I Get It!
I finally understand a basic idea of Christian Theology. I don’t think that I ever understood it before – the concept of an angry god being a loving god. But here’s my realization; let me lay out the logic for you.
We feel upset when our beliefs for how the world should be conflict with our perceptions of how the world is. When we reach a disjunction between what we believe and what we percieve, we are given three options. 1. Change how we view the world (change what we believe). 2. Change how the world is (change what we percieve). 3. Stagnate (and become frustrated and angry).
For God (capitalized to reference a character name from a book called the Bible), his beliefs and his perceptions are often in conflict. However, because God is perfect and his beliefs are always correct, he cannot choose option 1. Because he is perfect, he cannot choose option 3. Therefore, his only recourse is option 2. He can only change the world to reconcile the gap between beliefs and perceptions. This is why God gets angry. He uses anger as a tool of his rightousness to move the people on earth towards matching up with his beliefs.
The difficulty with this lies in one simple fact: how can you have beef with God if everything he does is correct? I can’t say to God that I think actually anger is a good way to scare people, but fear and love do not go together. I can’t say it because God is perfect and obviously my inferior brain cannot fathom his methods. And Old Testament God used anger a lot, then switched it up after the birth of his only son, our Lord Jesus Christ, conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the virgin Mary, and all that jazz.
But the fact remains that I understand the belief now and I’m pretty excited about that. How come nobody ever explained it to me in those terms before? If everyone can see that logic, the whole world can unite around God, the character from the Bible.
In other news, I did not go for a bicycle ride yesterday, alas. I had trouble sleeping Friday night, and when it hit around three and I was still awake, I realized that getting up in two hours to go riding was not going to happen. So as disappointed as I was, I was able to get a lot of work done on Saturday, whereas had I gone riding, I would have needed a couple of naps during the day. So it all worked out. Right now, I need to stop typing away on this thing and write up my paper due Friday. It’s a long time before it’s due, but I figure I might as well get it done now. Then I won’t have to think about it for the rest of the week. Yippee for getting things done early.
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