| Did you ever see the movie "Suddenly Last Summer", with Katherine Hepburn, Montgomery Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor, written by Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams? In it, one character relates a trip he once took to the Galapagos Islands, and how he witnessed a bunch of birds pick up turtles' eggs, fly to a height, and drop them to smash on the rocks below, for no apparent reason. He says that on that day, he feared that he was seeing the true face of God. Now, I do not believe that is the true face of God, but I also do not believe that "the universe is a massive, constant expression of one thing:LOVE." There is too much cruelty and horrific waste for me to believe that. I think that God made the world perfect, and that the sin of some of his creatures has corrupted it. To me, there are only two real alternatives: belief in some version of a Fall, or atheism. Spinoza did the best he could with pantheism, by suggesting that what seemed bad was so only from a limited perspective, but I cannot believe that the Holocaust, or the Ukrainian terror famine, or, for that matter, a kid getting hit by a car, is good from a more comprehensive perspective. I can believe that, in the end, God will make everything right, but that admits that there is something to grieve over in the first place......... |
