A Woman In Texas Complains About The God Taught To Other’s Children

TXBlue08 Wrote “Why I Raise My Children Without God” on the CNN site. This woman is raising her children in a community in which she feels herself a religious minority.  She keeps a blog and writes about these things.  The main points of her article were these:

• God is a bad parent and role model
• God is not logical
• God is not fair
• God does not protect the innocent
• God is not present
• God does not teach children to be good
• God teaches narcissism

The piece itself is an interesting protest. In her conclusion she asks for tolerance, and that people keep their beliefs private. I’m not sure she’s really after privacy (given that she broke her own by writing her piece) but rather wishes to engage in the conversation about religion. Most of the article is a protest OF the beliefs of others.  Another way to think about the article is that it is a defense of NOT following the dominant theistic culture around her.

If we would reverse her complaint we might suppose that if there were a god she would prefer that this god would be as follows:

• That God be a good parent and role model
• That God be logical
• That God be fair
• That God protect the innocent
• That God be present
• That God teach children to be good
• That God model humility

If I had time it would be helpful to work through the whole piece, but many of her points are essentially the same. Here are some quotes:

If God is our father, then he is not a good parent. Good parents don’t allow their children to inflict harm on others. Good people don’t stand by and watch horrible acts committed against innocent men, women and children. They don’t condone violence and abuse.

 If there is a good, all-knowing, all-powerful God who loves his children, does it make sense that he would allow murders, child abuse, wars, brutal beatings, torture and millions of heinous acts to be committed throughout the history of mankind? Doesn’t this go against everything Christ taught us in the New Testament?

He does not keep our children safe. As a society, we stand up and speak for those who cannot. We protect our little ones as much as possible. When a child is kidnapped, we work together to find the child. We do not tolerate abuse and neglect. Why can’t God, with all his powers of omnipotence, protect the innocent?

Does she ask for a bad thing?

Rather than engaging in the typical religious conflict, I’d like to ask whether she is asking for a bad thing? I’d suggest that for the most part she wants what I want. Can such a world be had?

What is Religion?

While “TXBlue08” or “dam” as she goes by on her own blog might argue that this debate is about religion vs. irreligion, I’d suggest that it is all very much about religion if you understand religion to be our quest for the answers for the problems of the world. TXBlue08 advocates for being more environmentally conscious regarding restaurant take-out food containers. I haven’t perused much of her blog but I’m sure she advocates a number of other positions as well, many of which I might very well agree with. She in fact has an idea of what the problem with the world is and how it should be addressed.

If you read her protest of the community god she is disbelieving we can see that she wants a world where people don’t hurt each other, where murder, child abuse, war, beatings and torture are non-existent, where abuse and neglect are not tolerated. She wants the world to be a safe place and the major threat against people is people.

The heart of her complaint is really very simple. There is no point in waiting for a God to rescue us, protect us, bring justice to the world. We must bring justice to it ourselves. We must use power, influence, persuasion, education, parenting to make the world a just and save place.

Now most of us won’t argue that we want to use the tools available to us to make the world a just, safe place. The conflicts tend to arise when we start to get specific about what a safe world looks like and specifically what are we to do both with differences of opinion about justice, means to pursuing justice, and the lengths to which we can use power to address evil.

If there were a God, how might that God bring about such a safe world?

If there is a story in the Old Testament that tends to confirm the common caricature of the God of the Bible as being uncaring, capricious, bloodthirsty and ruthless, it is probably the story of the Genesis flood. In this story God destroys all living creatures except a few who are preserved in an ark. The story bears with it all the ironies of our culture, where we create child’s toys and children’s book of arks and animals upon stormy seas while conveniently redacting the annihilation of a planet beneath those waves. This is a serious story about serious things.

How Is Violence Addressed? 

You may recall from an earlier lesson how the Hebrew creation story differs from the Babylonian story.  The first violence we see done against people is in chapter for where Cain murders his brother Abel. This seed began in chapter 3 with Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God and it bore fruit in fratricide.

As the story continues past chapter 4 we see that while there is a lot of other development, violence and evil continue to grow. God’s attempt to limit the shedding of blood by giving Cain a sign of protection gets mocked and exaggerated by one of Cain’s descendants:

Genesis 4:23–24 (LEB)

²³ Then Lamech said to his wives, “Adah and Zillah, listen to my voice; O wives of Lamech, hear my words. I have killed a man for wounding me, Even a young man for injuring me. ²⁴ If Cain is avenged sevenfold, Then Lamech will be avenged seventy and seven times.

The boast is made in contrast of Cain’s situation. While the LORD would protect Cain and try to limit bloodshed, here Lamech announces himself to be the arbiter of justice, the protector of his persona (he killed a young man for injuring him, either physically or via insult). What we see, however, is that Lamech is not doing justice.

