God Be Praised?
A note to regular readers/commenters: If lately I seem slower than usual visiting your blogs/replying to comments, I am – my condition’s progressive and it’s cutting into my time online. I appreciate your patience and the fact that you keep on reading/commenting.
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We find that we exist; we don’t choose existence.
This is to say that we are not the primary source of either the good or the evil that comes from us.
Therefore: No one is blameworthy – or praiseworthy?
Therefore: All praise – and blame – belongs to God?
Therefore: Praise and blame are problematic concepts?
___________
We find that we exist; we don’t choose existence.
This is to say that we are not the primary source of either the good or the evil that comes from us.
Therefore: No one is blameworthy – or praiseworthy?
Therefore: All praise – and blame – belongs to God?
Therefore: Praise and blame are problematic concepts?
Posted by Paul at 12:14 AM Permalink
53 Comments:
Let's say we are not responsible for what we do but god is.
I also believe that god is present in each and everyone of us.
It's the god inside us who is responsible.
The god inside us is us.It is shaped by us,commanded by us.
So it's we who is responsible.
If you stick to "good" meaning beneficial to your own interests, those of your tribe, perhaps even of mankind or the Earth, and "evil" as the opposite, then you are able to praise or blame particular actions. This is how you would train your dog, in fact. "Good dog" gets a pat or a treat, "bad dog" gets a mark of displeasure.
I suppose it isn't hard to generate problematic concepts: "Daddy, is a zebra a black horse with white stripes, or a white horse with black stripes? Why did God make a zebra anyhow?"
Of course, you could start from the reincarnation perspective, and believe that we chose our trials and temptations for the lessons they offer. That is the direction I found most tolerable/reasonable for most of my life. Too difficult for me to praise a pre-determining, pre-judging god. I can't tie myself into that particular knot.
However - remembering always that moral will is a muscle that needs exercising - and it's neglect sends us on a downward spiral - helps for some part of the journey. Doesn't do a lick of good when I think of accident victims, medical suffering.
Everyone has impulses and desires for short-term gratification; some are better at denying/delaying them than others, regardless of whether it can be established that they ever chose to have this relatively great ability; whether it’s strictly predetermined by genes/environment; or whether it’s something in between.
To me, the idea of being the authors of our destiny sounds contradictory in the sense that destiny sounds like something bound to happen one way or another, i.e., predetermined - and not "written"/chosen as we proceed through life...
Praise and blame as “only the representation of the inner self” – do you mean completely subjective evaluations? If so, how would you account for the fact that many actions are widely condemned – say rape and murder – while many others are widely praised, say, being generous with one’s time or money?
DESPARADO: Why do we have the two concepts then – “God,” on the one hand, and “people” on the other?
VINCENT: It’s easy to find particular examples for this generalization. In what follows, good and evil would mean helpful or harmful to large numbers of human beings:
Neither Adolf Hitler nor Martin Luther King Jr. chose to come into existence.
This is to say that neither was the primary source of the respective evil and good that came from them.
Therefore: Neither is blameworthy or praiseworthy?
Therefore: All praise and blame for their actions belongs to God?
Therefore: Praise and blame are problematic concepts?
HAYDEN: On reincarnation: Would any of the finite human beings that one is or was be viewed as having chosen to set the wheel in motion – to initiate the world of karmic law? If not, then we still face the issue of praising or blaming beings that didn’t choose existence.
Wouldn’t a truly and strictly pre-determining God necessarily be non-judgmental of creation?
That's a good question.Let me try to answer.
Man in the course of his immature and irrelevant pursuits averts from the fact that he has god within himself.He develops a sense of individuality(ego) and fails to sense this simple truth.
Hence is required the journey to discover the God.On this journey which only a fortunate few set upon,he questions,criticizes,hates and finally finds the god.In the end he finds it within himself.
("A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it."--George Moore.)
I feel that it is this concept of differentiating him and us is the source of our confusion.With differentiation we are in a confrontation with another entity with whom we have great expectations;we expect that entity to love us,be kind to us,judge us and keep us happy.If something goes wrong we always have the "luxury" of blaming that onto this entity since we consider him to be separate from us.It's always easy to blame the other party even though the other party is god.
On the other hand if we consider him to be part of ourselves ,then the whole equation changes.We have no one to blame because we just aren't too good at hitting ourselves.We love ourselves too much and are far too selfish to do that.
