How Much Help Should We Expect From God?
Planet Earth is reaching the brink of major calamity on several fronts. Financial markets are crumbling internationally while millions are already starving. Millions more could be plunged into the hardships of poverty through financial ruin as economies collapse and jobs vanish. More wars for oil loom on the horizon as sabers rattle at Iran. Our sickened planet’s air and water continues to be spoiled through exploitative management of dwindling energy and natural resources. Old tensions between Russia and the US are resuming after years of peaceful co-existence and partnering. These situations and others are on a growing list of acutely menacing problems.
Sound reasoning coupled with vision, design and creativity has taken civilization from being hunters and gatherers to the zenith of technological development. Misuse of these abilities has also taken us from merely killing one another with rocks and arrows to the threat of nuclear annihilation. Are we in over our heads?
How much help should we expect from God?
- Gary Vance's blog
- Login or register to post comments
Seeking God's Help
Gary,
I think you pose a very important question. In some ways, I feel like our only option is to ask God for help and I expect him to work his ways to help solve these problems through us. Each of us might ask God to be an agent of his, to do his will and perhaps then we might see the light. Without such entreaties, I worry because these are dark and dangerous times.
The greed and avarice of those on Wall Street have essentially ended their industry. As of yesterday there are no more investment banks. All of us through our taxes will pay for their mistakes even as they made millions or hundreds of millions in paper wealth over these last decades.
The pride and arrogance of our foreign policy has us in two wars that are not ending any time soon. Russia is reasserting itself on the world stage. Our debt to China is astronimical hampering our ability to demand it allow for democracy and religious freedom. Our reputation is tarnished throughout the world.
Our planet is in serious danger of catching firing and yet we hear from large segments of the population, "drill, baby drill."
The problem is so many of us, don't make the request for God's help amidst this turmoil. We believe we can figure this out ourselves or in many cases we just walk away from these global problems all together. "They're too hard to understand. They don't relate to my daily life. I have too much else on my plate." I know I'm guilty of this from time to time. It takes a post like yours, a kick in the rear from a friend, or just a reestablishing of my relationship with God through prayer that helps overcome these feelings of despondency.
Would God Intervene If We Asked?
I also posted this blog on Smirking Chimp and have received about a dozen responses so far. I knew from previous experience that it would probably be blasted by the Chimpsters. It seems that many on the Left are disdainful of the very idea of God...especially the Christian version. They generally hold no hopes for Divine help for us and tend to rabidly mock the very idea. How sad to think we are on our own and are limited by our finite shallow knowledge to resolve the issues at hand.
I have put this piece out as a form of survey to help inform my own approach in seeking to mobilize an effort to obtain Divine guidance. I still have hopes of obtaining God's pragmatic wisdom for our beleaguered planet and Divine help with humanity's struggle to survive here in a just and merciful fashion.
I have labored sporadically with Crossleft and the IPC over the last several years with a fading vision of seeing Christian men and women coalescing around a focalized effort to seek God and find the healing solutions to our most acute needs. Would God intervene if we asked?
The post on Smirking Chimp and the comments can be found on the link below. Read 'em and weep.
Gary
http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/17269
Good times never that good, Bad Times always have silver lining
Gary, this is a good post. I don't know what the Smirking Chimp site serves, but it seems like a fairly hostile site for Christians or religious believers of any sort. I commend you on your quest to find God's wisdom for our planet and for human struggle.
I believe that good times always have their dark side, but that bad times always have their silver lining. Nazi Germany and the Holocaust was a horrible time, but it was a time that brought out a Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch Christian who saved many Jews from Nazi persecution; an Oskar Schindler, a Nazi party member and war profiteer who risked his life to save many Jews; a Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who went against his government and served transits to thousands of Jewish refugees to escape the Germans. In the Rwandan massacre of the 1990s, there was Paul Rusesabagina, who hid Tutsi refugees from the Hutu extremists. We didn't hear about these people until many years later.
I think humanity is always in over its head. These are bad times, but I think there are people out there right now helping out that we won't know about until many years later. I'm lousy at theology, but I think God intercedes in sometimes big ways, but also sometimes with these ordinary people who rise above their faults to do courageous things.
Angelo
Help?
Gary,
To some extent I agree with what Rich wrote as your first responder, in that I think we've been given all the tools we need although we haven't used them wisely. But I think there's little reason to be optimistic about the likelihood of our using the tools -- our reason, the resources of our planet, and our capacity for love -- wisely anytime soon.
My view: Our "sound reasoning" is apparent only in narrow contexts. Generally, we react rather than think. Generally, we're irrational, being conditioned by unexamined cultural assumptions as well as by our idiosyncratic psychological milieus and the peculiar structure of our brains. (I'm far less taken with the idea of "free will" than Rich is.)
As for reaching "the zenith of technological development", I think we're far from that. The zenith of technological development would come when our technologies work to sustain our environmental life-support systems instead of destroying them. At the hypothetical zenith, and aside from whatever future marvels of ingenuity that are invented, our technologies would allow us to live completely in sync with the complex and evolving ecological systems in which we live as embedded co-creators.
