Questions About God

Here's the joke, with Donald Pennington's comments:

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8383979/some_question_on_a_few_of_the_myths.html?cat=9

And here, because Associated Content won't post them, are some answers to a few of the questions he raises. (This is one of the posts that's addressed primarily to non-Christian readers. I reserve the right to address other posts primarily to Christian readers, and/or Jewish readers, and/or Buddhist readers, and/or Muslim readers if any objective evidence that I have any online Muslim readers ever turns up.)

1. Is it okay to assault people who don't believe in your notion of God? Only if they've specifically asked for it, as the character in this joke has.

2. Do religious people REALLY believe that God takes sides in religious wars? It's possible. People quarrel over some very inane things. In California, in the 1990s, there was a literary "war" between two successful writers, Alice Walker and Ishmael Reed. It's possible to enjoy both writers' books (I do), and as long as the "war" consisted of criticism of each other's fiction, it was possible to enjoy the "war." Then, to the dismay of both writers, a few fans actually became violent, claiming that some of Reed's less than admirable women characters, and some of Walker's less than heroic men characters, were demeaning to all African-Americans of the gender in question. Attacks on Walker reached the point where she found it necessary to leave California. What do you do when you want people to appreciate your work and absorb your ideas, and instead they go out and throw rocks at other people? Is it ever possible that one side is misunderstanding you more grievously than the other side? I could seriously believe that God feels more misrepresented by one side than by the other in some wars, and then there are other wars in which God just "repents having made mankind" and allows us to do our worst.

3. Is the word "God" a title that literally means "Mighty One"? This is a question of linguistic study more than personal belief; I'm delighted to oblige. All languages with which I'm acquainted have some word that literally means, well, "God," as in "a cosmic principle usually identified with goodness, life, light, and other concepts depending on the religious beliefs of those who speak the language." The English word "God" is clearly most closely related to the word "good." In Latin-derived languages, Deus and related words are thought to be related to words for "sky" and "heaven." In Hebrew and Arabic, Elohe and Allah are obviously related to words for "high," which reflect most of the same connotations "high" has in English (not, so far as I know, the connotations associated with the drug scene). In India Brahm is sometimes associated with words for "self" and "being," although there's an "alternative" etymology that links it with words for "father" and "mother." Offhand I'm not sure in which languages the word for "God" is etymologically linked to the word for "mighty," but my guess would be that there is one, or, more likely, are several.

And the point of all this is...? I'm not sure. I've seen plenty of evidence for the argument, oft repeated in Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking, that "There is no eye on the sparrow," no cosmic principle that cares in any way whether we love It, hate It, or ignore It, or whether we practice good will or do good work or anything else. I've definitely not seen, in the last few years and especially the last year before this post was written, the feeblest flicker of a suggestion that God cares whether I, Priscilla King, keep my faith or lose it.

I could be asking the author of the joke Donald quoted why, if the student felt entitled to act on God's behalf, the student hasn't been around my neighborhood delivering the natural reward of fair payment for the work I've done. I am not interested in handouts. I am interested in payments that I can document that I've earned. I am not talking about anything even supernatural here. I am talking about the idea that, if people believe either in God or in human decency, there really ought to be a movement to end the ongoing cheating, mistreatment, bad luck, and lack of appreciation of the writer known as Priscilla King.

On the other hand, most religions agree that God has chosen to act in this world, at least 99.99% of the time, through God's creatures. The fact that people don't act out the best ideals of their religious beliefs has nothing to do with whether their beliefs are true, or for that matter sincere. What it proves is that human beings are at best emotional, and generally lazy, shortsighted, cowardly, and stupid. So the idea of God having chosen to act through human beings certainly raises the question of why God would choose to lean on such a bunch of brittle reeds, but it can't be said to disprove the existence of God.

I still recommend that those of us who find ourselves outside any of the traditional religious folds try to remain agnostics, rather than atheists. Is it really all that hard to admit that, if God has chosen to act through human beings, the existence of God can't be objectively proved or disproved, and thus if we choose to define "knowing" in empirical scientific terms we can't know anything about God?

Is it really painful to admit that, given that we can disprove only a few obvious errors about God and not the theoretical fact of God's existence, we should accept and respect other people's belief in God?