Or with self-blame comes introspection which leads us into becoming better version of our former selves and this is what we should aim to achieve.
No one would even bother to say Hitler was blameworthy. It's not in doubt that he was. You say that since he didn't ask to be born, he wasn't the primary source of the evil that came from him. Packaged up in this statement is the assumption that evil is a real thing that has a traceable source. This assumption does have a traceable source, however: Christian conditioning. Without that, evil shrinks into an action and an effect: that is, the causing of harm.
In a world where benefaction and harm can be deduced from what people do, the concept of good and evil has arisen. Harm can also occur from earthquakes, but it is not normal use of English to call them evil.
What I really try to put across, Paul, is that words are just tools for the purpose of communication and not every word has a real thing corresponding with it. We use the words God, devil, good, evil and it doesn't mean that there really is something corresponding to those words: only ideas---metaphors if you like. So your questions in this post don't in my view have much meaning.
I think that just because we don't cause our existence doesn't mean we don't have the power to freely choose praiseworthy or blameworthy acts. Maybe it's like being in a card game. You are dealt certain cards, but what you do with them is up to you.
as for the destiny..i feel we are a representation of one into many...we are all the same..yet with variations...now imagine a flame in a room filled with 1001 mirrors,we have 1001 reflections of the flame...now all of us are the flame yet not it...suppose we the images get the ability to understand that we are a reflection then we too will try and become the flame...so everything ends up in the flame...since everything is one...i feel we write our own destiny...correct me if i am wrong...didn't jesus knew he was going to be put on a cross?
VINCENT: My questions focus on the concepts of blame and praise – if we are responsible for the good/harm we do, in what sense and to what degree?
Your problem with the post has to do with seeing it as resting on Christian assumptions. Just substitute “harm” for evil. “God” is involved in only one of the three options I offer (plus there are other options as well, as Crystal’s comment suggests) so just reject that one.
Praising/crediting or blaming people for their actions aren't uniquely Christian predispositions and don't tend to have tautological or highly abstract
reference points. Starting a major war and slaughtering millions of people vs. gaining millions the right to participate in voting, for example are concrete events, and the human predisposition to blame or praise is very real.
CRYSTAL: Do you mean that because we don’t cause our own existence doesn’t mean we have NO power to choose? I could see that (it’s also my own sense of it – that it at least feels as though we have a limited power of choice, even if we can’t prove it).
It does seem to me, however, that not causing our own existence would rule out completely “free” choice – as do any number of other large, highly influential factors in our lives that mean nobody’s choices occur in a vacuum.
My specific question here isn’t about free choice vs. determinism; it’s whether/in what sense/to what degree we can regard people as worthy of praise or blame given that none of us brought ourselves into being.
VISHESH: Don't think we’re disagreeing about what self control is – I can see where there would be different types, and it seems to me that common to them all would be the ability to postpone or deny oneself some form of gratification.
OK, now I see what you mean about authors of our destiny. We’re each of the One and the One is author of everything.
At the same time, each of us isn’t perfectly identical to the One – or we’d have nothing to talk about! In other words, if each of the 1001 (or six billion) is profoundly and ultimately One, there’s still the day to day world we’re all familiar with.
What do you see as the status of human actions in the day to day world – not worthy of either praise or blame because every detail of what we do is the enactment of the One’s activity as the One authors its destiny?
If that’s the case, what about human actions that are ignorant or malicious, causing harm? Are they specifically intended by the One? (This is termed “the problem of evil” in the Judeo-Christian tradition.)
I suppose I didn't find those questions interesting enough. I don't really have that kind of concept of God, nor do I share this very real predisposition to blame or praise.
Or are you asking me how I think others would answer the question? I've no idea: does it matter?
But I am interested to know your answer!
Sorry to hear things are progressing in such a way.
As to me, both tendencies have gone down over time with regard to both myself and others.
HAZZBUZZ: Sounds like you’re replying to Vishesh (my remarks on “the God within” were looking to clarify what he meant…) My guess is that he’d say that the idea that God is inside everyone and everything would make bacteria (and us) less blameworthy, not more... but I don’t want to put words in his mouth…
PAULINE, I appreciate it –
You're going to say that any and every person who had the same circumstances and experiences as Hitler would have also become Hitler - would have made the same choices - and in fact could do nothing else, therefore we cannot blame Hitler for the things he did?
