My understanding of strength lead to my agnosticism
We tend to think of power as brute force; raw destruction. Therefore, when we think 'all-powerful' (or at least most-powerful, if we're being practical), we're implying something ominous about whatever deity we apply that label to.
Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that existence, that God, is simply 'strongest.'
Remember the distinction for a little while.
What is strength? It can mean integrity, it can mean durability, it can mean power, it can mean control; it can mean many, many things. It can mean all of them at once.
A submarine is strong, even unarmed; its armor can withstand astounding pressure, and if you ram it into something, it's going to cause damage. Give it torpedoes, and it is, of course, stronger; even if its control scheme is primitive, it can cause much more damage. Of course, the more sophisticated the control scheme, the stronger the submarine; it's hard to argue that a submarine that can't apply its power precisely is stronger than one that can harm only what it means to. After all, by definition, if the two submarines were to do battle, one that could put one torpedo right into the other's hull on the first shot is stronger than the one that fires a whole payload and has no guarantee of hitting its target. The surer the shot, the more likely the shooter will win; that shooter is stronger.
Sonar enables a submarine to detect enemies and flee before an insurmountable threat is upon them; a submarine can be outfitted with equipment to outmaneuver or neutralize depth charges. With enough storage or perhaps even something radical like a sustainable garden on board, the crew can survive for months when an enemy has them cornered in a chasm. Evasive and defensive measures, even those that don't rely on destruction of any sort, allow the submarine to survive longer. A submarine equipped with them is stronger than one not equipped with them.
What you begin to realize is that a submarine that can guide a missile into a specific house without damaging any of its neighbors is stronger than one equipped with only nuclear warheads. It has more options, plain and simple; that submarine could engage almost any enemy, while the one with the nuclear warheads couldn't engage any enemy that was close enough to cause the nuclear explosion to destroy its carrier in the explosion.
The underlying concept to this is, perhaps, the primary reason I stopped calling myself an atheist. It's at least a major one. There was a time I couldn't fathom how a God could actually exist when war and starvation and hurricanes are allowed to occur.
I came to realize that becoming stronger also means becoming more aware. A child without an allowance imagines what it would spend its money on, but upon becoming an adult with an income, few of those things are ever purchased. An atheist imagines the idea of heaven and concludes that, were there a God, the only moral choice would be to let us all in immediately and not have us endure the pain of this reality.
It turns out that the stronger we get, the less we exercise our power. The stronger we are, the more we're able to predict the collateral damage incurred by our choices. Spending your paycheck on luxuries could mean foreclosing on your house or being evicted from your apartment; indulging in indiscriminate sexual intercourse could mean spreading a lethal disease; executing a man who killed another man while in an uncontrollable rage doubles the number of people mourning a loss.
The stronger you become, the more capable you are; that is to say, more options are available to you, and at the same time, you're able to see why choosing many (perhaps most, perhaps the vast majority) of those options would cause more harm than good.
Perhaps God could answer someone's prayers and change the outcome of who wins the next lottery, but God doesn't because he knows the one praying would squander the money, become spoiled or complacent, and fall short of some vast potential that they were working towards before they won the money. Perhaps poverty was better.
Perhaps God could alter calm the oceanic winds and ensure that Florida and the gulf coast are never forced to endure another hurricane, but what if that meant that Canada, Northern Europe, and Russia stopped receiving the warm air and rainfall that enables people to live there? Starvation in those areas and overpopulation in the areas that people flee to. Perhaps a hurricane is a lesser tragedy.
What if letting a child die in Africa enables a thousand to live in other countries? I don't know how that death could prevent the others life; I'm not strong enough to understand. But that's just it. I'm not strong enough to make that judgment. It's an awful, depressing possibility, but we need to account for the possibility that the child should not have been saved.
Looking at it this way, I can look at reality and understand that it's possible that there's a higher power at work. A creator? All-powerful? Omnipotent? Omniscient? Perfect? I don't know; I doubt many of those qualities, at least. But it's still easily possible that there's something far stronger than humanity out there. It could be a singular being, it could be more than one, it could be a collective consciousness or a kind of energy, or there really could be nothing at all. I don't know, I'm not equipped to understand, and until I am, it does nothing for me to make frivolous guesses.
