Good Friday

I have nothing really to write today. Today is Good Friday-the centerpiece of the Christian calendar and the event that made Easter occur. I could write something glowing and reprint an excerpt from the Bible or perhaps from the sermon One Solitary Life. ( Which is, by the way a great read).

Yet-as is always in the back of mind on this day-what Good Friday says about God strikes me as not entirely a good thing. Here, after all,  is a deity-the Creator of the Universe- who is so  unfair as to demand the rather painful sacrifice of an innocent man. This when he could have actively intervened in any time since the Fall to steer his creation back to the proper path. Perhaps The Landlord needs to more actively mange the property.

Free will is overrated. So too is the idea that literally billions of people have to suffer while some grand timeline plays out to its conclusion.

Unlike Christopher Hitchens and others-I don’t seethe with anger over the fact that this timeline is playing out. And therefore they use the inconsistencies of that line of thinking to deny that God really exists. I can’t go there. One because I firmly believe there had to be a Divine Designer behind the world-it clicks together too well for their not to be something bigger than chance behind it. Second-what Hitchens and the others forget is that they are not God. So even if the rules are fundamentally unfair-they were never ours to make.

Just ours to deal with.

Which is why I try to avoid religious philosphical discussions because -being a man of logic and one who likes to pull threads all the way- the more you try to pull this thread the murkier the waters become.

I sometimes wonder though-had I been born in a Muslim country, or say India-would I accept the Christian version as the “right one”?  I regard Islam as apostate and Christianity as correct. But is that just a matter of conditioning? Perhaps so,  perhaps not.

I do know-that if one does not insist on a literal interpretation of the works of the three mono-theistic religions, they actually hang together pretty well. Viewed from an allegorical sense, they state a fundamental truth-God loves man, while at the same time He demands big  sacrifices of him.

Which is probably about as far as I want to go writing down things I think about a lot. And its probably why I have come to like the Catholic Church so much-in that it remains focused on improving man here-as much as to acknowledge his need to get There. Render under to God the homage that is due Him-and let the rest take care of itself.

And THAT’s while I will never be any kind of a great theologian. But it all makes sense to me.

Have a blessed Easter Weekend.

UPDATE! Andrew Sullivan-who disagree with as much as I agree with, has written an excellent and more indepth food for thought article here. Money Quote:

Fundamentalism, in this sense, is not a rigorous theology. It is rigid resistance to a rigorous theology. It’s a form of denial and despair. It is rigorous only within a theological structure that does not account for the growth and expansion of human knowledge. It is therefore, to my mind, an expression of a lack of faith rather than an excess of it. And the use of fundamentalism by those who do not even believe in it – for whatever purposes, good, bad or indifferent – is the real blasphemy.