Does God Have A Sense Of Humor - The Great Debate

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Well, good luck. I'm sorry for the kid and hope the bird eats well.There will come a time when we'll all be eaten. Some by birds, some by tigers, and some by all the little hungry things floating in all the air all around us.

What's-a matter you? Hey! Gotta no respect
What-a you t'ink you do? Why you look-a so sad?
It's-a not so bad
It's-a nice-a place
Ah
Shaddap-a you face!

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFacWGBJ_cs[/youtube]

I look forward to watching the video tonight when I get home; in the meantime I wanted to say that, while I do not believe in "God" (at least in any traditional sense), I found your story amusing. For the sake of argument, however, if there were a God out there... his tragedies do not preclude his comedies, his suffering does not prevent his laughter - there are multiple facets to all things instead of a single value that may be applied.


M.

God and Job probably sit together in Heaven some times, and laugh about the old times. I'm sure that everything that happened to Job was all in good fun.

And, of course, all those Jews up in Heaven are giggling and elbowing each other's ribs in high amusement over the Holocaust.

Pandabear, you are being sarcastic, aren't you? Let me build on your imagery:

Yes, and they slap their thighs as Job's wife serves them Mint Juleps. Job says, "OMG, remember the time you gave me those boils? What a scream that was. "



I found some interesting quotes and writings related to the Book of Job. To be balanced I included a few positive ones along with the negative.

My favorite. Guess why?
"I read the book of Job last night, I don't think God comes out well in it."
Virginia Woolf

On it's literary value
"The Book of Job taken as a mere work of literary genius, is one of
the most wonderful productions of any age or of any language."
(Daniel Webster)

"...the greatest poem, whether of ancient or modern literature."
(Tennyson)

"Tomorrow, if all literature was to be destroyed and it was left to
me to retain one work only, I should save Job." (Victor Hugo)

Makuranososhi wrote:


M - Is it a long flight home from WP to Earth? And does Alex pay your travel expenses?
Agreed. And along that order, another favorite of mine - paraphrased
"Job is the first man to comprehend the split inside Yaweh – that the God-image is an antimony, comprising both the dark god of cruelty and the benevolent deity of love and justice; “in light of this realization his knowledge attains a divine numinosity.” Confronted by archetypal injustice, Job insists on equalizing compassion, and eventually receives it, as his status in the world is restored." (Carl Jung)

From The West Wing, Season 2, Episode 22 (Two Cathedrals), as said by President Bartlett while he’s walking to the altar, alone, inside the empty cathedral during the funeral… he was speaking to God…

You’re a son of a b***h, you know that?

She bought her first new car and you hit her with a drunk driver. What, was that supposed to be funny?

“You can’t conceive, nor can I, the appalling strangeness of the mercy of God,” says Graham Greene. I don’t know whose ass he was kissing there ’cause I think you’re just vindictive. What was Josh Lyman? A warning shot? That was my son. What did I ever do to yours but praise his glory and praise his name?

There’s a tropical storm that’s gaining speed and power. They say we haven’t had a storm this bad since you took out that tender ship of mine in the north Atlantic last year… 68 crew. You know what a tender ship does? Fixes the other ships. Doesn’t even carry guns. Just goes around, fixes the other ships and delivers that mail. That’s all it can do.

Gratias tibi ago, domine. Yes, I lied. It was a sin. I’ve committed many sins. Have I displeased you, you feckless thug? 3.8 million new jobs, that wasn’t good? Bailed out Mexico, increased foreign trade, 30 million new acres of land for conservation, put Mendoza on the bench, we’re not fighting a war, I’ve raised three children…

That’s not enough to buy me out of the doghouse?

Haec credam a deo pio? A deo iusto? A deo scito?
Cruciatus in crucem!
Tuus in terra servus nuntius fui officium perfeci.
Cruciatus in crucem. Eas in crucem!

Translation:
Am I to believe these things from a righteous god? A just god? A wise god?
To hell with your punishments!
I was your servant, your messenger on the earth; I did my duty.
To hell with your punishments! And to hell with you!

(Bartlet turns away in anger. He descends to the lower sanctuary and lights a cigarette. He takes a single puff, drops the butt to the floor, and grinds it defiantly with his shoe…)

Last edited by cosmiccat on 02 Feb 2010, 11:02 pm, edited 3 times in total.

What is the light without the darkness, or the darkness without the light?

Heinlein's "The Book of Job" is a treasure in my literary collection; such a skewed and yet insightful bit of writing.


M.

I have mentioned this a couple of times before, and it might seem repetitive, but it was a crucial element in my life and holds strong significance on the mercy and humor of God. If there is a God He saw to it my very healthy handsome extremely bright son was hit by a stupid careless driver in a red sports car when my boy was three years old and he spent the rest of his 32 year life attached to a respirator paralyzed from the neck down. I do not present this as a unique event since people every day suffer much worse. But, if there is a God it seems to me He has a strange sense of what is entertaining. In mercy I must conclude He doesn't exist.

