Tag: God

Death

I fear death. I do; I fear death.

I want God; I do. I want God.

No, no, not the God of the Old Testament who condemned the entire human race to die because two people ate a fruit. Or the one who flooded the world killing all people except for Noah and his family or the deity who destroyed the unified language of man or the one who poured fire and brimstone to “smote” the people of Sodom and Gomorrah or the one who destroyed Egypt because of the institution of slavery which he allowed in the first place.

Not him. I do not want him.

Maybe I want the Christian God who was portrayed by Jesus as the loving father and the one who…no, wait, that God sent his son to earth to be horribly killed. For what reason? To rid us of the sins we didn’t commit?

Since many Christians believe that Christ is God, then God sent himself to earth to have himself slaughtered but at the end he said he didn’t want to do it but then prayed to God, who was himself, but accepted God’s will, meaning his own will, and went through with it.

I don’t want him; not him. There is something unsettling in that story.

I want a God who will hold me and comfort me, the way my mother did when I was a child. I still have some memories of those times—maybe I was five- or six-years old—as she calmed me in a world of hurt.

I want that love after I die.

I want to exist after I die.

Let me see my deceased family and friends now arraigned in their most beautiful guises.

I also want a heaven and, yes, yes, because I am human, I want a hell for those people who are awful people such as Hitler, Stalin, Mao and all those other monsters from history who are too numerous to name.

I even want a heaven for dogs and cats and parrots and apes of every variety. Let the animals enjoy a heaven too. Let the lion lie down with the lamb without dinning on the wooly creature’s flesh. People with pets want that heaven to exist. They want a puppy paradise.

But does such a place exist? Seriously, does it? I doubt it.

The books about the God (Yahweh) of the bible and the gods of other cultures give me no credence for any of it. All those books that I’ve read leave me shaking my head that anyone of any intelligence can put stock in any of this.

What has brought me to this moment as I write this? It is death.

Death. Death.

Human beings have the ability to imagine their own deaths, usually sometime in the far future, or even imminently, as a sudden stroke of the awful slays them. But it doesn’t usually hang over our heads except in war. Mostly it is a vague feeling when we are young. Mostly.

But as we age, as we’ve lived an enormous segment of our lives and are well past our peak, we feel the tentacles of death truly heading to grasp us in their unbreakable grip. We have medicine, yes; but none of it has prevented anyone from dying the permanent death. Although, we fight death, we think about it and fear it. We lose to it.

I am now the elder of my family. I am the gray-haired one—I even have gray hairs in my nose! At Thanksgiving, I am the oldest one at the table.

Recently several of my friends died—two of them way too young. Their deaths were sudden; immediate, bam! They were alive, then dead. Just like that. These two people gave the world the benefit of their existences. Their lives were worth living and now they are dead. Dead. Bam! Just like that.

I am closer to death now than I am to my birth; I’d have to live to a 144 years to call this the midway point of my life. I doubt my storehouse of prescription drugs can help me last to 144 years old.

All the ideas about death and the afterlife sold to us in sacred books by supposedly sacred people and by pronouncements of true believers carry no weight. I just don’t see any of that speculation as at all compelling, as at all real. It’s spit in the wind.

Oh, I do see death.

I see death seeing me.

I know one thing for sure; death has no soul.

Do I?

 

Frank Scoblete’s books are available at smile.Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, kindle, e-books and at book stores.  

God’s Wicked Sense of Humor

 

God has a wicked sense of humor. He really does. Adam and Eve eat a fruit (it was probably a fig by the way, not an apple) and they get the death penalty, not just for themselves, but for me and for you and everyone else. That punishment sure is severe. I don’t think we would be allowed to eventually kill everyone on earth because mom and dad screwed up by eating a fig.

Yes, some of the religious persuasion do not see this story quite as I do. They will say that Adam and Eve were punished for their disobedience by eating the fruit from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and that’s why you have to die. Okay, just a second: “Timmy, my son, you disobeyed me and ate Daddy’s orange. For that you die and so does everyone in your second grade class!” Shouldn’t all parents be allowed to do this? After all, I had a part in creating Timmy.

I think it is quite hilarious that God chose Moses to be the liberator of his people when Moses, while being humble as all heck, couldn’t speak a lick. He had to have his traitorous brother Aaron speak for him. So God speaks to Moses and Moses speaks to Aaron and Aaron speaks to Pharaoh. Why not just select someone who was good at public speaking?

In the New Testament the joke becomes amazingly weird. God impregnates the Virgin Mary and then she gives birth to, well, God. So God is his own father.

It gets weirder still.

When Jesus (who is God) knows he is about to get the hell kicked out of him by the Romans, he asks God (meaning he asks himself) to take this “cup” (meaning his upcoming torture and death) away from him. But then he says, “Not as I will but as you will.” Wait a minute Jesus is praying to God, who is himself, to take away his upcoming death but then he tells himself that he will listen to himself and have himself horribly tortured and then killed even though he doesn’t want to go through with what he has created for himself.  Huh?

There is also a scene in the New Testament where Jesus says he doesn’t know when the end of the world is coming and that only the Father knows. Wait a minute. Jesus is God and the Father is God, therefore God knows and God doesn’t know? Does that make sense? Yep, someone is pulling our leg and that someone has to be God. “I’ll tell them this and that and let’s see how long they can take it,” says God. “Ha, ha, ha! That’s hilarious,” says God back to himself, slapping his knee.

Even today, we can see God’s wild sense of humor. We are now experiencing horrible mass killings in churches, schools, movie theatres and the like. To prevent this, The First United Methodist Church in Tellico, Tennessee had a gun expert teach a lesson on guns. One 81-year-old parishioner bragged to all the audience that he always carried a gun on him. He postured himself as an expert. “Yup, I know everything there is to know about guns.”

When asked to show the gun, he took it out and accidentally shot himself in the hand and shot his 80-year-old wife in the stomach. Yup.

Then there was this Ohio legislator known for fighting long and hard against the gay community’s agenda, and a few days ago was caught in his office having sex with a man. Oh, and this legislator’s name is (wait for it) Goodman.

You see, God certainly does have a wild sense of humor and trying to make sense out of the Bible certainly isn’t going to enlighten us at all. My wife says we have to wait until we “get to the other side” (meaning snuffing it) to find out what all of this means. Perhaps she’s right, but I prefer to simply enjoy the chaos while I can.

Frank’s latest books are Confessions of a Wayward Catholic; I Am a Dice Controller: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Craps, and I Am a Card Counter: Inside the World of Advantage-Play Blackjack. Available from Amazon.com, Kindle, Barnes and Noble, and at bookstores.