I have my suspicions about the existence of God. If God there be, why would He allow innocent children to suffer? Why would millions of innocent human beings be allowed to suffer starvation’s slow, miserable self-devouring pains? And what of the six-plus million human beings the Nazis exterminated with barely a whimper from the universe? That I am asked to believe in an infinite power that allows men to do the horrible things they do is beyond moral reasoning.
I am further expected to believe that all of mankind’s suffering is designed for some perfect outcome that will, when history ends, explain God’s reasons to mankind. It is enough of an insult that God would allow these things to occur without adding the irrational explanation that I have it within me to ‘understand’ and rationalize the history of mankind’s collective suffering. Neither God nor emperor can persuade me that humankind’s misery is justified - It is not.
I equally detest selfish men who use the promise of a better afterlife to explain the affliction of those miseries humankind endures. There are no ‘better tomorrows’ and no promised land in which human souls will relish in eternal joy and comfort –
This life is not the dress rehearsal. All we have is today and one another. That’s it and, for decent men, that is enough.
The Bible speaks to a cataclysmic event that will usher the return of God’s Son in a blaze of glory. Mankind might better focus his attention on the horrific events that will precede that glorious arrival – We may be too pre-occupied with blood-letting, human sacrifice and unspeakable horrors to notice a fellow in a chariot streaking across the skies. The insanity of such a proposition defies imaginative reverence. That we must be driven to slaughtering one another before we are worthy of the return of God’s Son should tell us something about the character of the God we worship - Either he is a sadist or a maniac or both.
The only promise I see coming from a world-wide, human-made cataclysmic event is that humankind may finally come to terms with our humanity. We may finally come to accept that we are capable of doing good AND evil. The concept of God, after all, is designed to limit the bounds of man’s capacity to do evil is it not? Isn’t the existence of God an affirmation that mankind needs some form of constraint to protect himself from himself? What are the Ten Commandments other than a definition of behavioral constraints that, for decent men, need not be defined? Who needs to be told murder and thievery are evil other than a man who is, by his nature, evil?
Decent men need no God because there is no need for God. The internal limits we have set in ourselves are sufficient in themselves to keep us from needing the laws of God or king.
Laws are an insult to us; an intrusive necessity born from the evil deeds evil men do. Throughout history we have been asked to believe that external forces are needed to protect us from evil. Once set in-place, those forces conspire against us then they, too, become evil.
We cannot limit the boundaries of evil with laws or rules or regulations - Men born to evil will do evil regardless of silly laws – Locks on doors only keep honest men honest; it is the nature of the thief to smash through any locks we set for him. All of the laws ever written cannot stop a single man from committing evil when he is intent upon doing so.
Those of you who are insistent that God or some other power controls man’s destiny are a bane on mankind. You are loathsome, destructive creatures because you insist upon attributing your suffering, and mankind’s suffering, on the very force you claim to love and who, remarkably, you claim loves you. The paradox is too painful, too childish to deserve examination.
Either we accept fault for the evil we do and allow to be done or we accept we are destined to repeat all of history’s horrors. The cure, the only cure, is to acknowledge that our flaws, our capacity to do evil, are within us the moment we are conceived. Only then will we allow the unimpeded expansion of human experience in an environment where men who do evil deeds are judged by men who choose not to do evil deeds. Yet, as we have done for eons, our tendency to rationalize evil, to give it a subjective soul, is the foundation that pushes mankind to the brink of self annihilation. When will we learn: Evil is as evil does?
If God there be, He is weeping for us; He knows our contempt for reality. We have the history of a thousand histories to examine bitter truths yet, from one generation to the next, we pursue folly with the abandon of men unawares that they are blind to the liability of the flaws of their humanity. We clamor through reality creating governments, laws and ideologies that give pretense to the illusion that external forces can loosen those internal struggles that often vex the human soul.
We are creatures of emotion and mind; we cannot escape this truth. What we have tried to do is mollify our emotions by controlling our external environment in the belief that the external world somehow controls our internal well-being. Thus we have manufactured governments, and churches, and asylums, and laws and wars and havoc and all sorts of conditions that have repeatedly become vexatious to us - The things we create as salves become our prisons and our horrors.
It is the nature of man that we are at once good and evil. It is also our nature to reach out to the universe to mend the internal struggles each and every one of us must endure as part of the human condition. If the history of mankind is to remanufacture identical perils for himself, the least God-fearing men should do is remove God from the equation of blame: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars – or in our God - but in ourselves.â€
So it is that as we move into this new millennium we are again caught in a struggle with ourselves. That struggle has the energy to thrust all of us into ages hence when men ravaged one another for little more than edible fleas and, occasionally, human flesh.
Perhaps now decent men are ready to do that which God will not do: Rid this world of evil. What God would intervene in the affairs of men who are unwilling to do for themselves those things they have by grace been given the power to do? Such a concept is only feasible to men who surrender themselves to the so-called benevolent power of the universe; men who, throughout history, have been sent to the lions or watched as other like-minded fools met similar fates.
How many souls must be slaughtered for no other reason than to validate loyalty to a disloyal God? How many decent men must be slaughtered before we come to understand the duty we owe to ourselves is to extinguish the evil men that seek to extinguish us?
Whether we choose to believe this reality or not, mankind is in an argument for his survival - and God has nothing to do with it. There will be no gleaming chariot, no blaring horns, and no purification of the firmament from earthly sin to heavenly purity. This task is ours to do. It has always been ours to do, only now, for the first time in the history of history, decent men may understand what must be done: Quiet for eternity the soulless men who do evil deeds.
The miracle seekers – those who clamor for a mighty God to intervene in the ways of men – know nothing of God. How can they? Their relationship with Him is contingent upon His willingness to intervene in the affairs of men to satisfy their loathsome imputations. They would rather God destroy their demons than take it upon themselves to do that which God gave them the power to do at birth. And what is that power? That we should have to ask that question confirms the lack of understanding we have as regards the true God, the One God, the only God: When God was tested by evil He cast it out of the heavens, He destroyed the minions and the beasts that sought to destroy Him. This, too, is the task He leaves for mankind – rid ourselves of the doers of evil or lose the heaven we have been given.
History has forged a truth we avoid at our own peril: When we fail to cast evil from our midst it consumes us. It forces us to make laws and rules that become our God. It creates conditions that turn the Garden of Eden into a Breeding Ground for Evil and….fear.
With so much evil in our midst is it any wonder decent men are begging the universe to intervene? We see what we have done and what we have allowed to be done. This knowledge is a gift to us; it comes to us through the eons of man’s suffering. When the next calamity comes, when evil men seek to purge their internal struggles by destroying everything external to them, decent men must know that the final battle for their survival has arrived.
The gates of heaven will not fly open to unleash calamities upon us - We will unleash sufficient calamities upon ourselves. Those who look to the heavens to cure these ills will be sorely disappointed. No cure will come save us. If evil prevails it is because we have willed it so. If decent men prevail that, too, is because we willed it so. This choice is ours to make: Folly or faith.
When the hour comes some of His children suffer because they were blinded by reverence to pretense; when the hour comes some of His children quake at the duty they have been given; when the hour comes to purge evil from this heaven for as long as that is possible, God will do as He has always done –hope that man’s folly will end.
Sword or slave – the choice is ours.
Still. He weeps.
