Credo
Blessed art I, the Lord thy God,
King of the Universe,
Who conveniently hateth thine enemy.
Who sanctifieth thy unsavory whims,
And justifieth whatever the fuck
you felt like doing anyway.
That's a bit from Credo, a short film that you can watch here. (Thanks to rlp.) The lyrics are here.
Regarding the film's major theme (the quote at the top isn't directly related) I'm not sure what I think of the idea that God cannot see the future, that he fails to understand the consequences of his actions, that he does not always do the right thing. It certainly explains a lot, about both the world we see around us and many troubling Bible stories. (The Bible never says God is all powerful, and what it does say about God changes an awful lot.) But it's a very frightening thing to consider.
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2 comments:
This was so interesting and well made. I will have to watch it a few more times to really decide what I think but I just would not want to follow a God who wasn't infallible. Ok, that is a high standard but trusting God means trusting that he knows the absolute best for us. If he is just guessing (albeit with more knowledge than we have) then I don't want him playing with my life.
Also, if God can't know the future either, then all the passages about satan already being defeated, the prophesies (sorry, i don't have my bible with me) then those would be false, no? There would be no guarantee in anything. Maybe i'm taking this too seriously.
Maybe we need to believe that God is infallible, the way little children believe their parents are infallible. At a certain points, children have to come to grips with their parents' limited knowledge and power, and realize that they've made mistakes in the past, and won't always do the right thing in the future. Of course there's a difference between being fallible and being untrustworthy, but it's much more comforting to believe that your parents are neither.
And it's even scarier, I think, to believe a being as powerful as God is fallible. The more power you have, the bigger the mistakes you can make. And if God really has done things like harden hearts and sanction genocide, and if he had no great, unfathomable reasons for doing so, then He's made some very, very big mistakes. Big enough that they may call God's trustworthiness into question. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm prepared to consider this possibility.
If God is really behind Biblical prophecies, He probably has at least some idea of what will happen in the future. But maybe He doesn't have foreknowledge, just intentions and the ability to carry them out. Maybe He doesn't know exactly how things will shake down, but He's confident that He'll defeat Satan in the end, like a chess master who's lured an inferior opponent into a complex trap.
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