Posted by CB on January 24, 2012 at 08:11:25
In Reply to: Re: God is cruel, God hates me posted by I feel terrible on January 23, 2012 at 07:31:50:
I got snappish with you toward the end of my last post under “God hates me.” Right now I have a low tolerance for inane debates that seem to carry a subtext of “gotcha.”
Moral responsibility is a subject about which there is much confusion. I don’t profess to have it all worked out; nevertheless, I don’t waste a lot of time with blame. Maybe I didn’t freely choose every bad situation in which I find myself, but if I refuse to take any responsibility for my situation, I have given up my power to change. I've bought into a victim mentality.
I don’t think it helps to get into blame because that attitude implies some sort of condemnation and negative judgment of a person’s character or core being. Blame is like a stick we use to beat ourselves and other up. “A man can fail many times, but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.” (John Burroughs) Blaming oneself or others (including God) doesn’t solve any problems. The only real mistake we can ever make is refusing to learn from our actions and circumstances. Blame keeps us stuck in a sense of powerlessness and resentment and guilt.
Taking responsibility for what we have the power to change is different than accepting blame for events in our lives. “The willingness to accept responsibility for one's own life is the source from which self-respect springs.” (Joan Dideon) I am ultimately responsible for my relationship with God, and I flat-out refuse to do business with a God who beats me up, lets me get away with beating other people up in His name, or wants me to let some asshole beat me up so I can have the blessing of “turning the other cheek.” Forbearance of others does not mean I’m called to be a doormat.
If I’m wrong about who God is and what God expects of me regarding taking responsibility for my life, that’s my problem. If you’re wrong about those issues, that’s your problem. We each have to live with the God of our own understanding if we choose to believe in a Higher Power. It gets a little trickier if we choose to identify our Higher Power with the God of the Bible. I personally refuse to live with the tyrannical patriarch who shames and guilts me out with the message “you aren’t good enough” a long time ago. As I’ve already said, I also reject the Marquis-de-Sade God who gets His rocks off by making me suffer. In addition, I refuse to turn my life and will over a Snake-eyes God whose gambling addiction is the source of all the random crap that happens. When sh*t happens, the God of my understanding helps me figure out how to deal with it. I guess you could say I worship a therapeutic God, a divine healer and counselor. (Both of those ideas about God are found in the Jesus story.) Beyond that, my God is fundamentally a mystery. What I think I know about Him, I mostly get by trying to live according to Jesus' teachings. If I do my part, I “get” what He's about one day at a time.
I have a young friend dying of cancer right now. She didn’t do anything to deserve it, regardless of whatever God or lack of a god she professes. God is not punishing her and she is not punishing herself by harboring this horrible disease. Nevertheless, she is responsible for making choices about how to live her life with a fatal illness. It’s her life and death, and she can waste her time blaming God or fate or hatred of her body if she chooses to do that. She’s the one who has to live with her choices, not me. She can choose to avoid any responsibility for her situation and let events play out as a victim a medical establishment that will make choices for her.
But I suspect she will die the way she has lived for the last 15 years—with a great deal of courage and self-respect. In other words, she pretty much accepts her situation and does what she needs to do to maintain a reasonably good quality of life. She recognizes that “everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” (Viktor Frankl) We have the power to create our own reality, living and dying in whatever state of mind we choose--assuming there's not a major brain disease going on.
But that's another subject.