What I can understand is that the strongest people seem to be the ones that choose options that require the least amount of effort and make the smallest impact possible on others. What I can understand is that, often, the strongest choice is to choose to do nothing at all.
Maybe it would be more appropriate to say that existence, that God, is simply 'strongest.'
Remember the distinction for a little while.
What is strength? It can mean integrity, it can mean durability, it can mean power, it can mean control; it can mean many, many things. It can mean all of them at once.
A submarine is strong, even unarmed; its armor can withstand astounding pressure, and if you ram it into something, it's going to cause damage. Give it torpedoes, and it is, of course, stronger; even if its control scheme is primitive, it can cause much more damage. Of course, the more sophisticated the control scheme, the stronger the submarine; it's hard to argue that a submarine that can't apply its power precisely is stronger than one that can harm only what it means to. After all, by definition, if the two submarines were to do battle, one that could put one torpedo right into the other's hull on the first shot is stronger than the one that fires a whole payload and has no guarantee of hitting its target. The surer the shot, the more likely the shooter will win; that shooter is stronger.
Sonar enables a submarine to detect enemies and flee before an insurmountable threat is upon them; a submarine can be outfitted with equipment to outmaneuver or neutralize depth charges. With enough storage or perhaps even something radical like a sustainable garden on board, the crew can survive for months when an enemy has them cornered in a chasm. Evasive and defensive measures, even those that don't rely on destruction of any sort, allow the submarine to survive longer. A submarine equipped with them is stronger than one not equipped with them.
What you begin to realize is that a submarine that can guide a missile into a specific house without damaging any of its neighbors is stronger than one equipped with only nuclear warheads. It has more options, plain and simple; that submarine could engage almost any enemy, while the one with the nuclear warheads couldn't engage any enemy that was close enough to cause the nuclear explosion to destroy its carrier in the explosion.
The underlying concept to this is, perhaps, the primary reason I stopped calling myself an atheist. It's at least a major one. There was a time I couldn't fathom how a God could actually exist when war and starvation and hurricanes are allowed to occur.
I came to realize that becoming stronger also means becoming more aware. A child without an allowance imagines what it would spend its money on, but upon becoming an adult with an income, few of those things are ever purchased. An atheist imagines the idea of heaven and concludes that, were there a God, the only moral choice would be to let us all in immediately and not have us endure the pain of this reality.
It turns out that the stronger we get, the less we exercise our power. The stronger we are, the more we're able to predict the collateral damage incurred by our choices. Spending your paycheck on luxuries could mean foreclosing on your house or being evicted from your apartment; indulging in indiscriminate sexual intercourse could mean spreading a lethal disease; executing a man who killed another man while in an uncontrollable rage doubles the number of people mourning a loss.
The stronger you become, the more capable you are; that is to say, more options are available to you, and at the same time, you're able to see why choosing many (perhaps most, perhaps the vast majority) of those options would cause more harm than good.
Perhaps God could answer someone's prayers and change the outcome of who wins the next lottery, but God doesn't because he knows the one praying would squander the money, become spoiled or complacent, and fall short of some vast potential that they were working towards before they won the money. Perhaps poverty was better.
Perhaps God could alter calm the oceanic winds and ensure that Florida and the gulf coast are never forced to endure another hurricane, but what if that meant that Canada, Northern Europe, and Russia stopped receiving the warm air and rainfall that enables people to live there? Starvation in those areas and overpopulation in the areas that people flee to. Perhaps a hurricane is a lesser tragedy.
What if letting a child die in Africa enables a thousand to live in other countries? I don't know how that death could prevent the others life; I'm not strong enough to understand. But that's just it. I'm not strong enough to make that judgment. It's an awful, depressing possibility, but we need to account for the possibility that the child should not have been saved.
Looking at it this way, I can look at reality and understand that it's possible that there's a higher power at work. A creator? All-powerful? Omnipotent? Omniscient? Perfect? I don't know; I doubt many of those qualities, at least. But it's still easily possible that there's something far stronger than humanity out there. It could be a singular being, it could be more than one, it could be a collective consciousness or a kind of energy, or there really could be nothing at all. I don't know, I'm not equipped to understand, and until I am, it does nothing for me to make frivolous guesses.
What I can understand is that the strongest people seem to be the ones that choose options that require the least amount of effort and make the smallest impact possible on others. What I can understand is that, often, the strongest choice is to choose to do nothing at all.