A Detailed View of Page 3

   

On Page 3 of God is Not Great we find the following:

 

“in a fairly short time I had also begun to notice other oddities. Why, if god was the creator of all things, were we supposed to "praise" him so incessantly for doing what came to him natu­rally? This seemed servile, apart from anything else. If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blind­ness? What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic. With all this continual prayer, why no result? Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner? Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic? These faltering and childish objections are, I have since discovered, extremely common­place, partly because no religion can meet them with any satisfactory answer.”

 

This is a good example of the torrent of information that I refer to as one of the ‘deceptive strategies'. Most of us just look at this and, trying to absorb it, meekly say or think, “Well perhaps he's got a point.”  Well actually, he hasn't! There are seven questions piled into this paragraph.

 

If you pause and look at each of these questions, there is a reasonable answer. If you don't want to bother to consider these answers, then please just use your ‘back button' and return to the main page. Now I don't think you would want to read a line-by-line refuting of what you find in this book – it would be too much – but I felt that just by way of illustration I would do it with this passage, so here goes: 

     

    

Question 1: “Why, if God was the creator of all things, were we supposed to "praise" him so incessantly for doing what came to him naturally?”

 

Answer 1: I assume that he must be referring to some order of service that he has encountered that requires praise. “So incessantly” is emotive language so let's ignore that and translate this question, which is logically quite reasonable, into the following:

 

“If God is Creator of all things and it was natural and easy for Him to create the world, why praise him for what is natural?”

 

The implication is that we only praise someone for something that is not natural, that they have had to put effort into and chosen to do.

 

But surely we praise someone for something that is good. We don't praise someone for doing something that is bad. When we praise God we are acknowledging:

 

a) He chose to do something and He could have chosen either to do nothing or do something that would cause us upset (like the little boy who upturns an ants' nest to see how they would cope), and

b) He chose to make a good world that would ultimately benefit us, but as we noted above, He could have made it a bad world.

 

Thus, when we praise someone we “commend their merits or extol their virtues” which they exercised by choice, instead of following a contrary path.

 

Thus, we praise God because He chose to act in a way that (yes, He was capable of) He didn't have to act, but did for our benefit.

 

(The question of the world ‘going wrong' because of our sin is another question!)

 

 

Question 2: “This seemed servile, apart from anything else.” Implication: why do we have to be servile?

 

Answer 2: My dictionary links ‘being servile' with ‘being a slave'. The definition of a slave is ‘one who is the property of another', and the clear implication is that you do what they want.

 

Now we could certainly make a case for us ‘belonging' to God in the sense that He created the world – and us as human beings – but when He gave us free will He gave us the option of NOT doing what He wanted, which is what the Fall (Gen 3) is all about.

 

This is obviously linked to the first question. When we praise God we recognise His greatness (power) and His goodness (benign attributes) which He chooses to use for our benefit.

 

Ah, says our author, if He is naturally good, surely He doesn't have a choice, He HAS to be good. No! If you think about this, that assumption also requires that He no longer has free will, but everything about personality as we know it, demands free will.

 

So when we say God is good or God is love, it may be what comes naturally to Him but it must also be because it is what He chooses to be. If there is any freedom, He is good because He chooses to be. Recognising this and praising Him for it, is simply a way for us to hold onto the truth and maintain perspective – He IS great and we aren't!

 

 

Question 3: If Jesus could heal a blind person he happened to meet, then why not heal blind­ness?

 

Answer 3: I assume he means by healing blindness, make it so that people never go blind.

 

Blindness is simply a form of the body breaking down and malfunctioning. The question really goes to a much deeper level: why not make human bodies so that they don't decay and deteriorate?

 

This side of heaven the best I can do is refer you back to the Bible as I will do later in the book in Chapter 6, in respect of bodies breaking down when they get old.