Instead, our technologies are embedded mostly in institutions that 'couldn't care less".
So I think we're in over our heads.
Looking to the Bible, I think there's reason to see parables for our times in the stories and prophecies of judgment and destruction. Armies, locusts, and other signs, omens, and catastrophes of "biblical proportions" provide many pertinent metaphors. If there's to be deliverance, it's more likely to happen eventually rather than immediately, and only after much loss. (The current financial crisis may be a handy model: the structure is rotten, our leaders are working out one kluge after another to try to fix things, the kluges are temporary, more destruction is probably coming, and eventually the destruction will work its way through the system. The acute phase of the crisis will pass and then we'll be in a new, as yet unknowable position -- perhaps strengthened or perhaps weakened.)
Rich raises issues about prayer. What is prayer from the standpoint of progressive Christians? For me, the formulas found in passages like Matthew 7:7, quoted by Rich, don't work in any literal sense. Praying for peace in a way is just another version of the Prosperity Gospel. We may think that peace and justice are the right things to pray for while praying for wealth, material goods, and 'success' are not -- but the process is pretty much the same. I think what we can pray for is to be instruments of peace and justice, and all that good stuff. Deist, theist, non-theist -- all can make their own kind of spiritual sense out of that kind of prayer.
Peace, indeed,
Bill
Free will and full responsibility -constant
Bill,
We can never avoid making decisions, to put off deciding is still a decision. We must still take responsiblity for that avoidance. There are always consquences no matter what you do, including nothing. There really is no such thing as "nothing" no-thing. Thus we are using our free will each and every moment of our life.
Yes, our decisions are made in many ways. On the purely phsyical it can be as simple as avoiding being burned, on emotional levels it is often reactive, mentally we make more "rational" pro-active decisions and spiritually we hope to learn from the masters who came before us such as Jesus and make decisions that benefit all. Hopefully.
That's where prayer comes in. Matthew 7:7 is to me very practical. As Psalm 46 advises, Be still and know that I am God. The answers we seek are within us, all we need do it be still and in deep prayer the answers will come. By combining our prayers with those of others, we multiply their power.
I've been on line that past couple of days researching science and prayer. Fascinating stuff. There is an emerging amount of science supporting the power of prayer. I'll share it in a later post.
Over all, I am more optimist than you seem Bill, or Gary for that matter. Yes we have monumental challenges ahead of us, but we must not lose heart - or we'll lose our heads and all be in deep do-do.
Now's the time to invoke the power of prayer, not only for our nation, but for ourselves. In trying times the tempation to lose our faith is strong. If we lose faith we lose it all. Keep the faith!
Read the 10 guidelines in How to Engage in Politics Without Losing Your Soul I posted earlier. I refer you to the 4th guideline (regarding our ultimate security) in particular.
I'll now post the last 5.
Do keep the faith.
Rich
Decision-making doesn't require Free Will
Rich,
I'm not sure how you got the idea that I advocate doing nothing. I was and still am, although at reduced speed, an activist. And temperamentally I'm an optimist and am almost off the scale on extroversion.
Like you, I believe that everything's connected and interactive -- which is at least part of the reason why I think unfettered Free Will doesn't exist. Like the Free Market, it's a myth, albeit a more useful myth than the Free Market one. Belief in Free Will is an adaptive trait -- it encourages active decision-making and discourages fatalism and passivity. Well, adaptive on balance -- there are certainly times when the best thing to do is hunker down and wait. But how do we discern when it's the time to act or the time to wait?
Maybe that's where prayer comes in: when it comes to ourselves and our world, we have substantial resources of information, knowledge, reason, and wisdom, incomplete though they be. To be instruments of peace, we have to use those resources wisely. Prayer, however one conceives of it, is a way of accessing all that. And accessing it within the framework of our deepest values. So for discernment in matters of importance, prayer can be an experience of emotional/rational integration -- the seeking and finding of wisdom. Even though the wisdom is always contextual and never final. Holistic, yes, but part of an uncompleted process.
So I haven't lost heart, regardless of what my analytical head tells me. I keep going back to my favorite cheerleader and gym coach -- Walt Kelly's Sis Boombah, a Rhode Island Red hen in Pogo, and that immortal cheer, "Fight on Chartreuse and Plaid!" (We're a motley crew so why not celebrate our motley colors....)
Re: Guideline 4: getting highly invested in election outcomes is not one of my problems. As Howard Zinn wrote in the March issue of The Progressive, "Voting is easy and marginally useful, but it is a poor substitute for democracy, which requires direct action by concerned citizens." The title of the piece is "Election Madness".
The Labor-Religion Coalition of NYS calls its quarterly newsletter "Justicing". I like that usage -- so I say back to you "keep faithing". Hmm, maybe "justicing" works better. Do that, too.
Peace. (I won't take a stab at "keep peacing". The long form of that is "There is no way to peace. Peace is the way.")
Bill
Four levels of decision making
Bill,
I don't know where you got the idea I thought you were not being an activist. I certainly don't see it in either your actions or your words. Oh well c'est live'.
Free will is always present. It's power, it's use, grows as we grow. Decisioning making always involves use of free will, limited as it may be in some situations.
