Good Reasons

Remember when I said I wasn't going to post vents about religion anymore? Er, yes. Well. Here is the thing: it turns out I still want to.

BUT! I wonder if this will help at all:

1. A lot of my religion issues are also FAMILY issues, and you know how those always get pretty tangled and complicated. My dad was a minister, my mom was a Christian school teacher, so....I mean, you know how there are things that if anyone else says/does them it's fine, but if your parents or in-laws do it it's So Annoying or whatevs? Religious Issues can be like that for me: all tangled up with Childhood Issues and Parent Issues. A lot of times it's not as much about religion as it seems to be.

2. So I don't MEAN to be attacking religion in a nasty, slingy way.

3. And I don't WANT to hurt you.

4. I am aware that, nevertheless, attackiness comes across from vents. I certainly don't like to read vents about things that are important to ME, and also it makes me feel like maybe the venter likes me less because it IS important to me.

5. But I adore YOU, and if YOU are religious I'm not intending to be all nose-to-nose with you, poking you in the collarbone with my forefinger in a "Whatcha gonna do about it, huh?" way.

6. It's more that I have Religious Issues. And that this is actually a pretty good place to work through them, if it's possible to work through them. And so I'm going to now and then.

7. But I'm really hoping not to hit anyone with Vent Shrapnel. And if I do, I have a tweezers and a box of bandaids ready.


Okay. On to it.

My family has belonged to a lot of denominations. All of the denominations I'm familiar with believe that we are supposed to pray to God to ask him for what we want, and that sometimes he says yes and sometimes he says no. This is pretty soft for God, isn't it? If we get what we want, he gets credit, but he never has to take blame.

Well, I do get that, though. I've had things that I wanted, and I didn't get them, and then later I was REALLY GLAD I didn't get them. Boys I wanted to date. Jobs I wanted. Classes I wanted to get into. Personality traits I wanted. All things that I would have fervently prayed for, and then had to conclude that God had answered "No," and then later would have thought, "Oh! It was for my own good!" This all makes sense to me, even though it's a little annoying when I hear my parents giving God the credit for their own hard work and and good ideas.

I've also never struggled with the common problem of "How could God let airplanes crash?" or "How could God let a mother die of cancer?" or "How could God let that tree fall on that house?" All of those things make sense to me: we live in a habitat, and sometimes our interactions with our habitat are damaging or fatal. Some of it is our fault and some of it is not, but it makes sense to me that God would not be going around putting out fires, putting cars back over the yellow line, catching falling trees, catching airplanes.

Besides, the "How could he?" category mostly falls nicely into the yes/no answers thing. Maybe God keeps airplanes from crashing A LOT, but of course we wouldn't know that he'd done so. Maybe he OFTEN cures illness, and we wouldn't know if it was God or the medical treatment. Maybe he OFTEN makes a tree fall a different direction.

And maybe when he chooses not to stop the plane from crashing or the tree from falling, he has a really good reason that is just not immediately apparent, like when I didn't get a job I really, really wanted, and then a year later the person who was hired instead of me got into enormous trouble because of systems set up by the previous employee. Whew! Lucky! Or when someone's house is destroyed by a tree while they're all at the store---maybe there was fatal mold in the house, or maybe the roof would have collapsed in the night the next day, or maybe it would have burned down the next week. So this all makes sense to me, too.

Here's the sticking point to me: that we're supposed to accept that God might say yes to getting us a date, getting us a job, keeping our plane from crashing, helping us avoid an accident, preventing us from being killed in a fire, helping us find our car keys---but that he would choose not to step in when a baby or child is being molested or abused. Or when a baby or child is kidnapped and violated and tortured and killed, and the parents never know what happened. I can't see any justification at all for saying "No" to a baby or child who is screaming or silent in terror and pain, while saying "Yes" to the lady praying that her cat will come home safely.

All the denominations I've been involved with agree that this sucks. It's not like anyone's saying this is a GOOD thing that God allows babies and children to be molested and tortured and beaten and burned. But when I was a Christian, the answer I was taught to give people who wondered this sort of thing was that it was an issue of free will (evidently God is unable to make distinctions between "utter freedom" and "freedom to do what doesn't affect others' free will"), or that it wasn't possible for us humans to understand the mind of God. That we needed to have faith that even when we didn't understand his ways, God was still right and good, and we could cling to that knowledge even in the storms of doubt.

I choose not to. Even if my faith were suddenly restored and religion made sense to me again rather than seeming exactly like believing in Santa Claus, I would CHOOSE NOT TO follow a leader who can IN ANY WAY justify that decision. Maybe I'm wrong not to trust that he has good reasons. I don't really care. I wouldn't accept Secret Reasons For Horror from anyone who was asking to direct my life and guide me down a path. I wouldn't follow or trust that kind of leader, even if he seemed good in many other ways, even if he told me I could believe him that he had good reasons for everything.