Dear Cell, let me caution you first: this letter is not a letter about answers. It is in fact a letter generating more questions than answers. Answers to what, you may ask. Well, answers to all the questions you have about God, His existence, His love and His power. For those of you who attended Cell last Friday, the discussion was a challenge to our faith. The challenge was this: How do people come to the conclusion that there is no God or that God is cruel and sadistic? How do you answer them? Let’s go for the jugular. Professor Richard Dawkins, an atheist extraordinaire, will take the first shot at our religion with this shockingly invective quote, “God is arguably the most unpleasant character in all of fiction. Jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloody thirsty ethnic-cleanser; a misogynistic homophobic racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicial, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously, malevolent bully.” When you finally come exhausted after poring through the Oxford dictionary to find the meaning of those big, long words, you can take this rabid quote as the signature, all-compassing mantra for all non-believers with a religious axe to grind. It is like a convocational pledge, a national anthem or an initiation oath-taking for the hot headed atheists, the narrow-minded agnostics and the vindictive free-thinkers.
But, the implied question yesterday was this, does Dawkins have a point? Maybe not the whole spiteful load of it. But the undertones and sentiments behind his quote are unmistakable. Without misquoting Dawkins, I think we can say that he is of the view that there is no God. Or, at least the probability of His existence is so marginally negligible that it is as good as taking it as a generally accepted and universally sensible confirmation that there is no God. Period. And you don’t need to be a Professor to share this sentiment with Dawkins. You can be a preschooler and still be able to identify with him. A year ago, my son, who was only six years old, casually asked me this question, “Daddy, how come God can hear us, and we cannot hear God?” Of course, this is not exactly an expression of doubt by a young boy but it is the cornerstone of all theological questions about the existence of God. It always starts innocently enough and, if left on its own to fester, it can grow into something catastrophic for the devout Christian parents, possibly leading to a renunciation of one’s faith. So, we as Christian parents have a sacred duty to fulfill and that is, to protect our children from the pernicious thinking that comes with Dawkins quotes. But how do we do that? Do we have better answers to offer that will annihilate all doubts?
Honestly, when Jezer asked me that question, I took it quite seriously. I thought it was too early for him to challenge me in that way, so nonchalantly, so disarmingly and so innocently. But of course, I knew Jezer didn’t realize the full theological weight behind that question. But I knew as the years roll by, when he grows older and wiser, the question will be less innocent, less amiable and maybe more confrontational. The older Jezer will want an intellectually satisfying answer and expect me, as his father and a cell group leader, to give it to him.
At this stage, many religions have come forward to offer their answers to a variant-form of the same question posed by Jezer. When the tsunamis struck South East Asia and took the lives of fathers, mothers and young children alike, altogether 250,000 lives were taken that fateful boxing day of 2004, the religious journalist, Gary Stern, went around mosques, temples, churches and secular communities to scout for answers and he wrote a book about it entitled, Can God Intervene? His question was simple enough but the answers were far from simple. He started off with this, “Is the mystery of God’s role in the tsunami any different than the mystery of God’s role when one innocent person suffers?” The question makes two presumptions about God. First, God has a role in all the natural disasters in this world, whether man-made or otherwise. Second, God’s role was and is and will always be a mystery, largely unexplained and situationally obscure.
Well, the theologically correct answer is that there is no difference. God is equally mysterious in both situations. There is no way to know why natural disaster happen in a place and time we least expect it to strike and take away so many innocent lives and why an individual has to suffer unexplained illness without any fault on his part. If it is a mystery, it will always be a mystery and explaining it fully will only take away the mysterious elements out of it, thereby making it a known fact rather than a mystery. Of course, telling my son that it is a mystery will do little to sate his intellectual appetite. He would want to know why it is a mystery. Or, is it just another tactic Christian parents employ to avoid answering the question?
Here, the atheist’s answer would be the easiest and even most tempting. In the book, Gary interviewed David Silverman, who is the national spokesman for American Atheists, and his answers were the most rational of them all. “If you combine benevolence with omnipotence and all-powerfulness, you can’t have natural disaster…Either God sent the tsunami, which means he is not a nice guy, or he didn’t know it was going to be there, so he’s not omnipotent, or he couldn’t stop it, which means he isn’t all-powerful. You can’t get all three. If you think about it, natural disasters disprove most religion, especially Christianity.” What is even scarier is that Silverman became an atheist when he was only 6 years old (my son’s age) when he said, “I realized that God is fiction. I kept asking questions and getting non-responses.” Silverman did not stop there. His religion bashing was most frightening and vitriolic with this conclusion in the book, “(Silverman) thinks most people are atheists. They innately understand that life doesn’t make sense and that no one is in charge. But they pretend to be believers so they don’t have to face the truth. They don’t want to deal with it, so they pretend that they believe in the invisible, magic man in the sky. That’s why when you challenge them on it, they get so defensive, angry or withdrawn. Prayer is a form of self-hypnosis so that people can convince themselves they’re not going to die. A natural disaster is a shot of reality. People doubt mythology when they’re confronted with reality.”
