Figuring out who the finger is pointing at?!
18 April 2010 
The gospel according to Dave Matthews:
“If there is a God, a caring God, then we would have to figure that he’s done an extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.”
We see evil and can only blame someone else for it. We experience the twisted reality that we live in and then turn it into questions towards God. It seems that this is more of an excuse not to believe in God. It is a denial of who is really responsible.
Let us assume that atheists are right: God does not exist.
Why ask the question? Why make the statement? What a tired rhetorical tool that misses the point. There is no One who made the world. But we are still left with a cruel world. The finger points at us. We are to blame for most of the cruelty that is experienced in this world. Certainly one could blame religion as many are in the habit of doing. But if religion is merely an invention, then the inventors are to be blamed. This is still a cruel world. The finger is still points at us.
“If there is no God, then we would have to figure out some one else to blame for the extraordinary job of making a very cruel world.”
We would have to figure out why the finger is pointing in our general direction and yet we are not the ones to be blamed for such a cruel reality. That God-deniers are God-blamers is not only disingenuous but philosophically dishonest. Let us not forget that the One who is being blamed does not exist. The highly evolved finger points in a different direction.
The finger still points to how extraordinarily cruel we can be.
We may want to point the finger at God, but let us not forget that random mutations have given us three other fingers that are pointing right back at us. So by evolutionary standards we are at least three-times more responsible for evil than the God whom we invented and now deny for our purposes.
For years and years I’ve thought about the following photo, taken by Kevin Carter. I’m sure you’ve seen it. I’ve probably thought about it more than any other photo I’ve ever seen. Several times a week this image pops up in my head. I’ve seen hundreds of similar ones, but this one is a good symbol for all of them. When I think through my theological views, I think about this photo. What does my interpretation say about this photo? How does my theology give meaning to this image? What are all the kinds of end results could have happened after this was taken, played out to eternity? What is the meaning given by my theology to each of these end results?
http://imgur.com/NABuy.gif
Sometimes when I see this image, or read a quote like Dave Matthews above, I can make sense of it (at least partially) by focusing on the fact that what I experience when I look at the picture, or what underlies Matthew’s quote, is the dream of a very different world. The fact that this one is not like the one we have in our minds results in the experience. At other times when I look or hear, the author of Ecclesiastes makes far more sense of the picture.
Thanks for perspective.
But not the kind of perspective that is theoretical, but the stuff that smacks of real-life-tearing-out-your-heart-crying-your-eyes-dry kind of struggle with the world we live in and the ECHOES reverberating within our souls that this is not how it ought to be.
My theories need to be softened by such realities.