#1

I’m really still trying to get my head around the fact that God is everything, both good and evil, justice and injustice.  At church and FOCUS, they  never address that.  They build God as a completely pure, perfect, blameless being.  But I’m seeing in Job alone (and with the help of Jung), that that’s not true.

God can’t create a rock so big that he’s not strong enough to move it.  I’ve gone through that sentence in my head over and over and I can’t grasp it….I’ll get it for a small second and then I think about it too much and it slips away. 

If God really is all the evil in the world as well as good, then who is he to make me feel bad about being sinful?  Obviously he created me, and he is the most powerful being (except for himself…) so I’ll give him that, but if he’s all evil, then he is the evil in me, and therefore he can’t put all the blame on me. 

On the other hand, if he is all good/justice, then he does deserve my awe and praise.  I think they talk about this in Nine Stories (JD Salinger)—Teddy said he realized one day when he was pouring milk on cereal that he was pouring God on God.  It’s so weird to think about.  I’ve always through of God as being everywhere, but in the sense more that he knows everything than that he is everything.

I’ve always pictured God with long white hair/beard and a long white robe…pretty cliché.  But what if God actually does look like us, and we were literally created in his image? 
   
Sometimes I freak out today thinking that humans are just here purely by a freak chance—a series of events that happened exactly the right way… that we’re just marbles bouncing around on a board without direction or purpose.  But then I think that so many billions of things had to go exactly right for us to exist that there has to be a God, or something. 
   
I watched The Butterfly Effect the other day… made me think about how if something seemingly so tiny and unimportant like a butterfly flapping its wings can make such differences, imagine the insane amount of effects that we’re causing every second.  Every single thing that happens in the effect if billions of other things that happened an exact way. 
   
Last thing… I liked the idea brought up in class that Heaven is all around us and in us, not something that happens later.  Even if it’s not true, I think we should live as if it is.

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#2

I just finished the Exodus reading assignment, and I can’t figure out why God hardened Pharaoh’s heart so he wouldn’t let the people go for so long.  If he wanted them to be free, he could have made the Pharaoh let them go whenever he wanted.  But he said specifically that he (God) would harden Pharaoh’s heart.
   
I guess God had motives that we don’t know about.  Maybe he wanted to demonstrate his power (I think I remember him saying something like that).  Maybe he had some other reason for not wanting them to be free right away.  Maybe he knew that that was going to happen, but he didn’t control it himself…but he took credit for it anyway to make himself seem more powerful. 
   
Mr. Shaffner brought up the point that if God is everything, then he is hardening his own heart…which messes up the whole point.  The idea that God is everything pretty much does that to every argument.

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#3

I really like the idea that there is one consciousness and each person’s body/mind is just the lens with which they view it.  That would explain why there are common symbols in dreams, and why there are cases of people having an idea of some sort of God even if they’ve never been told about one.

I was thinking today about how insignificant I am.  We’re supposed to keep going.  Humans, animals, the world.  Everything in our nature seems to help out to make sure we survive long enough to reproduce.  Why, though?  We don’t really do anything… we survive and we try to attain happiness and we make progress for humans to come.  But what is the point on the larger scale, whatever scale that may be?  Are we just entertainment for someone? 
   
I used to have an “ant theory” when I as little:  ants go about their business gathering food, building homes, etc.  When a human steps on an ant hill, they don’t know what happened.  All they know is that their work was destroyed by a more powerful force.  What if we’re the ants, and something else is the “human?”  We can’t comprehend what happens when we die or a million other things, so we come up with religion to make sure feel better.  And why not?  Even if there is nothing actual behind the belief, we feel more secure.  Because nothing is more terrifying than thinking that this world is all just an accident, that we’re all alone. 

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#4

I’m reading this book, The Shack, right now.  To be honest, I think the writing is pretty poor, but it has a cool premise.  God is portrayed as three characters (representing the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost).  It got me thinking about how God is so much more distant (physically) from us than he was in the Old Testament.  What happened?  Or did we just lose the ability to believe/notice/interpret the way that they used to?
   
I heard this pretty cool story about my camp counselor’s friend.  He used to be a Christian but completely gave it up.  Then, the day of the London bus bombings a few years ago, this guy was walking down the street and heard a voice telling him to go into the church he was walking by.  He went in and sat down.  Twenty seconds later, a bus exploded, killing people exactly on the street where he would have been had he kept walking.  Another counselor knew someone who had screamed at God to give her a sign of his existence.  The next night, she was struck by lightening and survived.  
   
I don’t know if these are coincidences or the real thing.  If they are real, why would God chose these people to survive?  There are plenty of non-believers.  I wonder if the general human consciousness that we were talking about can develop as time goes on.
   
I think of myself as being inside my head.  I guess because that’s where my brain is and that’s where I see from.  But I’m just as much in my toe as in my head.  Or am I? Maybe I’m just kind of hovering around my body.  Am I just an object?  I mean, I am.  My thoughts, feelings, everything that seems like so much more than just matter are still just chemical reactions taking place in my body. 

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#5

Conscience vs. Morality

We were talking in class about the difference in conscience and morality.   We decided that your conscience depends on the values that you are raised with, and morality is built in to your nature.  I wonder about whether it’s my conscience or morality that determines how I act sometimes.  I feel as if I couldn’t kill another person, no matter how I was brought up.  But maybe I really do only feel that way because of the standards that I grew up with.