For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for April 21, 2011

He’s reaching that age. Next thing you know, he’ll be questioning the existence of Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy.

“I’m beginning to have my coubts” Isn’t that advanced vocabulary for a kid his age?

My boy stopped believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny when he was about 10. But he still believed in the Tooth Fairy, because he knew he wouldn’t get any money if he didn’t.

Michael, never question those who bring you the loot!

I’m not sure we ever told our kids there was an Easter Bunny. Never really thought about it. We hid Easter eggs and made baskets - they hunted them and when they were all found asked us to hide them again. They don’t seem too traumatized by never having had an Easter Bunny…

That’s where it started for me; no Santa, no Easter Bunny, no Tooth Fairy. It was only a short trip from there to no God. Fantasies are nice as a child, but you have to face reality sooner or later.

Sigh…so much fun to be a kid. The simple things that they have to worry about. Too bad you have to grow up.

Well, wantobe, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” This is not only theology, but common sense: if you can see something and already have it, faith and hope are beside the point.

But there’s a great difference between faith and fantasy. Based on how little first-hand personal knowledge each of us has about the world we live in, a moment’s reflection shows us that nearly all of what we assume to be true is, in fact, taken on faith — mostly we just take someone else’s word for it — and no one thinks twice about it.

When you lose faith in things you can’t personally see, hear, touch, etc., and things that you personally can’t understand, you may lose faith in things that are as real and true as your own pulse. And you can end up as a very small person, living in a very small world, to your own loss.

When you’re a kid, this is a big issue. Is it okay to doubt the things you believe or will that be the end of all the good stuff? Poor guy.

I think his vocabulary can be pretty normal if he reads a lot. My oldest has used the word “suppose” a lot since she was 4, a word that I hardly use. She also reads voraciously, and regularly uses words and phrases that surprise me.

Well said, scaaty!

As for me, I will go to the Lord’s table friday night, and I will be on the hill sunday at six am.

\\//_

Geez, and here Easter always reminds me of an Easter at our cousin’s house a long time ago. It was raining so the eggs were hidden in the house. Unfortunately, all the eggs were not, um, immediately found …

FishStix said: “It takes a lot more faith to NOT believe in a Creator than it takes to believe on one!”

That is not true and does not make sense.

and SCAATY said, “When you lose faith in things you can’t personally see, hear, touch, etc., and things that you personally can’t understand, you may lose faith in things that are as real and true as your own pulse. And you can end up as a very small person, living in a very small world, to your own loss.”

This also doesn’t make sense. These are both platitudes the religious use to make themselves feel better about believing in myths and superstitions.

My favourite is, “If you don’t believe in something, you’ll fall for anything.” The complete opposite is true. If you believe in incredible things with no good evidence, then you’ll fall for just about anything. And already have. Happy Spring!

Fish, Dave only made one comment that I can see, and I’ve read it 3 times to find the statement that creation is a myth or superstition. That’s YOUR inference from what he said. Obviously creation happened, since we are here. It’s the METHOD which seems to be in question. And we could use some insight into the fishing boat theory, which WE did not infer from your comment.

You just explain to me the reason for earthquakes in Haiti and Japan, and Hurricane Katrina, and the Asian tsunami at Christmas, and the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and World Wars I and II, for that matter, and maybe I can understand how Mr. All-Powerful could allow all that. You believe what you want, and I’ll do the same, IF you don’t mind.

Well said gofinsc

Dave, FishStix: remember Godel’s incompleteness theorem: any non-trivial algebra (that is, any logical system more complex than a simple tautology) must have at least one unprovable assumption. E.g., Euclidean geometry has its six postulates. In other words, using logic for anything more complex than A->A requires some exercise of faith.

When talking about the origins of the universe, “creationists” and “intelligent design” people make the unprovable assumption that a supreme being of some sort caused things to be the way they are (which leaves us with problems like theodicy). The scientific method makes the unprovable assumption that the universe behaves according to a set of laws that apply consistently across all of time and space (despite the fact that our experience consists of a few thousand years on one minor planet).

You cannot choose whether to have faith; you can only choose what you have faith in.

puddleglum1066,

Well said!

“Humans need fantasy to be human…You have to start out learning to believe the little lies.’

‘So we can believe the big ones?’

‘Yes. Justice. Mercy. Duty. That sort of thing.’

‘They’re not the same at all!’

‘You think so? Then take the universe and grind it down to the finest powder and sieve it through the finest sieve and then show me one atom of justice, one molecule of mercy. And yet…you act as if there is some ideal order in the world, as if there is some…some rightness in the universe by which it may be judged.’

‘Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point-

‘My point exactly.’

-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather (my 2 cents!)

I can only give my own personal answer, gofinsc — it’s thoroughly conventional, and it may not satisfy you, but it’s enough for me.

