Monday, May 16, 2011

Why doesn't God have a blog?

If Jesus was the son of God, why didn't he write the New Testament himself? For some reason, the proposition that a God who wanted people to follow him should have set his messenger down in a remote backwater village and instead of providing a clearly stated guide to what people needed to do should have left only a handful of paradoxes, anecdotes, and questions, to be spread by word of mouth and written down by others does not strike people of faith as unlikely, even though today we would consider such action to be proof, not of divinity, but of insanity.

The reduction of God to a being who acted in such a way might have seemed reasonable to the naive, superstitious and largely illiterate people of those times, but today, when every event can be communicated around the world almost instantly, surely regarding God as less powerful in his communication skills than the local newspaper (let alone the medium we are presently using which will make this message available globally the instant I hit 'Publish review') makes no sense whatever.

If Jesus was God, and the all powerful God who created the universe chose to come to us in the unpretentious form of a poor Galilean man who spoke in parables, what does it say about God? It's almost like God was saying "the point of life isn't to follow clearly delineated rules, it's to follow me," or "I'm a God who cares more about the weak and powerless in my life than making a name for myself," or "knowing that all power in heaven and earth has been given to me, I'm going to respond by washing your feet." What an unlikely, insane, anti-consumerist, anti-imperialist God indeed. Why would we ever want to believe in such a scandalously humble God?

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