Hey guys, It's been a while. I miss you. Now that thats out of the way I wanted to tackle the notion that comes up ALL THE TIME with religious folks. Since I first started looking into religions I have constantly heard the term "personal God" come up over and over from Christians. As I understand the phrase, it refers to their belief that God speaks to, cares about, watches over, and is generally interested in each of us individually. He is concerned about each of our sins and is hurt personally by them. It is not a simple matter of accounting but rather, each transgression is a slight directed directly at the Lord of the Universe himself. Likewise every time we pray to him (which is apparently the only positive thing he gives a damn about because he seems somewhat petty) he hears it and it fills his heart with glee that he is getting attention. This has always seemed to me something of an undesirable trait in a deity.
If you will permit me a short analogy. The God of Christianity seems to me to be somewhat like Michael Scott from the Office. He spends less time running his office than meddling in the affairs of those that are in his charge. He cares about the running of the branch with which he is the head, but more so he cares about making sure that everyone is happy, and in a good mood and most importantly in adoration of him. Meanwhile it is only the skill with which his underlings do their job that allows the branch to survive. If they were entirely unsupervised it in conceivable that they would be just as effective a work force as they are with him there. Indeed he is probably not necessary to the completion of their work at all.
My point in all this, aside from the Office being a pleasant but somewhat over-rated show, is that it is not necessarily a desirable quality in an administrator to have him overly concerned with all the personal details of those underneath him. I would think that even a omniscient deity who knows about all of the minute happenings in the universe would be better off maintaining a certain level of emotional distance from those whom he might be put in a position to send to an eternity of torment. Without out that distance how can we trust his decisions to be made in the best interests of the universe or even of humanity. Maybe leaving Hitler around as long as he did was giving a loved son a second chance, or striking down Heath Ledger was displacement for somebody in Mumbai mugging an old lady. Having a personal God that loves us all so much is only going to invite distraction. I would think that God had better things to do than worry over the minutia of my life, which I would rather he stayed out of.
Now I know the one of the counter arguments is going to be that God so loves us that he wants to make sure we are all okay. But that love is the very thing that makes the idea of us betraying him punishable by an eternity of fire. Only that love and be strong enough to create that rage.
So why then is this concept of a personal God seen as so enticing? I think it has to do with the search for meaning. I have come to grips with a universe that doesn't care about me. That is incapable of caring about me. I have realized that on a cosmic scale everything terrestrial is just a game and so I, in my turn I play the game until I am removed from the board. But I think that for some the idea that the universe doesn't care is intimidating. I think for some it is hard to reconcile the idea that even though there is no God to care, they can still have people, friends, family, loved ones, coworkers and kind souls who care about them. This is why we go on.
I don't believe in God, or a god. But if in some cosmic twist it turns out I am wrong, I still write this blog without fear. Because I am sure that if he's running the whole show, he has better things to do than worry about some snot-nosed lower being with a keyboard.