We live in a universe, yes, where events are either the result of random, mindlessly indifferent forces of nature, or directed by human choice motivated by either kindness or cruelty. Both the forces of nature, and human choice, can be beautiful and uplifting, or sickeningly ugly and hurtful. No one who has ever lived an intelligent day in this world could argue with this: it is what it is. No one can point to any objective, physical evidence that it could ever possibly be any other way, even in a fantasy, much less that a loving God created it all.

And yet…the nagging idea that there has to be something more, something better than the physical world can offer, is a universal human experience, in every time, place, and culture — and that in itself may be the best evidence for God that there is. Where could the idea of something better than this life possibly have come from? Certainly not from anyone’s experience of living in this hard, cold, utterly indifferent world. Rather, the only logically admissible explanation is that the idea could only be put into us by God himself. (Some of you may recognize that I’m paraphrasing C. S. Lewis, and not at all doing him justice.)

So how did the world get to be such a mess? We did it. (This is the conventional part, if you will.) You could take it that God created a world in which nothing bad or ugly would ever happen, and he created us with free will so that we could share in the experience of love — and we perverted his gift to selfishness, greed, and cruelty. We live in a sinful, fallen world, in which bad things happen to good people (and how could it be otherwise in such a world?), because we made it that way: he empowered us to choose, and we chose (and still choose) badly…and we took the benign natural world down with us. He will not revoke his gift by stopping us from doing bad — in a sense, he can’t: to an entity who exists outside of linear time, the concept of reneging has no meaning.

Maybe the point is that, while God created us, he is utterly unlike us, and we can no more comprehend what he does, or why, than an ant could appreciate Bach — as the Bible in fact tells us in many places. The most astounding thing about him (again, as the Bible points out) is that he actually notices us, and loves us, and wants us to know him as much as our nature will permit. It’s only our own infantile arrogance that lets us presume to judge him because his creation (including ourselves) isn’t always to our taste.

Well, you asked me to explain, and I did. My reasons probably wouldn’t be yours anyway — but keep demanding the answers. You never go wrong if you honestly, uncompromisingly seek answers, whether you like them or not.

Scaaty and everyone else in on this thread about whether or not there is a God, and if there is, why he or she (or it, for that matter) etc… Try thinking about this for a while.

Back when man evolved from a lesser primate, everything in his world confused and amazed him. He knew that he didn’t have anything to do with its creation. Eventually, he ascribed everything to the power of a group of powerful “Gods.” A God for the Heavens, a God for the afterlife, a God for the Water, a Goddess for the Grass and another for the trees, and so forth. Eventually, man became more sophisticated in his thoughts, and began lumping like creations with like. No more Goddess for grass and another for trees, just one for the fertility that he knew they had. Soon, this progressed into Jehovah, one God more powerful than any and all others (Ref. the First Commandment, “I am the Lord, thy God, and thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” Possibly referring to a polytheistic religious belief. Possibly referring to the fact that “He” was supreme to his brother and sister Gods.)

My thoughts are that as man progresses still further, he will no longer have need of a “Supreme Being,” and will think religion to be quaint and passe, not something he wishes to involve himself with. We already see this today with decreased church attendance.

Then there are those like me, who have a belief system that is not composed of belief in the Judeo-Christian ethic, but in something different.

I have no problem with your beliefs, just as I feel you should have no problem with mine. I’m in the US, I served in the military, and I shed my blood on a foreign battlefield, just for that reason. so that every person in our Country could enjoy the freedom to practice his or her beliefs, or to express that he or she has no beliefs.

May everyone have an enjoyable Easter Sunday. And let your kids believe in the Easter Bunny while they can, they grow up all too quickly and become just like the rest of us, trying to get by from here to the grave.

I have no problem with your beliefs either, yuggib, whatever they may be — you sound like a thoroughly decent and likable person, and I thank you for your service to our country.

I also have no problem with your detached irony toward those of us who actually care about something you dismiss as quaint and passé. There are worse things to be labeled than quaint and passé, :) and I appreciate your restraint and courtesy.

I wish you and yours an enjoyable Easter as well…Easter Bunny optional. :) Peace be with you.

Scaaty, I have no problem agreeing that man-made evils are made by man, and a certain amount of personal leeway is allowed by the “Creator”, perhaps as a way of encouraging belief in him/her/it. But no human action causes “natural disasters” which kill and maim thousands every year. If every life is valuable, and quality of life is also important, how can this happen if an all-powerful “being” is in control? Notice that these events often happen to poor people in underdeveloped areas. Maybe they just aren’t worth the effort. Or maybe they are all just evil incarnate.

An interesting thought — that natural disasters seem to happen preferentially to poor people in third-world countries. I can think of non-theological reasons, though. Statistically, there are many, many more poor people in third-world countries than there are wealthy people in countries like this one. So, if natural disasters are randomly distributed over the populated surface of the earth — they aren’t, but I’ll get to that in a moment — then poor people would disproportionately be the victims, simply because there are more of them to be in harm’s way.

