The traditional religious belief is that almighty God controls everything that happens according to his will. If that is so, dare we ask a few questions of the Father we are told loves all of us as his children?
Why are we suffering this dreadful viral pandemic? Why is our world threatened by climate change and environmental destruction? Why are so many people living in poverty? Why are so many suffering from famine and sickness? Why is there so much crime, corruption, abuse, and addiction? Why, despite the sacrifice of his only Son, is sin as rife today as it ever was?
The conventional religious answer to those questions would be that humans have free will, that we’ve brought all this upon ourselves. That we’ve yielded to temptation and sinned on a monumental scale.
It makes sense that we have to take responsibility for our actions, but it still begs a fundamental question of God. Why has he given the Devil free reign to lead us into temptation? Why has he not put a halt to Satan’s antics?
It might further prompt us to ask, does God care about us? Does he really love us as is claimed? Given the potentially catastrophic problems confronting us and our World, we might also ask, why at this our hour of greatest need, has God abandoned us?
The religious answer to those questions would be that God hasn’t abandoned us, but that we’ve abandoned him. They’d say it’s all part of God’s plan, that he works in strange ways, that He is a mystery we couldn’t possibly understand.
That’s not a particularly helpful answer at times of need. Nor is it an appropriate response to a rational and reasonable question. In fact, if we dare to be honest, it sounds more like avoidance than explanation.
Even if it’s true, if God is too complicated for us to understand, we still have to wonder:
Why has he allowed his Church to ride roughshod over the faithful? Why has he fostered so many differing religious belief systems? Why does he allow them to fight over him, even kill in his name?
Asking questions about God serves only to create more questions, more confusion, and few concrete answers. We live in a high-tech world dominated by science. Our knowledge of the Universe, of physics, chemistry, and biology has evolved spectacularly over the last hundred years. In contrast, our understanding of God hasn’t changed in thousands of years. This surely prompts the question: do we need a new understanding of God. The answer is yes.
We need a new understanding of god, if for no other reason than the old one isn’t working. If it was, we’d have a unified belief system that would bring us all together for the common good of humankind. We’d have Universal peace, equality for all, and a solution to the global problems confronting us.
Despite thousands of years of worship, to a multitude of gods, our world is still in a terrible mess. Now is surely the time to look again at our understanding of God and religious theory.
God could yet have a role to play in helping us to solve our problems. Not God as we currently understand him though; but a new god, a different kind of god - one based on logic and scientific understanding rather than mystery and faith.
Only by opening to a new understanding of the truth, can we hope to save ourselves, our way of life and the planet that sustains us.
Read Tempus Momentus, we need a new understanding of God, the old one is working, by David Michael Jones; available on Amazon and at davidmichaeljones.com