Why does God “allow” bad and disastrous things to happen to us poor defenseless girls and boys? After all, most of us lead lives that do not warrant that level of punishment! How can this good and benevolent God sit there and let these things come down upon us, causing lives to have pain and suffering and sadness and/or to “end prematurely”? The answer may lie in understanding what life is for and, indeed, understanding God. Oh, but wait, we can’t understand God. We don’t know what life, much less our own life, is for. My suggestion is that we must live to grow, learn, experience, and expand our consciousness. We must, as members of the human race, strive to raise Humanity up from the imperfect beings we are to attain a level as close to God as we can get, maybe even Godhood. It may have very little to do with each of us individually, but everything to do with all of us collectively. How long will this take? Well, how big is the Universe? How long is the rest of existence? We don’t even have the perspective to understand how long the Universe has been in existence and that is only 13.7 billion years or so. How can we hope to know how long it will take us to learn? Perhaps we should stop asking questions there are no answers to yet. Certainly we are not ready to understand the answers. If we lift ourselves up, the answers will come.
We don’t raise our children by coddling them their whole lives. (Well, we shouldn’t anyway) We don’t give them everything they ask for. We can’t protect them from everything. We give them tweaks and pokes and suggestions and hope they come out OK. We want them to be the best that they can be by letting them make correct decisions based on our suggestions and guidance. Ultimately it is the strength of their own character that makes them what they become. The human race is no different. We are only children. We are very young children.
The creation of the Universe is a gift to all who can appreciate it. It is an anvil upon which to beat us and a furnace to forge us into the best, most perfect beings we can strive to be and therefore become. If he wanted us to be perfect from the start, if he wanted the Universe to be a safe place, he would have created it that way. Or maybe that’s not even the point. We have no understanding of God. We think we know a few things from the bible, but we don’t know what he is or what he actually wants. Some would argue that we don’t even know if he exists, but whether he does or not, we are still here in the Universe wondering how to proceed. The purpose of any life form is to grow. We must strive to evolve and improve ourselves. We must go forth and multiply. In order to move out into the Universe, which I believe is supposed to be our destiny, we must attain the ability. We have to understand things about morality and science and existence that we don’t yet know. Some things we are in outright denial about. We are slowly getting there. We have only to overcome religion and politics and shortsightedness in order to increase our knowledge.
An artist can carve an image into stone. The artist can make it look almost alive. It can be created beautiful and perfect or perfectly ugly, but it will always be as it was carved. This is called Sculpture. In this case the medium is dead regardless of how alive it looks. When the profound dimension of life is added to the Artist’s medium, what has been created can evolve. It can start out ugly and become beautiful. It can be very unknowledgeable yet gain knowledge. Time is a direction life must expand into. We don’t have to know much about life in order to understand this. The Artist sets a few basic rules and then sets the creation off into the Universe. There may be some expectation, but other than the few rules, and a Universe of potential, it is up to the creation itself to become what it can become.
On TV I heard a sound bite from a girl. She said that at some point she had thought about “Trying every drug before killing herself”. “Try every drug before killing yourself”? That is looking inside and ignoring “the Outside”. The Universe is the Outside. It is very big and demands attention. Spirituality is a means not an end. The idea of taking every drug before killing one’s self is like getting hit in the face with one raindrop and, in ignorance, thinking that’s as good as it gets, when actually there is an entire ocean out there. Don’t settle for a mere raindrop. In the “Ocean” there is more than water. There are fish, whales, plankton and other life. There is sand, coral, plateaus, mountains, valleys and things we cannot even imagine. Expand, in your mind, the meaning of this metaphor of the Universe. Let the AWE fill you and wash over you. See? You didn’t even need any drugs to get the rush! Some drugs may help expand your perspective and might open your mind. Use that as a tool, not as the whole experience. Drugs can also dull you and steal your ability and desire to perceive. Trying to dull the pain by drink or drugs is a symptom of a lack of a greater perspective. If you wallow in your miserable life you’re not looking at what the possibilities really are. What a crime against you, and the Universe, that is! You don’t have to even believe in God to have awareness of the wonder of the Universe. Don’t narrow your focus too much. By all means scrutinize, but then back off again and try to put it into perspective.
And by the way….
If we live by the rule that “if you kill one of mine I’m going to kill one of yours”, all that we are going to get is a lot of killing. It could go on forever. It doesn’t take much of a step back to get the perspective that a different solution is demanded. Whatever the justification we use, there really is no justification for that course. There is a difference between “justice”, “punishment”, and “forgiveness”. They are very closely related to each other but, they are mutually exclusive and should exist completely separate from each other. They should, however, all exist at the same time! Remember that personal retribution is not the same as social justice. Punishment should not be a criminal act. Forgiveness helps end the cycle. Understanding is the only real solution. Communication is the only way to reach understanding. All that’s left to get is willingness. I wonder how we are going to get that. Oh, I guess we’ll have to grow.
