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McSpanky

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  • Birthday 07/13/1959

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  1. Hello, I'm new to the forum. This looked like an interesting thread to weigh in on. Seems to me that any serious attempt at theodicy, Katrina notwithstanding, has to address several issues. People who share a theological perspective with Robertson or Falwell assume an imminant God who regularly intervenes in history to punish wrongdoers. OTOH, "God brings rain [and presumably hurricanes] on the just and the unjust." Natural disasters affecting Va. Beach or Lynchburg aren't frequent, so there's little puzzling over the fact that God "punishes" cities that aren't headquarters for evangelical religious media conglomerates. I think the deeper issue has to do with God's prerogative not to act. One helpful approach to theodicy is the idea that in order for there to be any free will in human behavior, there has to be randomness in the universe. A lack of randomness would indicate a deterministic world in which everything happens for a reason - and while many people seem to find comfort in such an idea, it would actually be a disaster. Sometimes things just happen without any particular reason, random occurances in a random world. God is self-limiting; God chooses not to intervene, at least most of the time. We get to choose how we respond to what happens, and God gets to choose, too: we can't really be certain that God never intervenes in history, since we can't assign God less free will than we assign ourselves. The story from Luke 13 addresses some of these issues, I think: I don't hear Robertson, Falwell & Co. preaching from that passage. Things are going to happen, Jesus seems to be saying; the state of your heart and soul when they happen is more important that who they happen to. I think God is immanent and transcendant. God may intervene, but more often chooses not to. God allows disasters because to refuse to allow them would interfere with the right to choose God has granted to human beings, and that right is the cornerstone of authentic relationship between God and human beings. People shake their fist at the sky and question how God could allow something like this to happen; God sees our response and asks the same question of us.
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