Is God Loving and Mysterious, or Just a Failure?

I recently read an interesting article on Associated Content entitled, The Case for a Cruel God.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/173347/the_case_for_a_cruel_god.html

Alongside the humorous graphic of a disembodied hand zapping the world with lightning and fire, the well written article by Content Producer George Meluch extends it's amateur yet sound philosophic view-piece over the perpetually unresolved issue of human religion and it's favorite hero, God.

This article, in response to the aforementioned piece, will further explore the great unconquered character. Although I have no official scholarly theological training, I have spent a lifetime implementing personal research into the area of the profound and the worshipful. Theology, regardless of it's age or it's long list of well famed heroes, is still a guessing game.

The churches of the world make the assumption that God is entirely good, using a well known barrage of similar adjectives to describe the entity. George Meluch put forth the vaguely researched and probably unknowingly unoriginal notion that God is possibly just cruel. While this can be seen as a logical conclusion to the dilemma, I have a different a slightly more disturbing idea to add to the conversation.

It is evident beyond all doubt that life is a combination of "good" and "evil" components. Christians and other philosophies explain the cruelty of humanity as the failure of God's test. This argument seems almost logical, although it indicates a manipulative and "tough loving" God, creating the type of celestial Father figure that only certain military sons could truly appreciate.

However, the behavior of God himself has always been so perplexing and oppressive to the mind of man that explanations must twist and curl to accommodate. Like it or not, we live in a world where good people and bed people are punished and rewarded evenly by dumb luck and happenstance.

The old catch-phrase is, of course, that "God works in mysterious ways. One possible translation for this statement might be "God refuses to act the way we say he feels, but we're still right." This sentiment is, of course, natural and understandable. Religion fills the lives of so many with hope and reason in an unreasonable world. Unfortunately, as with all other things in this universe, religion makes wrong as often as it makes right.

If there is an all-powerful and all-controlling God of this universe, he might be cruel, as Mr. Meluch presumed, or benevolent yet incomprehensible as the Christians say. The third option, put forth here by myself, is that God could simply be incompetent.

My Father will sometimes save interesting newspaper headlines. Not too many years ago, I stepped in for a visit and while removing my shoes, read the headline "God Helped Man Survive, Says Mother." Scrawled beneath it in my Father's writing was, "What, he didn't care about the other three people?"

Apparently there had been a robbery and four people had been shot. One boy survived by chance and by the hands of skilled medical workers. But why had God chosen to save only one when he could have saved all four? Is he really planning something useful with all of the random deaths? Or is he just powerless to stop them because he is incompetent?

Death remains the greatest cruelty of the universe. Humanity utilizes the afterlife to give hope and soften the blow of the still unexplained sudden end to existence that we all must face. But without a belief in the afterlife, one is forced to cope with the evident cruelty of living.

The notion of an incompetent God may seem terrible, but the very nature of incompetence would indicate the posibility that he does at least love us. Just like with cruelty and evil, there is undeniable evidence of kindness and good in the universe. Maybe God is only capable of saving a few of us from the jaws of chaos, as opposed to being the sole puppeteer of the chaotic jamboree we call home.

The also opens up a new attribute of this celestial incompetence, that is, the notion of God as lesser to his opposing force, chaos. Perhaps religion has misplaced the role of the loving force in the cosmic order.

I suspect that this notion has crept about the mind of every religious thinker at some point. there is evidence of it in the very nature of religion. Prayer is a form of pleading, similar to the way a child pleads to a parent. Perhaps the habit of persistent prayer is a response to the fear that God is not quite so all powerful, and needs to be reminded to keep you safe.

There is something out there that loves us. There is too much profound splendor in the world for there not to be. I am not a pessimist or a sadist. I hope for the best, and I would choose a well meaning, incompetent God over and cruel and knowing one any day.