I don't agree. I don't think we're the eqauivalent of a recipe that if followed will turn out the exact same meal every time. I think we are more than the sum of our experiences and physical/psychological/environmental circumstances.
There's a history of philosophical and theological argumentation on either side of this. If I can find the argument I'm looking for, I'll come back and mention it :)
I feel I should be channeling Augustine here, although it would be exquisitely painful to do so! As I recall, he got out of the box by saying that god was all-knowing, not pre-determining. God knew we would mess up given certain circumstances (because he knows), but rested on the technicality that he made us able to do better, just knew that we wouldn't. So it's still our fault.
Do I buy it? Nope, none of it. It's a pin I don't dance on.
Like you, I don’t believe that anybody born into Hitler’s circumstances would have turned out like him. But perhaps someone would turn out just like him (and only perhaps – again, I’m not sold on strict determinism, but I can’t disprove it either…) if he were born with those exact genes at that exact same locus in space and time and then went on to experience exactly the same moment-to-moment sequence of life events, in every particular.
Of course, if that were possible, then it seems to me that this “other” person would BE Hitler and it would turn out that the entire universe into which Hitler and you and I and everybody are born is predetermined in every particular.
Which I tend to doubt…
But whether or not life’s predetermined, no human individual ever got to decide whether or not to create him/herself, and to me, that has to at least place a limit on praise or blame. No one, in themselves, is an ultimate source of good or evil.
HAYDEN: But God would have made the circumstances – at least that version of God whose actions well-meaning people often try to explain. If God didn’t create the circumstances, laws and conditions, then that’s a restriction on God’s power.
All arguments for a Creator who is both all good and all powerful – with no restrictions whatsoever – are logical contradictions.
The human tendency to hold a grudge for a perceived misgiving is probably at the heart of this praise/blame process, too. It's this same concept of right/wrong, good/bad, light/dark... our distinctly human capacity for weighing these things logically, vice a reactionary sort of behavior.
Humans have the ability to look at a situation in most cases and have an inner dialogue about it. Arguably, animals other than humans simply see a situation and spend very little time at all (if any) mulling over the semantic details. For example, even when faced with a fight/flight situation such as being mugged... humans enter into an internal dialogue, i.e. should I shout, how much is in my pocketbook, should I just hand it over, should I fight, did I just crap myself, can I smell any crap, etc. While this happens in a split second, we still have this internal dialogue. Animals on the other hand don't really have this sort of thought process... when faced with another animal that wants to eat it, it experiences a sensation like "ahh! don't eat me!!" and simply reacts by jumping, screaming, moving.... it just reacts, without thought.
This inner dialogue is our unique lens on the duality of life, the universe, and everything... and perhaps the drawstring on the curtain between life with and/or without God. Praise/blame, forgiveness/resentment, good/evil, shaved/moustache... these are a part of the human condition, which ultimately is our destiny to control, not necessarily to understand.
I read a really interesting book on the topic one time... "Way of the Peaceful Warrior," by Dan Millman. He's got quite a number of books out, I think... but that's the only one I've read. It really spent quite a bit of time on dealing with the inner dialogue, and it seems that his approach in the story is to control it, vice letting it control you - which leads to peace.
On this topic, all I can say is everyone is blameworthy and equally praiseworthy at some point in their lives :)
Keshi.
It seems to me as well that making moral distinctions comes with the territory of being human. Whether the recognition that some actions cause harm while other actions do good must or should lead us to blame or praise people is the specific question I’m asking.
KESHI, thanks - it’s been a one way, irreversible disease progression since June of 1994 and by now my nerves, muscles, bones and connective tissue are so extensively damaged that it’s pretty unlikely. However, I expect the cutback on blogging to be no more than a couple months. Right now I have to do work toward helping get the book online, plus my bedridden time has gone up. But once the book’s available I should get back blogging time.
I agree that if people are blameworthy and praiseworthy, then everyone would be some of each. But then there’s the question of whether one can validly fault or credit another’s (or one’s own) very being when God or Being or the universe is what brought one’s being into being…
Clearly we have to recognize the distinction between helpful and harmful actions. But are we ever in a position to judge the goodness or badness of another’s being? On what basis do we judge that?
...So perhaps the elusive state of forgiveness followed by peace can be found by either wholely accepting the person who has inflicted your pain as a superior in power and control, or by freeing yourself from him/her in some way (physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually).