In your place, Sand, I surely would have given up on God, and frankly, I am very close to that place now as I approach the 3rd anniversary of my grandson's senseless death in an automobile he was driving. He was 21 yrs old and was driving home from the Seashore alone. He fell asleep at the wheel of his car and ran off the road into the pine barrens. The medical examiner said his chest was crushed from the engine. Nothing is worse than losing a child. Nothing. I feel your pain and I think it must be far, far greater than mine, because my grandson went instantly.

As bad and hard as it is, there are probably a number of things that might be worse to endure. Being raped as a little girl for years while your mother stands by and allows it might be worse. I am not close to giving up on god but did so when I was only twelve years old after my nose was also broken because of the violent abuse I was being subjected to. And at this point, the entire subject of God makes me want to regurgitate.

Death is an inherent part of life and must be accepted as such, But the concept of God requires that there is an intelligent and reasonably sympathetic structure to events responsive rather exclusively to a human sense of justice. The fundamental problem with any religion is to somehow puzzle out how the almost totally meaningless brutalities inflicted on innocents can be fitted into a sense of right and wrong and no religion I have come across has been successful in that. I have never, since the age of about four, found any sense in the concept of a god so I had nothing to give up on, but one is continuously battered by people insisting on His existence and my own rather unfortunate experiences frequently find that, at least to some extent, insulting to both my intellect and to my general sense of fairness and a desire for a decent universe rather than a logical one.

YEAH, YEAH!

You can fool me with a smile,
Or a pill to sweeten breath.
You can kid me with a handshake,
But don’t fool with my death.

I will go along with politics
And marvel at breast size,
But dealing with the afterlife
I know all about you guys.

You tell me there’s a God
Who squats in some dimension
And slaps around the atheists
To create apprehension.

But your god is too elusive
For serious concern.
It’s all a bit of hogwash.
Nobody’s got to burn.

The end is just the end
As the same before my birth.
All your tales of angels
Just leaves me full of mirth.

I’m past the age of kidding.
I know you’ve gone berserk.
If your God is what you say he is
He’s an imaginary jerk.

Actually, according to uh...Clifford Geertz... God is invoked to explain:

1) unbearable physical or psychological suffering (provoked by illness, mourning, or something so highly complex that it stresses the brain just trying to understand how it works ^.- ).
2) unexplained things (or "denial" of logical explanations, because they lack "meaning")
3) evil (i.e injustice or anything that causes a moral objection)

Does God have sense of humor?? OF COURSE NOT!! ! Laughter kills fear, and without fear there can be no faith.

That's actually part of a joke:

The human body is proof that god was once a man . . . who else would put a waste facility next to a recreation center.

As for the starving people bit, what's keeping those people from leaving the place that's in a state of famine, let alone reproducing in such a place? Personally, its because of rich nations thats causing this. Cause and effect scenario: To use the old saying, "give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. Teach the man how to fish, you feed him for life." Poor nations/people are relying too heavily on the supposed gregarious nature of the "upper class." So when the uppers decide to go cheap, those they supported dont know how to support themselves. Its the whole "convenience" mindset that i see killing us . . . but i'll save that rant for another time.

God's Sense of Humor - Not everyone is laughing

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Katharine Jefferts Schori
Presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, she is CEO and chief pastor to 2.2 million Episcopalians spread across 110 dioceses in the United States and overseas.

Her father, a former physicist, worked at Bell Labs in New Jersey with Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who won the Nobel Prize in physics for detecting the remnants of the Big Bang in the background noise of the Milky Way. Her mother earned a doctorate in virology. Jefferts Schori herself entered college at sixteen, graduated with a degree in biology from Stanford University and a doctorate in oceanography from Oregon State University, setting her career on the seas in motion.

“If I believe that God is more than I can imagine, conceptualize, or understand, then I must be willing to acknowledge that God may act in ways that are beyond my ken, including in people who do not follow the Judeo-Christian tradition.”

But if science led her heart to fear, science also, in part, her fears relieved. In a postgraduate class on the philosophy of science, she encountered the meditations of three great twentieth-century physicists, Heisenberg, Einstein, and Bohr. “They began to show me that even my fellow scientists saw the world as full of mystery—and that maybe understanding the world doesn’t always require sensory data.” Reading physicists pondering the enigmas of quantum mechanics made Christianity’s more incredible doctrines, such as belief in a God who is simultaneously Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, seem less dubious.

Ultimately, religion and science speak the same language, and impart the same lesson, she says. Each teaches that the world is made of connections and that actions in one place have consequences, often unforeseen, in other places and times. And nowhere are the effects of our deeds as grave as in how we care for the environment
As she explained in testimony before the U.S. Senate in 2007, “As a priest, trained as a scientist, I take as a sacred obligation the faith community’s responsibility to stand on the side of truth—the truth of science as well as the truth of God’s unquenchable love for the world and all its inhabitants.”

Search Magazine

I'm terribly sorry, but grasping mystery to excuse misery has no power for me. The hunger for a friendly universe is no doubt somewhere in anybody who is aware of the avalanche of meaningless horror that is our daily experience but wishing won't make it so. Evidently training in science may not be the antidote for delusion but I imagine it might help. Einstein, for one, continuously evoked a God that had little if anything to do with a God interested in the fate of humanity and he repeatedly said so but he also confused people to a huge degree by mentioning his strange version of God as if it were congruent with conventional versions.