Distracted by meaninglessness, surprised by joy

Is God merely an invention of the human mind to account for death?

This is a fair and common question.

What is the most certain thing that will happen to every living being on this planet and in the known universe?

Is it not death?

What idea is the most uncertain belief held by the greatest number of people in the known universe?

Is it not God?

What is the vehicle to belief in God if it is not faith? And what is faith if it is not a belief that contains no ounce of doubt? Can someone be a person of faith without also embracing the mystery that comes with doubt?

And what does it mean to embrace mystery, if one doesn't also embrace the very questioning process?

Why is it that people who do NOT believe in God go so far out of their way to avoid thinking about this most obvious and certain thing? Why do the skeptics live their lives embracing any distractions that numb their senses to this one universal certainty?

Is it really in our best interests to only embrace certainty, when the most certain thing is death?

Are our distractions inventions of the human mind to avoid God?

Is it not true that the believer is sure about the most certain thing, and the skeptic most doubtful?

Does it not even follow that the believer is most certain about the most important things in life, while the nonbeliever is only certain about the least important?

I close with excerpts of G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy (pages 91-92):

"The sceptic may truly be said to be topsy-turvy; for his feet are dancing upwards in idle ecstacies, while his brain is in the abyss."

"Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small."

"Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man’s ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small."

"We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear."

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian."

Now, what was the question again? :-)

Why Faith?

If there is a God, have you ever asked “Why would He use faith as the channel to relate to Him?” Why wouldn’t he post a huge sign in the Cosmos that was not ignorable? For those of us on the earth, the Sun is a great example.

Imagine that you are extremely rich and famous. What a great dream! Now, imagine that you are searching for true love. How would you ever know if anyone really loved you for who YOU were vs simply loving all that comes along with your wealth and fame?

One way would be for you to hide who you really are.

You might hide your wealth and fame and search for someone who really loved you for who you were, not for what you have.

Christ hid His fame and fortune and came down to earth in a humble manger.

I often see God as someone who appears to be hiding. But He wants us to find Him. He also wants us to love Him for who He is and not because we have no choice.

If God appeared to us as a giant in the sky, we'd be stupid to not at least act like we loved Him.

So He seems to veil Himself in such a way as to give us a fork in the road. That fork gives us two interpretations of life. One is the materialist's worldview that says man is the arbiter of all things. Such a view might even allow for belief in a god, but he/she/it is impersonal (Deism).

The other option is a God that loves us, a God who cares about how we live our lives and wants those lives to be acts of worship.

I'm not here to tell you that one of the two interpretations makes more sense or is more rational than the other.

I'm asking you "Do you want to believe?"

The Blessing of Doubt

Imagine that a very handsome, powerful, rich and well-known king seeks to find a true love life-time romance.

Love is volitional and requires the will.

So how does the king determine whether the lucky lady that he might set his heart upon sincerely loves him for who he is or just accepts his love because of all that he has to offer? Or perhaps she would only love him out of fear that he might punish her if she resisted? Isn't he too powerful to resist?

How does he weed out the true love from the gold-diggers?

He could hide his identity, not making himself as clearly known.

If you were God, and wanted the true love of your creation, would you not hide yourself in such a way as to test whether or not your creation had the WILL to love you?

When it really comes down to it, isn't faith the outward expression of our deepest heart's desires? After all, who has faith that they will get cancer or will get run over by a Mac truck?

If love is volitional and God is all powerful, then isn't faith the only gift that can test whether or not we truly have the will to love him for who He is as?

Does He not hide so as to win our love by volition and not out of fear or bribery?