Terry starts some interesting threads. Alas I tend to approach the main point of them by analysing the motivation behind them rather than addressing the issue raised. Slap wrist. Here is something more relevant to terry’s original point, taken from my notes of thoughts I had during my twenties:
Time to walk and ponder. Looking at the people and children playing in the park, I began wondered if all these people were really going to be slaughtered soon because they were not in The Truth. How could a just and righteous God commit such an atrocity.
I felt compassion for them and at the same time a growing sense of outrage. I had never tolerated the misuse of authority or bullying but here I was claming to love a God who was planning to slaughter all these innocent people, including me if I failed to please him.
He was certainly capable of such an act. I knew my Bible off by heart and had read of the flood in Noah’s day when a world of unrighteous people had been destroyed. Then there were the Israelites who God arranged to be taken into slavery for two hundred years and then rescued them, killing many Egyptians in the process. He then made them wander in the wilderness for forty years and claimed that he owned them because he had rescued them from the captivity he had put them in.
There were many more accounts of this God’s deeds and they all seemed to involve retribution, revenge and death. I was having difficulty understanding or justifying his reasoning. I had been told many times that God’s way are higher than man’s but this all seemed very low. How could the God of love behave in this spiteful way? Did I want to live forever in a world run by this God Jehovah? I was supposed to love him but I felt a growing disgust towards the whole idea. He had created us so was it really our fault he had made a mess of it?
The more I read about this God of the Bible called Jehovah the more uneasy I became. Whenever Jehovah was mentioned there was so much talk of fear and darkness. He was portrayed as a violent, angry male who could switch from feeling love to feeling regret and then throwing violent tantrums. Surly God should be more mature and above making mistakes, I reasoned?
As I examined what I had always accepted as truth, certain contradictions began to appear. None of the Bible writers had ever met this God or spoken to him, yet they claimed to know his innermost thoughts and plans. What if he was nothing like the petulant tyrant he was portrayed as? What if the writers had made God in the image of man and the earthly rulers they had known?
If that was possible then it was also possible that this God Jehovah did not exist at all. The idea was not new but I had closed my mind to anything that did not support the fixed view I had always held. Now I began to recall some of the comment that people that I called on, had made.