Quote:
Originally Posted by Maguru  ...I find it interesting that one can justify one's behaviour through doing the will of god. I've heard this reason/excuse from positions of power and from positions of weakness.
If god exists and has a will, what is it and how would you know?  |
Well ... logically, if you believe you know god's will, then you would want to follow it and encourage others to do so.
Interestingly, you can accuse someone of gross arrogance for claiming to know god's will, and you can also make the same accusation against someone who says, as did the Librarian in this thread, that their will alone is supreme.
I look at it this way. If god gave a fig about us following his will, he's perfectly capable of making his will so thoroughly obvious that there would be no widespread ambiguity about what it was.
Yet, everyone's got a different story. God wants you to be loving. God wants you to kill his enemies. God wants you to speak in tongues. God wants you to take a vow of poverty. God wants you to be fabulously wealthy and successful and confident. God wants you to accept Jesus as your personal savior and spend eternity with him forever. Jesus is just another prophet and this is just another of an endless cycle of lives and god wants you to get enlightened in dribs and drabs. And on it goes, ad nauseum.
At some point, anything connected with god, including his will, requires that you accept something as an article of faith. Generally, (a) the existence and nature of god and (b) some holy book or tradition to frame some kind of interpretation of (a).
So ... I consider it Information Unobtanium (tm) and I speak as one who has pretty much spent his life searching for God's will, caring about God's will, and wanting God's will. Funny thing is, it turned out to be a convenient way not to pay attention to what I want or don't want and I'm experiencing self-discovery that probably should have happened three or four decades ago. And there has always been a bunch of people willing to stand in line to tell me what I should or shouldn't do, generally in the guise of god's will or some law of the universe or something. I suspect this has just all been absolutely nothing more than a great big distraction from taking responsibility for my own life.
At the end of the day, everything I've ever heard about the will of god has been other people's stories and beliefs. Pick a story you like and run with it. Works as well as anything else does.
--Bob