This is a very much delayed reaction to the gospel and sermon during the last mass I attended. It’s about the transfiguration, and the 1st gospel was about god’s test to Abraham to sacrifice his only son for god. The priest explained that god did that to Abraham in order to test his faith before he is promised a vast kin. It’s a good story about faith. However, it seems to emphasize god’s mercilessness.
I was raised to believe that god is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. The idea of an all-knowing god was so fearsome that it made me behave even when no one else seems to be watching. But if god is indeed all-knowing, then he would have known what Abraham would do even before he asked him to sacrifice his only son. Knowing what Abe’s decision would be, god needn’t have let him undergo such excruciating agony of having to choose between his god and his son. To say that god tests our faith by throwing problems at us is unacceptable. Knowing what you would do even before you did it and still putting you through it is kind of cruel for me.
Even with the argument of free will, god would know (and most likely he planned it that way) what your decision will be. What kind of god lets one suffer by testing him over something the result of which it already knows. If you look at it closely, free will is worthless. Whether or not you have the capacity to choose between good and evil or love or hate, god already knows what you will choose. In fact, it has planned your life that way. It then leads me to think, if god knows how all things begin and end, it might have planned all things that way. As such, a man who refuses to believe in god was made to be so. And if that man dies without still accepting or believing in god, god willed it to be so. If that’s the case, then why would god punish such men to eternal damnation if it made them so in the first place? Such a god, I think you’ll agree, is unmerciful.
But then the faithful won’t question this. They’re hard-wired to accept god’s words (as taught by their priests) hook, line, and sinker. They’re made to believe that all that happens to them is a path towards god’s plan. And not following god’s words stray them off from that plan, from his grace, from his bounty, forgetting that whenever they falter, whenever they sin, and even if they don’t come back to his graces, it is all part of their god’s grand plan. All these assuming there is a god, and assuming further, that it is omniscient.
