Theology | Purpose and Reason: The Bible In Proper Perspective
Purpose and Reason: The Bible In Proper Perspective
© 2020 Vernon Miles Kerr, vernonmileskerr.com writersclass.net
A Reason
It’s 5:58 am. I normally get up between 4:00 and 6:00 a.m., have my morning coffee and meditate. Sometimes my meditations turn into prayers, just in case God is also a person and I might get some insights as answers. When I was going to church, I used to hear, “…there’s a God-shaped hole in every human being.” To me that meant “something missing,” like maybe something an orphan would feel if it never knew being cuddled by a mother. If there is a God, an actual central intelligence to everything—not just the everything represented by this universe, with its physical laws and its history, but to all reality wherever and however it may exist—that entity, person, personality, must have supreme reason. So, everything that such a God would do has a reason, or multiple reasons behind it—Including the big-bang, the appearance of life on Earth, the hundreds of millions of years of evolution, including our own recent million or so years as “homo-sapiens.”
If there is a God, why did this entity create a world of such violence and competition, including the violence and competition in humanity, that exists to this very day?
Why would God wait for a million or so years of human existence before—relatively recently—giving humanity the “Bible,” upon which all three of Earth’s major religions are based? The Bible is obviously faulty, things it says are being contradicted by science continually, so if it comes from God, it must only be inspired obliquely, not dictated word-for-word. The moral concepts obviously work , so there’s value in it—if you can overlook the myth and legend, or better, take the myth and legend as metaphor—fables meant to teach moral lessons.
The Bible says somewhere, “there is a spirit in man.” Somewhere in this mass of matter that comprises a human being, something resonates. I picture it as something shared by God, that supreme intelligence, but not something that only defines God. But what is the purpose of placing violent humans into this violent planet, in the first place, and then giving them part of God’s essence, which only creates inner-conflict and discomfort as we all “try” to be good, “try” to avoid our violent, physical nature? Could God be trying to make a point, for all beings in this universe and others, that humanity can be perfected, even given the violent incubator in which it was developed? Is something like the Garden of Eden in our real future as well as in our mythical past? Is the seed for that buried deep within our psyches? I’m reminded of my poem of a while back, about the crocus, the first flower to stick its head through the snow in spring.
Can a Crocus Bloom …
© 2018, 2020 VERNON MILES KERR
Can a crocus bloom in desert’s searing sand;
Or Altruism spring from our primate-surly band?
Could Love, that _agape _of old, that outward-flowing care
For others, arise from merely wishing it so?
Or was it a gift, bestowed by the loving hands,
Of some gardener, long ago;
A seed, planted in unlikely soil,
So that when it flourished
It would confound–
And astonish?