“Take it to the Lord in prayer.” “You have a friend in Jesus.” “Believe in him and ye shall have everlasting life.” “We do this for the glory of God.” “God will answer your prayers.” “Trust in the Lord.” “Only God knows.” “It is in God’s hands.” “In God, all things are possible.” In one sense , these sentiments are laudable. They show deep respect for that controlling force outside our lives which is all powerful, all permeating, causing events to happen beyond our meager ability to understand. We should be deeply in awe of that mysterious force that controls the entire universe and every thing that we do. We should always be mindful of how tiny and insignificant we are in comparison to the greatness of the universe, and whatever began it and rules it. We need humility in order to understand our place and make rational decisions.
Humility is good. The problem is that when this humility is carried to the point of total subjugation, it becomes evil. One form of that evil is lassitude. Since God does everything and controls everything, we humans don’t have to try in any way to make things better. God will decide what is better. It doesn’t matter what we humans do. God will do whatever he wants to do. Why bother? The other glaring form of evil is to believe that whatever violent act we are doing is because God decrees it. We can do inhumane things to other humans, other life, and our planet home because this is “What God wants us to do.”
Humility overrides its bounds when we believe in a personal god. If we believe that god is reachable by us humans, answers to us humans, and interferes in the lives of us humans in order to answer requests and or show favor towards those humans who please him and disfavor towards those humans who displease him, we can believe that all sorts of cruelty and horror have justification in god’s eye. We can believe that if some massacre, mutilation or beheading occurred, we just accept that this is somehow in god’s plan in a way that we can’t see. The horror of it goes callously by, unless that happened to be a relative of ours. If we are one of the murderers or destroyers, we see this as a sacrifice for the “glory of god.” Since we have enlisted our personal god on our side, this heinous evil we have blasted onto our fellow humans is justified in our eyes. It becomes “god and us” against everyone else. If all those others don’t believe the same as we do, then our god is telling us to kill them, without remorse. How tragic.
It is even more tragic because this is exactly the opposite of what the true God of Chance is asking of us. This God is not personal. This God is absolutely, fully, uncompromisingly, eternally, unreachably impersonal. This god does not care about humans in any way at any time in any sense. This God casts a baleful cold eye on all of creation. That life that adjusts and adapts to its environment the best gets to survive, and gets to have its progeny survive. That life that does not adjust or adapt to the conditions at hand gets killed by this impersonal, uncaring, unfeeling God. There is no chosen people. There is no chosen race. There is no justification for inhumane destructive violent acts against other humans, other life, and our planet home. The true God has a very simple message: either get along with each other, learn to love each other and care for each other, or I will get rid of all of you. And I won’t care if I get rid of all you insignificant specks of life and start over somewhere else.
Belief in a personal god leads us into evil ways. We have had centuries of horrors committed by humans against other humans on the basis of religious myths, demons, angels, devils in the earth, gods in the sky, gods on earth, triumvirates, virgin births, raising from the dead, ascending into heaven, killing off the heathens without remorse, because god is on our side. Belief in a personal god leads us into passivity towards life and callosity towards cruelty. Belief in a personal god leads away from that which we should do.
In contrast, belief in an impersonal God of Chance leads us to take full responsibility for our lives. It leads us to be activists in life. We know that whatever happens is not up to some supreme being or some force that exists somewhere else. We know that if there is something good that is to be done in the world, it is up to us to get it done. We know that if we perform an evil act, that evil is fully our responsibility. We can blame no one else for creating hell on earth. We are fully responsible for all our own actions. Knowing that there is no one else to give blame or credit for what we do leads us to be loving and caring towards our fellow humans, other life, and our planet home. We create whatever good or evil will live after us. We create our own heaven and hell here on earth. What we leave behind is totally our responsibility, We have no one else to blame. If we don’t show our ability to love each other, the God of Chance will show us the error of our ways with an unrelenting arbitrary justice, called early death.