God is good all the time

Don Moen’s Praise song ‘God is Good all of the time.” Has been one I’ve enjoyed.

But how do we explain suffering.

The determinist view of life is that we don’t have free choice and that our believe in our control over events and ourselves is pure illusion.  Shit just happens. Life just is. Everything is pre destiny and fate

Unfortunately those who like that view like it when they’re doing well and don’t like it when the other guy is.  So they say I was born to be rich. Destiny was the rule of kings and aetheists who believe that they were destined to be in the Communist Party leadership too,.

The Christian view of Free Will says that we have choice.  

I’m not sure given that there are all of us and any choice I make interacts with all the other choices.  No problem for God because God is an infinite Cray computer. Even my little brain has billions of synapse and possibilities

But if god is Good why is there Justin Trudeau and Jeffrey Epstein one could ask.  What about the innocence of children.  Christians explained that by the ‘sins of the fathers’.  Original Sin even, is just Genetics 101.

But what about a bad person doing a bad thing. While there would be no joy without pain.  Black and white . Yin and Yang

God is good all the time.  God is perfect and I’m imperfect.  The failure of man in Christian explanation is Pride.  I think I’m okay and God’s not Okay. Transactional Analysis looked at that I’m okay you’re not Okay or You’re okay, I’m not okay or we’re both okay or we’re both not okay.  That occurred with the Game Theory and Prisoner’s Dilemna which when played out rarely has ‘we win’ because people naturally are paranoi.

Piaget studied the cognitive development of children and found that it wasn’t till adolescence that they developed abstract thinking. When the tests for abstract thinking were applied to 30 year old they found that most were ‘developmentally delayed.’  Anna Freud studied ‘lines of development’ like narcissism to altruism.  Again many people didn’t progress.  In the study of humor humor moved from laughing at others to laughing with other to laughing at oneself.  Unfortunately most people lack the capacity to laugh at themselves.

When Buber said I and Thou he said that the thought experiment was that life was a dialogue between God and man, first the tribe and God but now the individual and God.  

I and it versus I and thou.

Jung said all were an aspect of the one.  

For God to be Good I must accept my humility.  Further God is the prime mover.  Ironically functional MRI studies show that action precedes thought. This causes me to believe I’m a voice over on the comic strip of my life.  I love Monty Python’s “look on the bright side of life’.  I can reframe all as positive. God is good all of the time yet even Jesus asked ‘my God why hast though forsaken me.  

All of creation is God since there was one, not two , god and building blocks.  One.  Deuteronomy. 6.4. Hear O Israel, The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

There is in my mind the perception of God as other but as God is one then I am of God.

In first year university I wrote the poem and paper and son,  “I am God, You are God, God is greater than we are. Yahweh”

Moses asked God, the burning bush his name, and God said Yahweh, beingness.  I am, that is who I am. 

Loving God means loving the Devil.  God is love.  In Milton the angel turns his back on God.  Free choice.  In the Garden Human’s break the law.  The first law of thermonuclear and then the second law.  The first law is ‘constant’ , conservation of energywhile the second law is entropy of isolated system always increases. The third law says entropy approaches a constant as the temperature approaches absolute zero.  Entropy is chaos. 

God is love. Love your neighbour as yourself.  We are one.  

The one becomes many and the many becomes one.  The chemical equation is life to death to life.  Oscillation,  Chaos and Order,  The String Theory . The mathematics of music and ultimately harmony.

Peace and perception.  I and I or I and Thou.  Love and War.  Faith and Fear.  I must learn to love the introject of the shadow within. That which I don’t accept I project onto the other.  

The ‘love the sinner’ not the ‘sin’ isn’t Biblical.  I am to love as St. Francis.  Aspire to love all but not be hurt by the other.  Boundaries.  Detach with love.  I love my neighbour as myself.  Livingston when he was preparing to be a missionary struggled with the idea of killing animals for food and being in the jungle then he realized that life and death are entwined like God and the Devil in Job. God is all and God is good.  

Acceptance is the answer.  Surrender.  Accept.  I live and die.  I and God. No there is none but God.  To know God is to let go of self.  The Self and Overself.  It’s all the caterpillar and the butterfly and zen of one hand clapping,