The One Where Trish Rails on God

I found Katrina and Tyler E's blogs from yesterday quite striking. Katrina wrote about her compulsion to write and speak about God in exclusively positive terms for fear of divine retribution while Tyler E wrote about the all around asshole God seems to be. For the past few days, I've been thinking about how different groups of people, both historical and present day, feel akin to characters in the Bible and have applied biblical stories to their own lives, taking solace and comfort in making such connections. Puritans, for example, saw themselves as modern-day Israelite slaves who were escaping religious persecution via their own exodus to the New World. Slaves in the 18th and 19th centuries in America, hearing biblical stories from the masters, viewed themselves as a reincarnation of the still-oppressed Israelites in Egypt. There are numerous examples one could draw upon to make such a point. Today in class, Michael mentioned The American Religion by Harold Bloom. I had to read The American Religion for Lynda Sexson's Interpretations of American Religion. While incredibly dense, the book's thesis (that religious Americans practice a form of gnosticism, or cult of secret knowledge, concerning salvation via a personal relationship with Christ and God as opposed to traditional notions of Christianity and Judaism) is quite compelling. Bloom focuses on the so-called American home-grown religions: Mormonism, Southern Baptist, Pentecostalism, Seventh-Day Adventist, Christian Science, etc.

As someone who was raised in a Catholic home with many, many Jewish relatives who has since apostatized, the idea of having some sort of personal relationship with Jesus or God is incredibly foreign. I can't speak for other Catholics, fallen or otherwise, but that whole Catholic guilt thing was and is real for me; criticism and questioning were discouraged and, if one did question, one was made to feel bad for even entertaining such a notion. One of my personal heroes, Mother Theresa, was said to have been pained because of her lack of faith: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Theresa#Spiritual_life. So, I get where Katrina is coming from, feeling fear over criticizing God. God is someone to be revered and, yes, a little feared. He is the Creator and he did a lot of terrifying things in the Old Testament. It's pretty damn hard to reconcile that with the benevolent, merciful God of the New Testament, even considering all the theological nuances expressed by the boy who looks like Gerard Butler who's name I can't remember right now. Yes, Jesus represents a renewal of the covenant between God and His people. However, that BAMF in the Old Testament still seems to loom large in people's minds, especially mine. Thus, I never felt the need to have this special one on one thing with Jesus or God or whomever when I still did believe.

On the other hand, one of the passages in Plotz that got me thinking was that concerning a Jew's relationship, or lack thereof. Jews just have that Old Testament God, the God who cast Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden, who brought the Great Flood, who destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah (among other places), who enslaved them in Egypt then made them wander the desert for forty years, who exiled them to Babylon, who enabled enemies to destroy the Temples, who stood by and let discrimination, abuse, pogroms, and the Holocaust happen. The question of theodicy is an important one and one that I doubt I'll ever be able to answer satisfactorily. People look for answers and comfort in the Bible and in The Book of Job, specifically. The Book of Job attempts to tackle the problem of evil if we have an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent God. God orders Satan to kill Job's family and inflict him with horrible diseases, like boils all over his body (God does seem to be fond of that one, doesn't He?). Still, after all of that, Job praises God's holy name. The lesson of the story, in the end, is that Job's experiences are not on par with what God experiences because God is beyond anything that human words can describe and He shouldn't be questioned. What a fucking cop out. Scholars call that line of thought apophatic reasoning. I call it bullshit. Human curiosity can't and shouldn't be tamed; it's a trait that should be encouraged. Telling someone that God or whatever other variable you choose to insert can't be described by humans because it's so beyond our conception is a euphemism for "I don't know and I can't be bothered to figure something out on my own, " or, as I tend to believe, "God doesn't actually exist but I'm going to give you this bullshit line so you don't question me or anyone else any more about it."

Theodicy, I don't feel, can be addressed with the entirety it deserves in a blog entry, but I thought it'd be a good idea to touch on it. Anyhoo, as a relative of Holocaust survivors, I find that no amount of passages in the Bible or comforting  Jesusy messages about compassion will ever help me reconcile the amount of suffering in this world with a so-called benevolent God. I'm not troubled when I criticize God or the theology or dogma surrounding Him. I don't think he's going to smite me for saying that He's probably the biggest jerk in all of literary history (except for maybe Voldemort). I don't think He's going to come to my tent to discuss warfare strategy against people who happen to enjoy anal and rough (pre- and extramarital) sex from time to time.