I believe God created us and knows why we are exactly what we are and will accept us in the afterlife for being exactly what he made us. It is our job here to learn, understand, and do our best to better things for ourselves and everyone else here.
If you left a slice of pie on the counter and told your child not to eat it you would hold the child accountable to obey even though you knew that he wouldn't. It was within his power to not eat it, he just chose not to resist. Being omnipotent, you knew he'd fail the test. NOT YOUR FAULT for leaving the pie out, his fault for not exercising his willpower.
Of course, this still doesn't touch on fairness, which is the point that most annoys me.
I see it like a faucet. We are not the source of the water but we have the choice to let it flow or to turn the water off. So there is merit and blame in our accepting or rejecting of God gifts but all the we do, that is good, is from God.
Thanks for your comments on my blog and may God give you strength and healing.
HAYDEN: It seems to me that your comment, as well as Lance’s, speaks to what’s usually called “the problem of evil.” Following your analogy and assuming a God that’s omnipotent as well as all-loving (it seems to me that’s the key – omnipotence – rather than omniscience), then there would have been nothing forcing or even predisposing God to create slices of pie, willpower, resistance etc. That is, none of the items in your analogy, which are analogues for things we find in life as we know it, are analogues for objects or conditions that must necessarily exist in any world that God might have created.
A Creator-God who created the world from nothing didn’t have to create a world where people can make wrong choices. Didn’t have to create a world where, in order to perfect his creation, it had to be tested. It’s easy, for example, to imagine a world where we faced choices between good and better rather than good and evil.
CURE OFARS, thanks. I find that God has given me strength in inverse proportion to healing. But maybe you don’t get to choose your graces after all.
I'm wondering... what reason do you think there would be for someone to freely choose not to participate in grace?
LANCE: With God as love and in control of our destinies, what do you make of the world’s suffering – both what people create and what comes naturally?
I would like to differ with the Godhead theory too.
For me there is no duality.
God is not inside me.God is me.It's this singularity which has enabled me to find a higher meaning in life.
I do acknowledge various ways in which people try to associate themselves with God.
For me this works.
Personally, I would have to say that it has a lot to do with control. To say, “Thy will be done” is hard when I want total control. I would think another aspect is that I'm broken. There is a part of me that is bent out of shape and to quote Paul, “What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate.” Why do I sometimes feel envy when good things happen to friends? Why do I enjoy -at times- the misfortune of others? There is a part of my that is jacked up and not all of it is of my own choosing.
love.
CURE OF ARS: I like that quote too, and to me it does seem that it’s more a matter, as you say, of brokenness. I’d find it hard to conceive of why someone who was fully and deeply aware of a grace as a grace, and how great and good it was, freely choosing to reject it.
DON and CARRIE, thanks for your thoughts and prayers.
and if that isn't ironic then I don't know what is?
I didn't take the time to read all of the comments but I found this post very interesting and will give you my two cents.
Yes~ We find that we exist. We do choose what/who we worship during that existence.
I praise God for the way He has changed me. I take blame for the times I rejected His love and His truth. In His mercy, He never gave up on me. Because I accept the forgiveness He offers, He will never hold that evil against me and will share His glory with me for eternity.
I do not understand predestination. AT ALL! But I know He is good and I know He is mine.
The vast majority of adherents to the world's various religious traditions were raised in them. Most Christians, for example, weren't formerly Muslims or Jews. Most people within a given religion didn't shop around for it - didn't choose it. It resonates deeply for them, in most cases, precisely because it's rooted in their early experiences - don't you think?
As to having to have faith in a person, that's part of the Christian tradition and also the Islamic. Some Buddhists have that attitude toward the Buddha, but not most I think. So that leaves billions of people who don't find faith in a person necessary.
My main point was that people don't freely choose their religious traditions. There's a strong tendency to stay with or return to the one you were raised in.
The fact that there are Chinese Christians doesn't invalidate my example because the average Chinese citizen certainly isn't a Christian and my reference was to the average Chinese citizen.
Sounds like you believe that people who have little to no acquaintance with a given religious tradition are as free to choose it as those who are familiar with it? I don't see how that's possible, but really can't think of anything else to say to clarify how come.
Btw, I'm not saying that the religious traditions in which we were raised absolutely determine our religion, only, again, that it's a factor. Otherwise it's hard to see why most Muslims come from predominantly Islamic regions and same with Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, etc.
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