Another thing: for a variety of good (if short-sighted) reasons, people tend to live in places that are more prone to natural disasters — along rivers that flood, on seashores that experience hurricanes and tsunamis, even on earthquake faults and next door to volcanoes. It sounds crazy when you think about it objectively, but even when everything they had has been destroyed, more often than not people are determined to rebuild in exactly the same place. Go figure.

But human greed and indifference to other people can always make a bad situation worse. Poor people tend to be found in the most physically at-risk and environmentally polluted places, because the wealthier ones have moved away, and the poor can’t afford to, or are socially or economically compelled to stay put. Sheer human depravity is never expressed more clearly than in: “I’ve got mine — screw you!” Human action may not cause natural disasters, but it can certainly multiply their victims.

In passing, both the Old Testament (especially the Book of Job, and Ecclesiastes…recommended reading) and the New Testament (especially the gospels) point out that people must not be judged as bad because they suffer, much less “evil incarnate” — sometimes it’s just the opposite: good people suffer, and bad ones go along fat, dumb, and happy. The writers of the Bible were not beguiled sentimentalists, but clear-eyed, hard-headed realists about the world as it truly is.

But the real point is that all of us go the same end, regardless…we live for the briefest of moments, we grow sick, we grow old, we die, and as far as any unaided human understanding can possibly know, we’re gone for good. Once we’ve been given life, God offers no guarantees of happiness, or wealth, or longevity; those may come, but only as unearned and loving gifts, not as an obligation because God somehow “owes” us something. Moses quotes him as saying, “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy; I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” If we’re at all reasonable about it, the simple fact that we have life itself on any given day, and any pleasure or joy, should be enough for us…we could just as easily never have existed, or have any of those things. Every time you breathe out, you don’t know that you’re going to breathe in again — which makes every breath a gift, an opportunity, and a joy.

The best that we can do in the face of this is to live honorably, enjoy our work, and be good to each other in each day that we’re given — the Bible has lots of helpful guidance on how to do that :) — and not make ourselves crazy with questions we can never know the answers to, except, if we can accept it, by faith. How much less then should we persecute others because they have different answers that they live by!

Peace.

Skaaty,

Thank you for your comments to me. I must say that I was not detached toward those that hold beliefs other than mine, nor was I trying to be ironic. What I was saying is what I think (with my small mind. C’mon, I live in the back hills of Tennessee, y’all! ;-) ) that mankind will come to in some distant future (“In the year 2525, if man is still alive, if woman can survive, they may find…”)

And…Chocolate Bunny’s are NOT optional. I want the EARS! (Just in case the ears on yours are missing.)

May this Easter find you and yours in Peace and love, Shalom

Big Guy

Interesting reading, thanks. I’d just like to address the previous comment about “Where could the idea of something better than this life possibly have come from?” It came from man, when his mind developed to the point where he could understand his own mortality. That is scary, so to comfort himself he began to imagine that after dying he would go to someplace better. Nobody had to put that idea in his head, it came from a natural desire to continue living and for there to be an easier life.

Dave, how would you answer those folks who have had the “light at the end of the tunnel” experience. There are just too many of them for it to be hallucination and they are too much alike for all of them to have made it up.

Thank you, Dave. It may be an overly scrupulous philosophical point, but I’m not sure I would agree that it’s possible to imagine something that our environment and life experience have provided absolutely no previous hint of, without some kind of gentle outside nudge. And even in your own terms — “… to comfort himself he began to imagine that after dying he would go to someplace better. Nobody had to put that idea in his head, …” — how would you be able to tell with certainty that the idea wasn’t put into his head? Particularly if, again, there wasn’t a shred of real-world experience even to suggest such a thing?

For that matter, the dread of death itself that you say would prompt such an imagining may come from an uncanny realization that death is somehow hideously wrong and unnatural. This is a gut feeling that we all share, underneath all of our mature rational understanding that, after all, there’s nothing more natural and unremarkable than for a living thing to die and seemingly be gone forever. But if death is so natural and universal, where we would ever get the idea that it’s unnatural and to be avoided, except from outside knowledge that it’s not the way it’s supposed to be? You might answer, because we, unlike any other life form that we know of, have the ability to imagine the future and don’t want to lose it. Fair enough — but where did we, alone, get that ability?

You can see that we can just keep kicking this can down the road, and not accomplish much…but I’m left with the conclusion that the purely materialistic, evolutionary sociobiology view is not the only possible explanation, it can’t be conclusively proven to be the only one, and, at least to me, it isn’t even the most likely one.

We can amicably agree to disagree, though, and just enjoy the conversation. I am. :)

I was going to make a little joke about the fertility rodent but it would be lost in all this.