grace and love for us soft squishy mortals
This started off as a somewhat ranty response to someone trying to tell me that their god was the source of all good things... but I think it's central enough that it shouldn't just be cast off into the ether for one person to reject. It's probably glaringly obvious and been thought of many time before, but here it is.
I find grace among real people in the present, who are gracious not due to their role in the cosmology, prophesy or some covenant made with people long dead or cobbled together into a historical gestalt, but due to effort, inclination and rising above the call of duty. Same goes for love - maybe the love I feel from people and feel for people is not perfect and world-shaping, but it's beyond what people's natures and obligations require, and beyond what I can stick into a little rational-self-interest box, and beyond describing sometimes, so it's special. There are people out there like that, theists, atheists and undecideds, more than any theology of a fallen world would care to admit. Perfect? No. Permanent? Probably not - some of them quite transient, some of them enduring within the bounds of what people can manage. Patient with my boneheadedness, neglect and foibles? Well, not infinitely, but again, often more than I deserve. It may not be infinite bounty out here in atheist-land, but unless you compare it to the infinity attributed to a god of the gaps and asymptotes, it's good and real and sits firmly in my sense of the real rather than the theoretical or faith-based.
Sometimes I can think I feel God - some part of my Nazarene experience was spent interpreting the world that way - but there's a better, more beautiful and simpler/more-complex/more-subtle explanation out there. One time when I was still going to the Church of the Nazarene and in its thrall, I told my mom about all the stuff I felt God was doing for me. She responded by reminding me that I had a part in that (which is all well and good to be humble about, I guess) and that other people - mere, soft, squishy mortals - did too (chalking them up to just being little pawns of some puppet-master god is just plain ungrateful if you believe in free will). What does that leave? The contributions of animals and inanimate objects? Well, I don't know about you, but it's been certain people and the occasional sentient critter that have been supportive and loving over my 24.5 years... these are the influences I can be thankful for because they had a choice, and they had limited strength and time and perspective, and they were still more gracious and loving than some basic sense of civility or mere pleasure in being friends of family might require. I brushed my mom's words off at the time somehow, but they've stayed with me since.
I find grace among real people in the present, who are gracious not due to their role in the cosmology, prophesy or some covenant made with people long dead or cobbled together into a historical gestalt, but due to effort, inclination and rising above the call of duty. Same goes for love - maybe the love I feel from people and feel for people is not perfect and world-shaping, but it's beyond what people's natures and obligations require, and beyond what I can stick into a little rational-self-interest box, and beyond describing sometimes, so it's special. There are people out there like that, theists, atheists and undecideds, more than any theology of a fallen world would care to admit. Perfect? No. Permanent? Probably not - some of them quite transient, some of them enduring within the bounds of what people can manage. Patient with my boneheadedness, neglect and foibles? Well, not infinitely, but again, often more than I deserve. It may not be infinite bounty out here in atheist-land, but unless you compare it to the infinity attributed to a god of the gaps and asymptotes, it's good and real and sits firmly in my sense of the real rather than the theoretical or faith-based.
Sometimes I can think I feel God - some part of my Nazarene experience was spent interpreting the world that way - but there's a better, more beautiful and simpler/more-complex/more-subtle explanation out there. One time when I was still going to the Church of the Nazarene and in its thrall, I told my mom about all the stuff I felt God was doing for me. She responded by reminding me that I had a part in that (which is all well and good to be humble about, I guess) and that other people - mere, soft, squishy mortals - did too (chalking them up to just being little pawns of some puppet-master god is just plain ungrateful if you believe in free will). What does that leave? The contributions of animals and inanimate objects? Well, I don't know about you, but it's been certain people and the occasional sentient critter that have been supportive and loving over my 24.5 years... these are the influences I can be thankful for because they had a choice, and they had limited strength and time and perspective, and they were still more gracious and loving than some basic sense of civility or mere pleasure in being friends of family might require. I brushed my mom's words off at the time somehow, but they've stayed with me since.