Creation Regret

Genesis 6:5–6 (LEB)

⁵ And Yahweh saw that the evil of humankind was great upon the earth, and every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was always only evil. ⁶ And Yahweh regretted that he had made humankind on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart.

Genesis 6:11–13 (LEB)

¹¹ And the earth was corrupted before God, and the earth was filled with violence. ¹² And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted its way upon the earth. ¹³ And God said to Noah, “The end of all flesh has come before me, for the earth was filled with violence because of them. Now, look, I am going to destroy them along with the earth.

Genesis 6:17–19 (LEB)

¹⁷ And I, behold, I am about to bring the flood waters over the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life from under the heaven; everything that is on the earth shall perish. ¹⁸ And I will establish my covenant with you, and you must go into the ark—you, and your sons, and your wife, and the wives of your sons with you. ¹⁹ And of every living thing, from all flesh, you must bring two from every kind into the ark to keep them alive with you; they shall be male and female.

TXBlue08 wants a god to see and be present. She wants a god to act and intervene. She wants a god to stop the violence, the bloodshed, the oppression, the enslavement, the neglect and abuse.

It is unfortunate that we read the text in English, because there is a wordplay in Hebrew in this passage. The earth was “corrupted” before the face of God and filled it with violence. Why? Because all flesh had corrupted it. This same word “corrupted” is then used and is translated here as “destroy”. The word means “to ruin”. Humanity ruined the world with their violence, and so in return God “will ruin” it to wash it clean and give it another start.

Creation Reset

This story is about a creation reset. If you read the text carefully you see in the manner God used to create the orderly space for the world (separating the chaotic cosmic sea) he undoes it, creating a flood, and then redoes it, once again creating dry land.

Rather than remake the “living creatures” including humanity he preserves them with a covenant with the ark and they are spared. He remakes the world using the absolute best man and family he can find upon the face of the earth.

The violent, the negligent, the lazy, the abusers, are all wiped out, and God starts the world again. This time will we avoid the ruin and violence we saw develop the first time?

Noah’s Perfect Family

The nice children’s Bible show good Noah, wife, sons, daughters-in-law and animals placidly sailing. They seldom tell the next tale. Once the flood has subsided and Noah can work the ground he plants a vineyard and gets drunk on the wine. One of his sons sees him naked and mocks him. When Noah sobers up he curses his son.

So often Christians want to talk about “family values” yet in the short story so far of humanity we the family of Adam and Eve, where one brother kills another. We have the story of Lamech and his two wives, where he admits to murder and vows genocide on anyone who crosses him, and now we have Noah, the best man in the world who is weak with the bottle and wrathful towards his son.

TXblue08 wants good things for her children, the best. She’s clearly an energetic mother who is using all the tools at her disposal to raise her children the right way, and implicit in the pieces she writes it the belief that somehow better parenting will save the world.

Is she the first mom to hope this? How many adult children are in therapy trying to undo the world saving projects that their moms and dads implemented through them?

Revision 2 goes the same way as Revision 1

As the story continues we see that the descendants of Noah are no better than the descendants of Adam. Noah’s sons will coalesce together and try to build a city construct a mountain to try to look God in the eye. Noah’s children are sons and daughters of Eve and bear the same ambitions that Eve realized in the garden with the serpent.

Are We Lacking Judgers and World Savers?

The story of the God destroying the world destroyers fairly and completely at once realizes the hope of TXblue08 and her horror. We quickly stand in judgment over God. Surely the judgment was too universal!

We judge God’s judgment to be so while we employ similar means. Out of fear and frustration did we not bomb non-combatants and children during WWII?  While trying to avoid civilian casualties don’t we continue to take the lives of the innocent in Pakistan and Afghanistan in drone attacks?

Even such acts of power that we imagine today to have been purely good, like freeing the slaves of the Confederate States, were hardly unmitigated good. 

Our imaginations run wild. Our minds fill with better ideas of how an all powerful God could surely only kill the “bad people” and save “the good people” or somehow take away from us the ability to do wrong. Would he also take away from us the ability to think wrong? And around and around we go with this.

The irony of this is that we don’t do it ourselves. We imagine ourselves to be good, but we don’t evaluate each other as being good. We imagine that with a little more power we would fix the world, but the track record of humanity has been that the more power you give to individuals the more damage they do to those around them.

The irony of TXblue08’s post is that she’s criticizing the religious world savers and their schemes while promoting her own, and her plea for privacy is essentially “allow me my own personal domain in which I can establish MY will and MY way of making the world as I want it.”

