Great-Grandma Deserves Some Credit for Coming Up withThis:
My parents are visiting this weekend. My father tells me that my great-grandmother (his father's mother), a simple, uneducated woman who had a very hard life, used to say, in her native Yiddish, "If I ever get to meet God, I'll grab him by the neck and tear his beard out one hair at a time."
Unless you're young, the only necessary context is that He must have a pretty strange sense of humor.
philo
It's easy to make smug or boastful comments about God now. But one day, that will seem pretty foolish.
Usually when people saw God in the Old Testament, they fell on their faces as if they were dead. In the New Testament, when Peter realized that Jesus was God, he fell on his knees and said, "Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Oh Lord."
According to St. Paul, "every knee shall bow, and every tongue shall confess, that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."
I don't think that there will be much room for beard-pulling in that day. But in this age of grace, feel free to enjoy sarcasm against God while you can.
Pedro, whatever imagination you or I have is a gift from God in the first place. Same for a sense of morality. Same for the ability to laugh.
I was thinking the same thing. A whole lifetime of revenge fantasies wasted.
Stendhal
Maybe if Moses laid off the magic vision juice he would have spared Jews the dilemma. Probably not though.
doubtful: the child of a neglectful father may very well owe his existence to him, but that doesn't invalidate the child's grievances. What comfort is it to "know" that one owes one's moral impulses to a creator, if one's moral impulses compel one to question the morality of many of the creator's decisions? It simply isn't sensible to presume that all creatures shall love the creator simply by virtue of his immense power over them. (I may indeed owe my life and attributes to him, in your mental scheme, but that does not make me wrong in questioning him, in mine.)
Disclaimer: I don't have anything against the feelings of awe of believers. I simply don't share them, and find it a failure of imagination on your part that you don't see how someone might have grievances against any prospective creator, given the magnitude of senseless suffering that there is in this world of ours, much of it unrelated to free-will.
How do you know I am an "evangelical"? Because I quote the Bible or believe in Christ? Perhaps I'm Greek Orthodox. Don't jump to conclusions for the sake of your own narrow "caricature" that comes from stereotypes you clearly hold dear.
The original quote that David gave from his grandma was humerous, but it didn't strike me as "LOL." I'm not a Puritan who's against laughter, I'm a Monty Python fan myself. I'm just commenting on the ease in which people can now challenge God, compared to the likely scenario when they actually see Him face to face.
As for not being able to understand suffering, or how a person can hold it against God, I'll just say that with a mother institutionalized and with a sister in jail, and with drug use, divorce, and desertion prevalent in my extended family, I'm not a stranger to suffering. I just don't blame God for it. Instead, I pray to Him for help, comfort, and consolation, and He answers.
Glad to see there's no anti-Christian bigotry here at the VC.
Loosely translated, it would depend on where David's grandmother came from in Europe, it might be: Oib ikh vel trefen got, vel ikh em nemen bei di haldz on oisreisen di bord oif yeder hor.
Yiddish has awesome curses. And Judaism has some of the best G-d jokes around.
That applies to just about anyone powerful, from Don Corleone on up. God, of course, would be the ultimate boss of bosses.
I can think of only two exceptions:
(1) If the powerful person is down on his luck, aka President Nixon just before resigning.
or
(2) Steve Colbert at the White House correspondents' dinner.
This type of juice is not necessary to have visions. Spanish buddies St.Teresa of Avila and San Juan de la Cruz did very well without on that count. Both of Jewish ancestry BTW. Does not always work like a clockwork, however. That was the big complaint in Mother Theresa's diaries revealed last year. She stopped having visions for a while and that undermined her faith. No drugs in her case, as far as I know.
Perhaps. So I guess God isn't as all powerful as everyone claims? In which case, one should hedge one's bets and worship every god there is. Just in case.
" I'm just commenting on the ease in which people can now challenge God, compared to the likely scenario when they actually see Him face to face. "
Well, I'd be shocked if it turns out that, when meeting God, he acts as though I'm the first one to question his actions. After thousands of years, you'd think he has a ready response. And if his feelings are so easily hurt that someone might actually call him on the carpet for some of his actions or non-actions, then he's hardly someone worth worshiping.
Of course, maybe this whole religion thing is really just a big joke played on us by a god who has a very strange sense of humor.....
I suspect that if there's a God, He might not give us much of a chance to "call him on the carpet." Probably He will speak, and we will listen. Maybe He will ask us about our own actions or non-actions, and not give us the opportunity to return the questions to Him. Whether there's a God, and whether He's worth worshipping, isn't dependant on us.
But isn't God always around?
Well, but doubtful says his prayers are heard and even answered, so that can't be right. Pretty arrogant to not even give a chance to be heard. Even Stalin's show trials usually allowed the defendant to speak at least once.
Perhaps a supreme being might forgive things that lesser beings take offense at in the way I did not get angry when my daughter pulled my beard....