On the primarily physical level it is largely instinctive. We automatically react to danger, instinctively. Yet we used a long series of free will actions to place us in a position of needing to avoid danger. You freely chose the circumstances that placed you in a position of danger. We are never victims of circumstances. It's in learning how we get into and out of the messes we find ourselves in that true wisdom arises.
On the emotional level we often re-act, rather than pro-act. It is our environmental conditioning (family, social, cultural and economic, to list just a few) that most often determines our reaction to stimuli. There are only two emotions, love and fear. Fear, coming from a more basic, lower level often dominates. The Republicans figured this out years ago.
It's when we get to the mental, the so-called rational level, that the power of free will consciously exerts itself. Here ideas mean more than emotional stimuli. Yet even on this level we often fail to make the most beneficial decisions because we often do not have all the "facts" we need to form an enlightened decision.
On the fourth level, the spiritual, is where the most informed decisions are made. Here is where faith comes in. Whatever philosophical path you walk; religious, spiritual, secluar ethical, you do have at your disposal well developed guidelines of behavior to follow. In is in employing our free will that we chose which path to follow, when and for how long. Sometimes we just can't figure out what decision to make. Here we must just "let go and let God", trust that whatever decision we make will be the best one for us, sometimes seeing that a power greater that ourselves knows better than we what we need. Accept the results and go on.
The real challenge is in learning the mix of decision making we employ. All four are intimately interconnected, interactive and thus are interdependent. Wisdom comes from inwardly knowing how we make decisions, freely use our will and take full responsiblity for the consequences of our actions.
No matter what you decide to do, free will is always present, to some degree. Knowing how to use to free will to make benefical decisions, for yourself and others is the challenge. To do so is to become a fully enlightened person.
Alas, I haven't yet found my bodhi tree, have you? :-)
Rich
God gave us the power of free will and full responsiblity
Gary,
With my background in science I have come to believe we live in an intimately interconnected, interactive, and thus interdependent universe. I have also come to believe that we were given, at birth, the power of free will, with it's accompanying counter balance of being fully responsible for our actions, those that we individually take, including joint actions with others.
As such I believe in an all encompassing creative force; omnipresent, omniscient and thus onmipotent. It is neither male not female, but both. I refer to this as Our Creator, what you refer to it as God. That's why I refer to myself as a Deist Christian, I employ both reason and faith (not that you do not either.) If you read closely you will see that the 1st three American presidents were products of the Age of Enlightenment, men of both reason and faith, Deists.
(They promoted a philosophy of freedom of religion and freedom from religion.)
What is the role of this all encompassing all powerful creative force? Having endowed us with the birthright power of free will, counterbalanced with the power of being fully responsible for our actions, Our Creator then must by reason stand back a bit and allow humans to use their birthright gifts, intervening only when asked. Thus there is no force that zaps us with a bolt of lightning if we screw up. Our Creator needn't do so, we do that quite well on our own, thank you.
Let's look at the word responsibility, which simply means being held accountable for our actions. It is based on the word responsible, which has several meanings. Here I employ, "Capable of making moral or rational decisions on one's own; thereby being answerable for one's behavior." I like to separate the word into, response and able. Able to, as the Course in Miracles says, to choose again, to respond differently. Each and every moment of our lives we can, and do, either consciously or un- or sub-, conciously choose again. We make judgements based on our world view and how it forms our belief system.
Being responsible for our actions, as guided by our belief system, we can choose from a wide variety of potential actions. If we are guided to believe that there is a power greater than ourselves, a power to whom we can appeal for help in crisis situations, then we can engage in what is known as prayer, especially petitionary prayer, which according to your description of the world we had all better get on with!
To answer your question, "What help can should we expect from from God". Only that amount to which we ask. I fully believe that Our Creator is quite willing to allow humans to destroy all global creation, sadly concluding we were a failed specie, with the unique distinction of having engaged in self extinctive behavior, we killed ourselves off.
(I also believe Our Creator has a sense of humor, this being one reason we were created. Lord some of the dumb stuff we humans do. It just has to make you laugh.)
On a more positive note, do not for one moment think we can destroy the whole of creation. Yes, we may via nuclear actions, destroy most of the life on earth. Yet as the geological record shows, life does return. It is not in our puny powers to fully destroy all of life. BTW recent experiments with the administration of high doses of radition shows that the ultimate survivor of a nuclear holocaust will not be, as some had assumed, the cockroach. No it's the fruit fly! It can survive exposure up to 100,000 times that humans can endure.
So Gary, we can expect only that help from Our Creator, from God, that we request. If you believe that the description of our world you offer is accurate, better get to prayin' preacher man and ask for divine intervention! I am, 'cuz to a large extent I agree with your description.
Thus is the power of prayer! It can, and does, change the course of personal and collective human events every time its power is exercised. Looking at the historic record, I firmly believe that we are not, as as society, beyond redemption, we just need to know we have options and that we can "choose again". Let us pray for divine guidance to help us make the right choices.
"Ask and it shall be given you; seek and you shall find; knock and it shall be opened to you." Matthew 7:7
Peace Reverend,
Rich