"Anonymous said...
My father died of cancer when I was 13. On my 14th birthday, he was buried.
He was a wonderful man. He was a Christian man that lived what he believed in a manner that I have not seen of many people calling themselves Christians. He died in a cruel, painful manner that no one deserves. This was a real eye opener for teenager.
When I started asking questions of the religious leaders he respected and that I was raised to respect from birth, I got the standard line. God works in mysterious ways. My personal favorite was that we as humans were simply unable to understand god's grand plan for us and that we must keep faith with him as he knew best. I tried to follow this advice and found I had two paths before me and I had to decide which to take.
The first path was to accept god's mysterious plan and my ignorance of my own well being and carry on, avoiding logical thinking. The second path was to ask the hard questions and based on the answers to those, make a rational and informed choice to accept or reject the faith I was raised in.
I asked the questions and I did the thinking. It was not something that happened overnight and was a 10 year process. At the end of my journey this is what I was comfortable in believing.
There is no such thing as god or heaven or hell. If these things existed, would I really want to think highly of an entity that had the power to prevent so much pain and suffering and did not use it? My father and others I loved had died and that was it. Their lives were over and we all would not meet again in paradise no matter how good I was or how deeply devout I became. There was no hell and sometimes people do not get what they deserve. There is very little justice in our world. Good people get sick and die when the world would have been better off for having them in it a little longer. Some bad people live to be 90. People get sick and they die and that is not by the will of a higher power, it is due to the imperfections of the physical body that can not heal itself from all illness.
He was a wonderful man. He was a Christian man that lived what he believed in a manner that I have not seen of many people calling themselves Christians. He died in a cruel, painful manner that no one deserves. This was a real eye opener for teenager.
When I started asking questions of the religious leaders he respected and that I was raised to respect from birth, I got the standard line. God works in mysterious ways. My personal favorite was that we as humans were simply unable to understand god's grand plan for us and that we must keep faith with him as he knew best. I tried to follow this advice and found I had two paths before me and I had to decide which to take.
The first path was to accept god's mysterious plan and my ignorance of my own well being and carry on, avoiding logical thinking. The second path was to ask the hard questions and based on the answers to those, make a rational and informed choice to accept or reject the faith I was raised in.
I asked the questions and I did the thinking. It was not something that happened overnight and was a 10 year process. At the end of my journey this is what I was comfortable in believing.
There is no such thing as god or heaven or hell. If these things existed, would I really want to think highly of an entity that had the power to prevent so much pain and suffering and did not use it? My father and others I loved had died and that was it. Their lives were over and we all would not meet again in paradise no matter how good I was or how deeply devout I became. There was no hell and sometimes people do not get what they deserve. There is very little justice in our world. Good people get sick and die when the world would have been better off for having them in it a little longer. Some bad people live to be 90. People get sick and they die and that is not by the will of a higher power, it is due to the imperfections of the physical body that can not heal itself from all illness.
http://aftersomethought.blogspot.com"
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