 

The Biblical picture is that the first man and woman and subsequent generations lived much, much longer lives. The further they moved from their perfect creation and the subsequent Fall, the shorter their lives became. A close relationship with God seemed to indicate that wholeness and wellness would follow, as in the case of Moses (Deut 34:7). A promise for those who remain close to God is that they will flourish in old age. (Psa 92:12-14). The corollary to all this is that sin is linked to sickness.

 

So, God has made us to lead whole and well lives, but sin means that our lives break down, and so since the Fall, sickness and bodily breakdown follows.

 

Jesus came to show a way back to God and associated with that is the power of God that flows to restore those who are willing to put their lives on a non-self-destructive course by following him.

 

Making people well is less related to people being good, rather than people remaining in relationship with God. For example, healing someone of a STD would be rather pointless if they continued to follow a promiscuous sexual lifestyle.

 

 

Question 4:   “What was so wonderful about his casting out devils, so that the devils would enter a herd of pigs instead? That seemed sinister: more like black magic.”

 

Answer 4: The usual answer that is supplied here is that pigs were one of the forbidden foods for the Jews and so they should not have been kept anyway. It was thus a means of bringing disciplinary judgement on the pig owner.

 

An alternative answer is that demons are literal spirit entities that take up residence in human beings when those human beings turn to the occult and away from God. Jesus constantly sought to teach his disciples by what he did and so he gave them a very visual picture of what was the reality here. The disciples could clearly see that not only did the man visibly change as the demons left him, but the pigs clearly demonstrated that something had come into them which, allowed free reign, immediately caused their destruction.

 

Sinister? Wicked? No, just the opposite. Black magic? No that is demonic occult power which is destructive of human beings. This is God's power which brings blessing to human beings.

 

 

Question 5:  "With all this continual prayer, why no result?"

 

Answer 5: I assume he is talking about prayer in church services? Prayer is not magic. It is not a means of twisting God's arm to make Him act on our behalf.

 

In its simplest form, prayer is talking to God, coming to an understanding of His will and coming in line with it in our desires.

 

If we remain godless and unrighteous, then we can pray as much as we like but it is just an exercise in self-centredness!

 

 

Question 6:   "Why did I have to keep saying, in public, that I was a miserable sinner?"

 

Answer 6:   This is obviously a reference to a liturgy that declares that.

 

Liturgy in this form is simply a means of reminding ourselves of a fundamental truth. This particular one however, only gives one side of the picture and does not also remind us that in Christ we are new creations with tremendous potential in the love of God.

 

The truth, which the author will object to, even if he speaks it a number of times in the book, is that we are all ‘miserable sinners' left to ourselves.

 

The wonder of the Christian Gospel is that Jesus has come to deliver us out of this and into a new and wonderful life and experience as children of God.

 

 

Question 7:  "Why was the subject of sex considered so toxic?"

 

Answer 7: The author has a funny way of using language. Why does he think that Christian teaching on sex is poisonous? If something is poisonous it destroys. Christian teaching brings life.

 

Christian teaching says that God designed us and therefore designed sex for pleasure and procreation, just as he designed us to eat and drink, for pleasure and health and strength.

 

However if we eat and drink in excess, we suffer obesity and alcoholism. If we have sex in excess then we suffer sexual diseases and unwanted pregnancies, and find that our whole outlooks on life become distorted. Our Western societies are classic examples of this happening.

 

Christian teaching says that God had designed us to work best when we commit ourselves for life to one member of the opposite sex, and sex is an outworking of that commitment. That produces a wholeness that is very often lacking in modern life, where sex is often separated from relationship and becomes a short term physical act, with the negative outcomes we have noted above.

 

No, it is the modern ‘unrestrained' view of sex that is toxic and many lives are indeed being destroyed as a result. The facts of modern life prove it!

 

 

And So…

 

This has simply been an exercise in showing that there are reasonable, credible answers to all these negative questions the author pours out.

 

For the sake of time and space we will not go into as much detail in the bulk of the book – but we could do, and so could you! Think about what you read and question it.