travelled”. Compassion is about knowing that though the path may be clear for you, that for another through no fault of their own the path may be hidden in vines and quicksand. God could not be cruel enough to hide the path, booby trap it and then punish them for not finding the path. I can only hope that your God is not as cruel and judgmental as his representatives on earth are.
