Whenever I've tried to think about God as all loving or just a God guy/gal I find it rather difficult. The biggest problem with someone being omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent is that it makes it impossible for said being to escape blame for literally everything.
Any wrong doing was allowed by God to happen but not only that, it was more or less programed to happen. If God is the creator of man then he has more or less programed every negative aspect of ourselves into our heads. The inclination towards violence and tribalism? You can thank God for that. The sexual urges of pedophiles and rapists? You can thank God for that. Hatred? The list goes on and on.
The concept of sin is more or less God getting upset with you for things he set you up to do. It's a little ridiculous honestly. This is also part of the reason I was leaning towards pagan, at least with polytheism you don't have to constantly engage in apologetics for God's schizo behavior.
What do you think?
It is unlikely, at least in my own mind, that a reality such as God would choose to intervene into the natural world without clear and specific purpose and the expectation of that purpose being accomplished.
If the purpose of the Incarnation was, as I strongly suspect, to in some profound way resolve the question of evil, that attempt self evidently failed. And as the 'theodicy' question and thus evil remains undented by any religious authority or idea, such divine purpose remains to be completed.
So we are left with only a few uncomfortable possibilities, all anti-thetical to existing religious ideas and tradition.
The first is the atheist option. There is no God. Not my choice but when two thousand years of tradition have failed to deliver on the Promise of the Incarnation, unable to demonstrate the reality of their claims, religion does have a credibility problem. And that brings us to the next option.
The second: The fact that religious tradition exists does not in itself mean God is active in our world. Religion could very well be false due to its all too human theological foundations and this potential is well supported in scripture by over three hundred of references to false teaching.
So the question is has 'religious' reasoning as understood by history and tradition taken us any closer to God or further from that potential? As the Doomsday clock was recently moved closer to midnight and our own self made hell, I must opt for the latter.
"The last option, and while I dislike quoting scripture, in this case I'll make an exception. from Hebews 4:7
The fact remains that someone must enter it, [the Kingdom of God] and since those who first hear the good news failed to enter through unbelief, God fixes another day."
As 'purpose' remains to be completed, that brings me to a theory of a second coming. Will such a presence come to confirm our existing ideas of God or deny them and the validity of tradition? That is to say, what there a difference between a true revelation from God and the theological interpretation of one? For there we have the basis for a judgement.
