Having lived in Salt Lake City for several years, one is always confronted with the majority religion: The LDS Church. Reading articles about the health benefits of coffee and prior articles about the health advantages of a glass of wine each day, I have to wonder: Are certain religions that demand abstinence from certain types of foods keeipng people from being as healthy as they could be? Surely, if it is proven that these things do have a long-term health benefit, then God would not choose to deprive anyone of this health benefit. Then again, that may be the plan. Perhaps, the original plan was a world where these things did not exist, and now someone gets a reprieve for awhile. Obviously, these are rhetorical questions.
Items like this continue to give us pause as we try to reconcile our definition of God with what we now know to be true through experience and science. 500 years ago if I had anyone of a dozen dieses, I would cetainly die. The locals would expain it away as they do now as its God's will. But, if I get that same ailment that can be cured easily today, I will live. If we use the logic that it is God's will that I live now, then why give me the ailment that can easily be cured? I fail to see how the death 500 years ago can be God's will, but today it can be God just wanting me to get sick? FOr if that cure didn't exist, we would say it is God's will.
I know, I know...the central issue is that these are man's saying and our way to try and understand and cope with things. I do not have a problem with that. As long as the next time I go to a funeral or listen to the reports from New Orleans, no one uses the trite excuse that God has a plan for each of us and that is why 10,000 men women and children deserved to die. In my book, that is simply the workings of a feckless thug.
This all goes back to my theory that God designed the universe and stated it off. The way it evolved and became what it is today, is entirely the implementation of the plan. I cannot believe that God has a hand in our day-to-day lives because if he did, then New Orleans would not have happened. BTW, I do know the arguments of if Hurricanes did not happen then much more damage would have happened, and God sparred New Orleans by making the storm swerve at the last minute -- those seem a little contrived and too simplistic, no? Nope, I believe that we are basically on our own and that society and our fellow man is the higher power we all share. I certainly have a higher power, but I refuse to believe a diety could look down and decide to change something in my life. Because if he could change something in my life, how in the world could he kill so many innocent people? If this sounds familiar, it is indeed the "Oh, God" school of religion. In the movie, George Burns' God says he created the worl, what we did with it was up to us. Free will it a bitch (to quote the devil from another movie). As the debacle in New Orleans shows, when you leave any enterprise up to the free will of man, his pety intellect and massive shortcomings will always get in the way. But, I will save that for another time.
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Age old questions of God's will.
Is God active in our day to day lives? I believe if we ask Him to be, He is. Is he a magic genie? No.
Is he someone that will protect us from all harm and bad things? No. When it is said He allows all things, it is in deference to His power to stop it if He so chose. His choice to remain hands off was made at the beginning of time - and cemented when man ate from the forbidden tree.
Does God have a plan for all of us? I believe so. But that plan is not necessarily what WE believe to be in our best interests at at the time. God doesn't plan for us to be in the path of a storm, that is simply a result of our choices in life, and natural consequences of life on earth. God's plan is of much greater scope - our life on earth is a blip in the eternal scope of things, though it is all we have to go on now, making it seem more important than it is. God's plan is essentially that we end up in Heaven - and he has set forth the road to salvation. It is up to us to cash in the check. Our time on earth, each breath we take, is not guaranteed.
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