Mystic Journey 2.0

The following excerpt is from: http://www.whydoesgodhateamputees.com –

The unconscionable arrogance of the blessed

Let’s assume that a tremendous hurricane like Hurricane Katrina hits Louisiana. It does an incredible amount of damage, destroying hundreds of thousands of homes, killing thousands of people and wiping entire towns off the map.

Your sister, a devout believer, happens to live in Louisiana, and a week later when cell phone service is restored she gives you a call. The first words out of her mouth are:

“Oh, God has blessed us so much this week! We prayed all through the storm, and he answered our prayers. The next town over was completely decimated, but our house is still standing. We are so blessed! God answered our prayers!”

What I would like you to do is step back for a moment, look at this statement, and think about the remarkable arrogance that it represents. What your sister is saying is this, “I am so special and God loves ME so much that God heard MY prayers and personally helped ME. All those millions of other people who God cursed — obviously God hates THEM. I am cool in the eyes of God, and all those other wretched people out there are, obviously, uncool in the eyes of God. Otherwise he would have helped them just like he helped ME.”

For a believer to talk about his or her blessings in a huge natural disaster like Katrina is to implicitly ignore the damage and suffering that are plainly visible for all to see. If God “blessed” one, while completely ignoring millions of other believers caught in exactly the same predicament, it says nothing about blessings. It says that God is an insane demon. For anyone to believe that God personally helped her while at the same time wreaking havoc on millions of others is a supreme arrogance. Yet believers seem to be completely comfortable with this arrogance.

The underlying question here is whether or not God answers prayers at all, or whether our life experience is wholly the result of some other force such as chance or fate. It is clear that those who believe in God tend to give Him credit for good fortune or ‘blessings’ in their life (some believe that God is also responsible for the bad things, claiming that everything is under His control).

But, experience tells us otherwise. For example: A ‘believer’ prays and asks God to heal him of cancer, and yet he dies; an ‘unbeliever’ doesn’t pray and is ‘healed’ or survives cancer. If ‘believers’ are indeed the children of God, shouldn’t there be discernible evidence of this relationship in their life (other than benign things like church attendance or tithing). It seems that believers in God should not be victims of fate as everyone else is. Believers should be living a somewhat ‘blessed’ life instead. But, that is not what we see. Life happens to everyone - good or bad - whether a person prays or not.

When we take an honest look at those situations that may appear to be answered prayer, like the example above, we have to realize how arrogant it really is to think God answered our request but refused others. We must also ask why so-called answered prayers are so random or non-existent.

There are numerous examples of ‘prayer’ that seem to demonstrate the lunacy of it all. Two sports teams pray for God to help them win the game, but God is credited with answering one team’s request. How did God decide which team to ‘bless’ with the win? Perhaps a more important question is - does God create Losers? Does God create defeat or loss? Is God the ‘punisher’ of one team and the ‘rewarder’ of another? Does He love one group more than another? What if one team prays for victory and the other does not pray, and yet wins?

How about the prayers of men in war? What standard does God use to protect one soldier from harm, while allowing another praying soldier to be blown to bits? If God is the Protector of one soldier who prayed, then He is also the Destroyer of the other soldier who also prayed (not to mention the grief of his family).

The Bible says, ‘The rain falls on the just and the unjust’ which says that all farmers should expect rain on their crops, not just the believing farmers. The Bible also says, ‘God is no respecter of persons‘ which means He has no favorites nor grudges against any one. He doesn’t ‘bless’ one person and withhold from another - He does not reward, nor does He punish. We can conclude that He does not heal one person of cancer, and allow another to die from it. That wouldn’t even be just.

So, we are faced with the question - does God really answer prayer? If He does, then why does He not answer most of the time? Why does He often ignore the most desperate pleas for help? There are many excuses offered by religion for this inconsistency, but none of them genuinely answers the question of how a God who does not play favorites can ‘bless’ one person and ‘curse’ another, or refuse their request.

Is it possible that God is not the One who answers prayers, but rather it is our own Dominion and Authority that brings the results? Could this be what Jesus meant when He said we can have whatever we ask for, or we could move mountains with our words? Maybe it’s not up to an intervening God, but it’s up to us!

Could it be that our religious doctrine of prayer is wrong, like so many other traditional doctrines? Is it possible that God put humans here on earth with the power to create our own experience - without His direct intervention? Could it be that most prayers are not answered simply because these prayers are asking God to do something that He cannot do because He has empowered us to do it?

How much free will does man have? Do we even have a free will? Is God sovereignly in control of all things here on earth, or just some things? Which things is He in control of? Can we know which things He controls, and which He doesn’t? If so, we obviously haven’t figured it out yet. Many questions, and few answers.