The Humble God

The most insightful point on TXblue08’s wishlist seemed the most innocuous. Surely we all want the obvious evils to stop and we imagine that with enough power this will be done. The irony, however, is that all of this missionary zeal so often turns people into narcissists. Their narcissistic ego creates enough gravity that all other light is sucked into the demand of the ego to satisfy itself, to be seen as right and the demand that its will be done.

How would a being that is in fact perfectly humble, perfectly patient, perfectly wise, perfectly in control not only of the earth but of all narratives that reach before and after the history of the earth death with human violence?

The story of God’s plan to rescue us from our own violence in fact begins after his reset of the world. The focus of God’s plan shifts from massive use of power to subtle, selective wooing of a family’s will. If the world is to be saved, it must be saved from the inside out.

The story of the God of the Genesis flood is the story of a God who felt the pain of his violent creation. He demonstrated that use of massive, unilateral and “fair” power is not sufficient to rescue us from ourselves. This God now takes a quiet, humble, subtle, non-coercive approach to woo us from our path.

Embracing Ceremonial Drowning

It is no secret that the chief boundary ritual for Christians is baptism. The relationship between baptism and death is less understood.

Baptism is a ceremonial form of a water ordeal. Baptism is ceremonial trial by water.

In the Old Testament one of the most obvious trial stories is the trial by fire of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace in Daniel 3. They sustained a trial by fire and were found righteous.

In Romans 6 Paul notes that we are united with Christ’s death in our baptism. What does that mean? How does water symbolize death?

In the Genesis flood water is the means of testing the righteous from the unrighteous. Water destroys the unrighteous and vindicates the righteous.

In the cross Jesus becomes the victim of the drowning judgment of God.

Who Shut the Door?

Genesis 7:13–16 (LEB)

¹³ On this same day, Noah, Shem, Ham, and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and the wife of Noah and the three wives of his sons with them, went into the ark, ¹⁴ they and all the living creatures according to their kind, and all the domesticated animals according to their kind, and all the creatures that creep upon the earth according to their kind, all the birds according to their kind, every winged creature. ¹⁵ And they came to Noah to the ark, two of each, from every living thing in which was the breath of life. ¹⁶ And those that came, male and female, of every living thing, came as God had commanded him. And Yahweh shut the door behind him.

Where does this leave the LORD? With the drowning masses of the earth to suffer with them. What does Jesus do on the cross? He endures the righteous judgment of God against the violent of the earth, even when he did no violence.

In baptism Christians are joined with Christ in that drowning. While Christians can identify with Noah, the righteous best guy who has a weakness for the bottle and can be abusive, in baptism we identify with the drowned god who does not exclude himself from human suffering.

Raised with Him

Paul isn’t finished, however, with the baptism in death. If we share in his death, we also share in his resurrection. In fact Paul says that this is the answer to humanity’s problem.

Romans 6:1–7 (LEB)

¹ What therefore shall we say? Shall we continue in sin, in order that grace may increase? ² May it never be! How can we who died to sin still live in it? ³ Or do you not know that as many as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? ⁴ Therefore we have been buried with him through baptism into death, in order that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so also we may live a new way of life. ⁵ For if we have become identified with him in the likeness of his death, certainly also we will be identified with him in the likeness of his resurrection, ⁶ knowing this, that our old man was crucified together with him, in order that the body of sin may be done away with, that we may no longer be enslaved to sin. ⁷ For the one who has died has been freed from sin.

Become Like the God TXBlue08 Really Wants

TXBlue08’s doesn’t want a god different from what the Christians say they have, she just sees no evidence of such a god and so she lives her life trying to be that god in her own small way.

She will talk about logic and evidence but I fear what they will reveal to her. All logic and evidence suggests that the ways in which she attempts to bring about the the world she hungers through her exercise of power and control will fail to establish that world and may in fact lead to rebellion against those actions on the part of the children she is trying to save.

No amount of admonishing us to recycle will likely turn the tide of environmental devastation we see around us. No amount of libertarian privacy seeking will build the kind of thick human community her children will need when they leave her nest. No amount of logic and evidence will undo the fact that everything she strives by force of will to establish on the earth will be destroyed by time and by her own confession will decay and be forgotten. In a godless universe every cry of protest has no enduring hearer who can remember her plea.

I would invite her in all logic and reason to hope harder in the god she is wishing for but not finding and perhaps take a chance on believing that such a humble god might in fact exist. That such a god would love her sufficiently as to rescue her from herself, and the rest of us, and make even her protests against him part of a story of rescue and glory that will endure longer than the sun.

If such a case comes to be, then in fact all her strivings for a better world would not be in vain, and that she might in joy realize that the safety she longs for is in fact available to her and those she loves.