I find it hard to understand why religious people say grace before a meal. It seems to me that the Bible gives a fairly explicit account of how God created the world, but it’s a little vaguer on the question of why. It would appear from events related in the Old Testament, however, that the reason God created people was to have something to worship him. If that is the case, it makes us at best his pets and at worst his slaves. If people choose to be content with that status, fair enough; it’s their right. But surely it’s the responsibility of any pet owner – or slave owner, for that matter – to provide the being in his charge with the material requisites to enable survival. Why should the pet be thankful? Surely, the pet’s position would be ‘You want me, you feed me.’ It makes more sense to me to thank the food for giving its own life to provide me with the means to keep mine.
Another thing I don’t understand is why people who survive close brushes with death thank God for their ‘deliverance.’ If God is what religious people believe him to be, then he exists at least on the level of spirit, if not above. So why would it be an issue to him whether a person is alive or dead. Living and dead would be all the same to God, wouldn’t it?
These are just two of the more minor reasons why I gave up on that idea of God a long time ago.
4 comments:
I don't claim to be any righteous person because I'm not. Nor do I claim to be the conventional Christian because I know that I'm not. But I do believe that God created humans for a reason. He had a reason to create Earth and He doesn't have to tell us mere humans anything. Maybe it's something even our intelligence can't comprehend. Man just wasn't meant to understand all.
And the grace before eating thing- I don't do that anymore, but I guess it's just saying thanks to God for being fortunate enough to afford food.
Also the deliverance thing... I believe in that, too. I believe that it's God's message to some of us that life is more precious than we take it granted for, and in doing so, we treasure it more. That's my opinion anyway. I've been swayed in my faith a lot of times before, too, but this is what I've arrived at every single time. You're entitled to your own opinions though :)
It's just that I got to a point, Lu, where the concept of God as a transcendental 'being' seemed far too inadequate. I believe in God, too, but in a very different way. And I would never use a gender-specific pronoun.
lol i 've always grown up thinking God was a man. Not like a man, man, but I always pictured him with a beard, so I've always just imagined him more like a He than a She :P
Nearly everybody does, Lu. But you must have wondered why the Bible represents God as a man. That isn't necessarily a criticism, just a point to ponder. Other cultures venerate Woman as the life-giver. And when you get into the more complex philosophy of Buddhism, the whole issue of life itself comes into question, and the notion of 'life-giver' assumes a wholly different level of importance.
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