One popular idea today is that man actually is a manifestation or expression of God, and as such, we have all the power to create not only our own experience, but the experience of our collective world as well. While religion rejects this idea, it seems to be an idea that is consistent with an honest observation of life on planet Earth.

But, there are numerous testimonies of people who have experienced supernatural protection, healing or other ‘blessings’ simply because, instead of asking God to ‘reach down His hand’ and do something, they simply said or commanded what they wanted, needed, or expected - and it happened. I have seen this happen time and again in my own life as well. Ironically, the website I quoted above is based on the observation that God does not answer prayer because God does not restore amputated limbs. Yet, Dr. Peter Wagner of Fuller Theological Seminary is documented as having used his divine authority to completely restore a man’s amputed leg! (see: ‘4th Dimensional Living in a 3 Dimensional World’ by Dr. David Cho)

The divine authority (Dominion - Gen. 1:26,28) that humans have been given as a result of being made in God’s likeness, appears to be the real power to order our life experience according to the Creator’s original intention. Thus, asking God ‘up there in heaven’ to fix something down here on our earth doesn’t produce genuine results, and makes it appear as if God is not listening or doesn’t care. (For more on the topic of our Dominion, or Kingdom Authority, see ‘Rediscovering the Kingdom,‘ by Dr. Myles Munroe)

Religious people feel the need to ‘honor’ God or ‘give Him glory’ whenever something turns out in their favor, especially if they asked God for it. Conversely, religious people cannot seem to embrace the idea that man is divine and therefore has innate creative power over his own life experience. To them, it seems blasphemous to neglect the former, or to embrace the latter. So, for centuries, God in Heaven has been credited with being the One responsible for our situations down here, and humans are off the hook - and apparently very confused or deluded about who God is and how He operates.

Religious people are forced to make excuses for God’s rare and random acts of kindness, even going so far as to claim that ‘No!’ is indeed His answer most of the time. And when ‘No’ is obviously the cruel answer, God’s will is said to be mysterious and not understandable by mortal man. But, to any reasonable person, all of these religious excuses have utterly failed to explain the obvious inconsistency of answered prayer, or the gigantic percentage of unanswered prayers. Consequently, honest people who see these inconsistencies reject belief in God altogether. At least they are honest enough to conclude that a god who claims to be love or good certainly doesn’t demonstrate it here among His creation.

I have come to believe that there is a dynamic involved in this issue that religion has not acknowledged, probably because of religion’s reluctance to acknowledge man’s divinity and creative power over his own life experience. If we reject the divinity of man, the only other conclusion is that God is a myth, because if God is distant and unattached, He cannot be Love at all. God cannot exist if He is not love.

“There is no time or place that God is not a loving Father. There is no way that God could ever stop loving and still be God.” - Father Richard Rohr

Because God cannot exist if He is not Love, and it is obvious that prayer is ignored by loving God, religion is forced to redefine God’s love as mysterious and above human reason. In religion’s definition, love can be abusive, neglectful, uncaring or distant - dysfunctional. God is therefore exempt from being humane or decent according to the same standards of goodness and decency that He created man with. While a human father’s love wants his child to be healthy, Father God’s love wants the child to suffer or even die! Lunacy.

So, religion invents another scapegoat - Satan - to take the blame for unanswered prayer. The devil is supposed to be the one who keeps our prayers from being answered. Another doctrine is invented to strip man of his divinity and creative power. Man now has 2 forces against him - a God with perverted ‘love’ and Satan. All I will say about this point is that religion has created it’s own enemies with the very power that is intended to be mankind’s savior - our own words. What we say is the reality we create. But, that’s a topic for another time….

So, why should we even pray if God doesn’t answer?

Prayer as we know it, is never intended to be an asking for things, but rather a conversation with the Father with whom we have a love relationship. Asking for things or for conditions ‘down here’ to be changed is not God’s responsibility, simply because those situations are under our own control. Don’t get me wrong - God is not opposed to us having ‘things’ - in fact, my point in this post is that God has given us the ability to ‘create’ or attract into our lives those things we desire.

True prayer is a conversation, implying a two-way dialog. Prayers that ask for direction or wisdom will be answered if we spend time listening and follow the inner voice of God’s Spirit in us. So, yes, God ‘in Heaven’ does answer genuine prayer that is conversational in nature. But, No, God cannot answer prayers asking Him to do what He has empowered us to do.

I am completely aware that these honest questions challenge the Bible that religion holds sacred. But, if I’m forced to choose whether to question the Bible or to question the true nature and character of God, then I will question the Bible without hesitation - or, at least I will question the English translation and common interpretation of what is called the Bible. But, that’s another topic for another time….

Helpful quotes on this topic:

“I am pure spirit, with unlimited creative potential.”

“What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” - Ralph Waldo Emerson