Well, my only wish is that my son is not as “enlightened” as Silverman was when he was six years old and took a path wholly different from mine.
At this juncture, I can get a little creative with my answers. I can tell my son what Reverend Tony Campolo once said. Basically, Campolo conceded that God was not in control of everything. He said that God limited His power by personal choice. It was the same choice He made when He sent His son to be slaughtered by His own creation. By sending Jesus, God made a conscious choice to limit His power by not interfering when Jesus was scorned, whipped, bound, tortured, ridiculed, misjudged and crucified. The bloodied, wretched and dejected face of Jesus at the cross was the epitome of God’s self-imposed restraint of power. It was therefore for a greater purpose that God had tied up his own hands. It was for universal salvation that God chose to turn his face away from Jesus at Calvary. As for the tsunami and all such natural disasters, I can tell my son that God chose not to act because that was the only way we could experience the full plethora of what we humans constantly clamor for, that is, “freedom of expression, will and choice.”
Take a personal example in this case. If I want my son to grow and mature, to learn from his mistakes and be independent, I would have to let go and let him do things his way sometimes. I cannot be controlling him 24-7. I cannot be telling him what to do, how to do it and why he should do it the way I would do it. For example, I cannot tell my son who he should love, how he should run his adult life, and what career path he should take. My son just has to muster the courage to take that first step on his own and sometimes suffer the consequences arising from his own personal choices. Furthermore, it is not on every occasions that the adage “Father knows best” is fully applicable. I could be wrong about things, misjudging them, or just being careless about it. So, my son should be left on his own to grow and mature. By extension, this example, however imperfect, is the same reason why God left us alone at times to learn, grow and mature. In other words, God cannot be chaperoning us all the time. By analogy, we will have to spread our wings on our own and take flight at our own pace. So, don’t expect God to be holding on to both our wings and flapping them for us. This will only ground us further instead of lifting us up.
And by leaving us alone, this will inevitably result in some hurt and pain in our lives as we face life’s challenges head on.
Of course, this explanation suits us fine when we are talking about pains of life that bring about our growth. There are many lessons to be learnt from failures. Many people are invariably stronger, wiser and more resilient after a financial or business debacle. But how do I explain to my son about meaningless and pointless sufferings in this world. Surely, God shouldn’t restrain His power to help when an innocent wife is crying out to Him for healing from Aids which she got from her unfaithful husband. Yesterday, we talked about a little Thai girl sold into the brothel at a tender age of 12. When they raided the brothel and entered into her tiny squalid room, they found many prayers for help scrawled on her wall – most of them were left unanswered by the one person who has the power to help. She had suffered so much despite her constant, daily cry for help. It is therefore tempting to ask, Where was God when she was forcibly taken by greedy mercenaries and sold like a cheap chattel to be repeatedly violated by perverted, STD-infected men, thereby ruining her life for life?
At this point, if my son is intuitive enough, he will pester me with these questions: Why can’t God be more discerning and discriminating about his choices to limit His power? Can’t He protect the innocent, defend the weak and make a way for the sincerely earnest without compromising the integrity of our free will and choice? Can’t a perfect God strike a perfect balance between divine intervention and humanity’s freedom of will?
Maybe, I should change tack or strategy. In respect of natural disasters, I should look at my son eyeball to eyeball and tell him that there is a scientific reason why tsunami happens. It is call shifting plate tectonics. I should tell him that there are several plates in this world holding continents and countries together. There are the Indo-Australian plate and the Eurasian plate. And when these dynamic plates shift or move violently, they cause natural disasters. There is therefore nothing divine or devious about it. As such, we do not throw a few manslaughter charges at these huge geological moving plates and pronounce them guilty. How about cancer? Maybe I can tell my son that cancer works almost the same way – sometimes they strike because of man-made choices in the food they take and the lifestyle they adopt and sometimes because of blind random genetic mutation without assigning any blame, and sometimes both are contributing causes.
In fact, another way of looking at it is that cancer is the disease of the rich, well-off and long-lived. You see, during primitive times, the mortality rate is usually high and many died young. By dying young, they were spared the pain of contracting cancer because cancer is generally the disease of the relatively old. When we age, our cells become more unstable and they tend to mutate and these harmful mutation multiplies or metastasizes, causing the dreaded cancer. So, in biological terms, there is always a trade-off; that is, the good and bad in all things. It is generally a blessing to grow old. But in growing old and enjoying the fruits of old age, there are also the despicable weeds of old age and they come in the form of neurological decay like dementia or genetic haywire like cancer or vascular entropy like stroke.
