Posted on by Abe Austin

Is the Old Testament God Evil? – Mind vs Heart

I have spent the past several days reviewing the common defenses that are made for God having commanded the Israelites to destroy the Canaanite nations. I found some of the arguments more compelling than others. However, even the ones that had strong points were not so convincing that I lost all discomfort for these passages. I find what remains for me is a sense that God was justified to have commanded these actions, but I still wish He wouldn’t have. The more that I delve into the details, the more I realize that the problem isn’t in the details.

I think this is a common mistake when raising and addressing issues related to God. We are dealing with a matter of spiritual unrest and are trying to resolve it in intellectual terms. We too often assume that our feelings are invalid if we cannot express it as a logical argument. Therefore, the critic will experience negative feelings towards these verses and will give logical arguments against them. The defender of these verses will respond in kind by providing logical rebuttals. Even if those rebuttals are sound, they will do nothing to convince the critic, because the logic wasn’t where the problem began. It isn’t the critic’s mind that needs to be converted, it is the heart.

Thus, my response to all of the defenses that we have covered thus far is, “yes, you have some good points, and maybe it all makes sense in my head…but I still just feel sad about it.” In my next post I will try to take a different approach to addressing these concerns. I think it is time we took the matter to a higher level of consciousness. I wish to make an appeal, not the to mind, but to the Spirit. We will see how that goes tomorrow.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Reasons for Disbelief- The Shattered View

I have published several posts exploring different reasons why people refuse to live by faith, or believe in the gospel, or accept God as their father and creator. I spoke of people who renounce God due to passive skepticism, or having a hierarchy of authority that is incompatible with God, or possessing an instinct to believe every idea from other people, or being swayed by close relationships, or having model of the world that refutes the need for a Creator.

Through all of these varied reasons, though, I think there is one shared core, something that I started to describe with my last post, and today I will summarize my series by laying out that common theme in greater detail.

Breaking Reality)

The core reason why most people refuse faith is that, on a fundamental level, they are converted to a worldview that is incompatible with the reality of God. Their current worldview might make them try to justify their sins, depend on a relationship with someone who is in opposition to God, or fear being damned if they give up on old ideals. Most of us find things that we rely on to make sense of the world and cope with our fears. And because we are human, we tend to choose imperfect things that are not God.

In short, accepting God often means shattering our entire conception of reality and personal safety. It means cutting out the foundation with nothing more than the hope that there will be a God who catches us as we fall.

There are many who first profess not to believe in God with an attitude of calm rationality, but who then devolve into hysterical, emotional outbursts when faced with a well-reasoned argument for God that they do not have a refutation for. This is a fear-based reaction, a survival mechanism to scare away the proselytizer who is pulling apart the disbeliever’s entire universe. The fact is, most people don’t care what the argument for God is. They might have pretended to have rejected Him for intellectual reasons, but most of them actually have an emotional reason for not surrendering to Him. You’re never going to be able to reason someone into abandoning a position that they are still using for a crutch.

All of the reasons for disbelief that I have given in this series come down to these elements of fear and coping in one way or another. When people see the evidence for God, they are able to work ahead and intuit how an admission of His reality might require them to stop relying on old superstitions, or end certain relationships, or do the hard work of investigating the truth, or stop listening to certain authorities. For most people, these are massive, life-changing alterations, and they are scary. This is why those who proselytize are to do so in a spirit of understanding and love, having great reverence and respect for the great undertaking they are inviting people to.

But the hardness of the way is in no way a justification for not following it. For any of us who are on the precipice of breaking a false worldview, may we be reassured by the knowledge that we were born to do great and heroic things, the greatest and most heroic of which may very well be smashing this carefully-crafted reality, casting aside the crutches that we have always depended upon, and taking a leap of faith into the unseen and unknown!