Do You Have a Gaudy God?

Raining brimstone, epic deluges, trumpets from heaven…is your God showing off?

We have all heard of insecure people who act out by throwing fits.  The kid who bullies others on recess, the child who screams when he doesn’t get his way, the buff guy in the military who wants to fight at the bar.  We call these people “show-offs” and “assholes.”  But what happens when you find your divinity throwing a hissy-fit?

One of the first things you can do is exempt your God from these tantrums.  After all, when your God says, “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” how can you compare the ugly-showboating of some narcissist with Him?  He is not even on your level–soo transcendent that his killing of children cannot be questioned–and to assume the Mighty One, who at times “regrets that he made man,” cannot simply be compared to a human child.

Another thing you can do is opposite of the aforementioned.  You can realize your God is just like you: insecure, trying to fit in and be accepted, and prone to quick bursts of regrettable anger.  After all, your God doesn’t have it easy.  Europe doesn’t like him; his favorite venue, public schools, are slowly kicking him out; and Mother Teresa doubted he even existed.  God is having some growing-pains, and we can totally understand when He gets frustrated and burns down an orphanage.

There are times when we wonder whether we create God on our image, soo much so that God behaves the way we do.  We are jealous, fickle, prone to anger, unreasonable, and malicious.  And so is our God.

To sum it up, you can 1) try to exempt your God,  2) acknowledge your God is not omniscient and is learning like you, or 3) consider God a human projection.  Either way, we are dealing with responses to a Gaudy God.

“The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective – i.e., contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.”–Ludwig Feuerbach