GOOD-centric Exterior Spiritual Disciplines:
To live out goodness, fairness, and love
From GOD-centric to GOOD-centric
Long before I wrote GOD-centric, I developed my "God Statement" which first articulated my fervent, yet decidedly non-religion-specific belief in an eternally good and fair God of love. My "God Statement" also revealed the thread that would lead to my faith's unraveling:
If God were not good and fair, then I would have no interest in knowing or pleasing God.
This thread was exposed again in GOD-centric:
If God were not good, I would not love God. End of story; quest over. To love a bad God, to kowtow to a tyrant, was to be a coward. (Ch. 5)
No coward soul was mine or so I thought. During my dark night of the soul, my mantra had been Thomas H. Huxley's “God give me the strength to face a fact though it slay me” but I was neither strong nor brave. Like an apologist doing back flips to justify the bible, I had been an acrobat contorting logic to try to justify natural evil. In GOD-centric, I acknowledged that: "The problem of natural evil did leave me staggering. Staggering like a drunken sailor who if pinned to the sweating wall would admit to being intellectually agnostic. How can I honestly be otherwise?" (Ch. 6) but I was not courageous enough to let the fact slay me. I clutched onto an imaginary sliver of hope while spouting some nonsense about irrational versus transrational belief: "I was willing to leap but my leaping would be transrationally beyond reason rather than irrationally against reason. Beyond reason meant that I might still be in the process of rational understanding but rational understanding still seemed possible. Against reason meant that reason had defeated faith but you were going to believe anyway." (GOD-centric, Ch. 5) In what way was I still in the process of rationally understanding natural evil? Thomas's grandson, Aldous Huxley, provided the push that I needed: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” (Complete Essays 2, 1926-1929) Natural evil slayed my faith in an eternally good and fair God of love.
Søren Kierkegaard stated: "There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Why had I been unwilling to face the truth? Because I loved God. Because I had a long and involved relationship with God. Because I felt loyalty to God who had been my rock during childhood. Because I really, really wanted God to be eternally loving, good, and fair; but, that simply is not true. If there is a God, that God is only occasionally loving, good, and fair. That fact is written in nature and in every holy book.
