Dear diary,
I visit as many churches as I can find, and I judge each building – I say: “This church is warm and welcoming,” or “This church is bleak, drab, and joyless; its space is not used well.”
I also criticize dreams, and rate and rank them. Your dream from last night, for instance, was not very good: it moved too slowly, and there was not enough feeling of potential. I prefer, as well, for there to be a hint of fear in the dream’s background, and yours lacked that. So, maybe, try again, this afternoon, while you’re at work.
What is it that you do, exactly? (I can’t believe that I never asked you this before.) I mean, for a living? How do you earn enough to stay alive, since life has a high price? You make money, do you not? Everyone earns an income, except poor people, who are not really humans, after all, because they just die in the street. So I assume that you go to a job, every weekday at sunup: you either sit in front of a computer and program weapons systems, or you perform surgical operations while half asleep, or you drive taxis in circles. Someone pays you. You sell yourself.
Dear reader, I know that you’re not going to answer my questions, because you and I hate each other now; however, wouldn’t it be intriguing if I had guessed correctly about all the things that I said above? I mean, let’s imagine that you really do work as a taxi driver: You drive taxis off cliffs, for your primary earning. And you supplement that with a second job as an operator of mechanical weapons systems. And you moonlight as a surgeon. – In that case, I would clutch both your arms and say “I am truly surprised that all my conjectures were right.” And then I would ask you where you live. And you would reply: “In an apartment in Canada.” And you would explain that you commute to South Carolina every day. (The joke is that your daily bus trip to work takes twenty-six hours. That’s a really long time.)
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So, what’s the deal – is God testing us or not? (Forget trying to differentiate between “testing” and “tempting” – only weasels care about such things.) One moment, God claims that he will never tempt us: “Let no man say when he is tempted, I am tempted of God: for God cannot be tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man” —James 1:13. The next moment, God claims that he will allow his chosen people to be “tried by fire” because he loves them and wants to purify them. The idea is that God passes a golden ingot through the flames in order to burn away all the dross or alloy, as all that can survive this process is the truest metal.
OK, if this is God’s plan, then when will he be satisfied? For he sent the Israelites into Egypt and let them slave there for hundreds of years, and then he finally got them out. He appeared on his mountain and gifted them his Teaching. Aren’t we finished, at this point? Can’t we say “Mission accomplished,” and dine together? Exodus 24:10-11 reports that
they saw the God of Israel: and there was under his feet as it were a paved work of a sapphire stone, and as it were the body of heaven in his clearness. And upon the nobles of the children of Israel he laid not his hand: also they saw God, and did eat and drink.
This sounds to me like the happy ending. So why does God permit the continuance of slaughters and terrors on the earth?
And why would God tell Abraham to sacrifice his son? Would you do the same, if you were the governor of a small island that is isolated from the rest of the world? Would you ever go to your neighbor’s house and ring the doorbell and say . . .
Let us leave off imagining hypotheticals and simply view the truth as it was recorded by our security camera:
And it came to pass after these things, that God did tempt Abraham, and said unto him, “Abraham.” And Abraham said, “Behold, here I am.” And God said, “Take now thy son, thine only son Isaac, whom thou lovest, and get thee into the land of Moriah; and offer him there for a burnt offering upon one of the mountains which I will tell thee of.” (Genesis 22:1-2)
Whenever I create a world, I try to avoid requiring its inhabitants to perform any type of work that they do not naturally enjoy. Let’s say that I create a being; then I command that being to wash the windows of my palace; but then I learn that this being dislikes the job of washing windows – in that case, what I would do is lure the being into a state of slumber, and then I would augment the part of its personality that controls its likes and dislikes: as soon as that element has been amended within the being, I would wake it up and try commanding the being again: “Wash the windows of my palace”; and what should happen then is that the being would make love to this employment. That’s my preference, in these matters. I would rarely ask a father to make a burnt offering of his son, without a good reason. And what could justify such a request? Does it benefit me in some way, to watch the poor man slay the lad and cook him?
Now I hear you argue: “But God did not allow Abraham to follow through with the plan to slay his son. God put a halt to the business before it went too far.” – Oh, is that true? I never watched the scene play out.
And now you add: “God was only trying to give a foreshadowing of the sacrifice that he himself would eventually make of his own son, Christ.”
Hey, I just thought of something: the Alien Deity that created Jehovah should have stopped the crucifixion right when Christ was all bloody and screaming out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me,” (Mark 15:34) — at that instant, he should have sent an angel to call out and say, “Jehovah, Jehovah! Lay not thine hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing unto him: for now I know that thou fearest me, seeing thou hast not withheld thy son, thine only son from me” (Genesis 22:11-12). For this would have saved the life of Jesus Christ.
Plus, it would be interesting to interview Jesus afterwards, and to ask, “What do you think of that last-minute development in your story, which circumvented what could have been a tragic ending? All your work here could have been lost – aren’t you thankful to have such kind and loving forefathers?” And I believe that Jesus would answer this like so: “I only wish that my Father in Heaven would have interrupted the judgment of this world’s God a bit earlier, so that I would not have been forced to hang so long on the cross before being freed. For now I have these unsightly puncture wounds in my body. But, yes, I am thankful, because ‘a living dog is better than a dead lion’. Howbeit, even now, I cannot let down my guard, for ‘the worst is not, so long as we can say: This is the worst’.”
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