In like manner, in geological terms, the earth we live in is the only planet, as far as the human telescope can capture, that can support a bio-diversity of life. We live in harmony and peace on this planet because the conditions are just right for us and all other living organisms. It is somewhat like a beautiful Garden of Eden on Earth except for some expected trade-off like earthquakes, tsunami, volcano eruptions and hurricane. In other words, in order for the majority of us to live, some unfortunate minority will inevitably perish in a way that seems unfair, cruel and mysterious.
Lastly, my son should know that no action stands alone on its own. There are ripple effects for every action sowed. One man’s policy may result in another’s tragedy. If a mother chooses to smoke, she risks a miscarriage, or worse, her child may bear the consequences of her actions. If a man seeks easy and quick profit, he may sell his young daughter to a man three times her age for a price. If the leader of a nation gives in to peer pressure and chooses to engage in war with a country for the flimsiest of ideological reason, we can expect a lot of civil casualties, resulting in future recriminations and revenge, and the cycle of violence can go on and on without stopping. So, there you have it, causes and effects are part of the reason why sufferings are so prevalent in this corrupt world.
In the end, I should know that my adult son will not be completely convinced by the above answers; because they appear to generate more questions than answers or more heat than light.
So, when that day of reckoning draws nigh, when my adult son ever come to me for answers, I would have to tell him what I told you guys all these years, “Son, I can’t give you an intellectually satisfying answer to your question, but I can give an emotionally fulfilling one.”
Let me share with you this passage from the book God on Mute authored by a church-planter Pete Greig.
“A story is told of the Nobel Prize-winning Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn when he was imprisoned by Stalin in a Siberian gulag. One day, slaving away in sub-zero temperatures, he finally reached the end of his endurance. Discarding his shovel, he slumped onto a bench and waited for a guard to beat him to death. He’d seen it happen to others and was waiting for the first blow to fall.
Before this could happen, an emaciated fellow prisoner approached Solzhenitsyn silently. Without a word of explanation, the prisoner scratched the sign of the cross in the mud and scurried away. As Solzhenitsyn stared at those two lines scratched in the dirt, the message of the cross began to converse with his sense of despair. “In that moment, he knew that there was something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that the hope of all mankind was represented in that simple cross. And through the power of the cross, anything was possible.” Picking up his shovel, Alexander Solzhenitsyn slowly went back to work.”
Beloved, Jesus is all we need and all we have to give to my children. He is the spiritual legacy to our loved ones. In their short life on earth as compared to the eternity that awaits, our children’s faith will surely be tested and it is of no practical use to tell them that God, like a tall dark charming prince in a shining armor, will come to their rescue every time they cry for help like a damsel in distress. Do your children a favor and don’t mislead them by telling them God is some kind of a celestial Arnold Schwarzenegger, forever arming himself with machine guns, readying to aid us, and perennially sprouting the catch-all phrase, “I’ll be back.” Your children will not be immune from troubles and troubles have no eyes sometimes. They do not choose who will be their next unlucky victim. They just strike when the biological, geological and made-made clock is up. But with every storm, comes the sunshine. By the same token, with every sunshine, lurks a storm. As long as we are on earth, living our lives in human flesh, limited by these mortal bodies, we are vulnerable to life’s challenges, however unfair they may be.
Ultimately, when the storms of life come, when our lives are being tormented by circumstances beyond our control, we can choose to echo these haunting words of the atheistic philosopher Bertrand Russell:-
“We stand on the shore of an ocean, crying to the night and to emptiness; sometimes a voice answers out of the darkness. But it is a voice of one drowning; and in a moment the silent returns. The world seems to me quite dreadful; the unhappiness of most people is very great.”
Or, just maybe, we can turn our eyes upon Jesus and cry out to Him with this sincere prayer.
“Abba, Father, I know all this stuff about Your love in my head, but my heart gets hard to it and I’m tired. Please do whatever You’ve got to do (and I mean whatever) to unclench my fists. Pry open my eyes so that I can see Your tears and soften my heart so that it moves me deeply. I don’t understand why You don’t just answer my prayers, but I do choose to trust that You have heard me, that You actually do care and that You’re somewhere out there on my case. Abba, Father, thank You for all the ways You have blessed me. I honestly don’t know what I’d do, where I’d be or even who I’d have become without You. Abba, Father, I am going to try to trust You today. Amen.”
Beloved, the choice we, or more relevantly, our children will make will ultimately depend on how we have been living our Christian lives in their eyes. Let’s send a clear message to them. Let’s live out our faith so that when our children face their own crisis in life, they can always think about how we overcame ours and draw strength and courage from it to overcome theirs.
Have a meaningful Christmas with your loved ones.
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