Legendary Pink Dots – A Message From Our Sponsor. Pondering the problem of evil and the possibility that God doesn’t interfere because of his personal ethics.

How God’s punishment can feel like love: It’s an old principle. God destroyed the Israelites periodically to teach them a lesson but he still loved them and they were still his people.

Jesus loved me because he I loved everyone I’d been singing “Jesus loves me” since I was four. But God? I was not so sure. God to me meant God the Father, the vengeful angry one. but he loved us too in his way.

It seemed to make sense. Why would God bother punishing you if he’d already cut you loose? He might destroy you but he wouldn’t punish you. It’s really a kind of Stockholm Syndrome but it worked on me for a very long time.

Julian Cope – St. Julian. Another answer to the problem of evil: Maybe God doesn’t fix things because he’s oblivious or maybe incompetent?

But it is one answer to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Maybe it’s a form of discipline. Of a person or of a nation.

Bad times will come as bad things do. Maybe you know why you deserved it and maybe you don’t. But if he could do that, maybe he could do the opposite if you followed the path, send something good your way, or maybe it served some larger purpose.

God still loved David after what he did, after all. Didn’t work out too well for his baby with Bathsheba, but it was something. We got a Solomon out of it. I believed that for a while when I was a young Christian.

When I did something I knew was wrong, the next bad thing that happened to me had to be payback. If things went OK for too long I got nervous. When was the other shoe going to drop? How much trouble was I in?

So the disaster was a relief when it came. I paid a high price, but I’m still on the path. I was terrified of leaving the path.

But when you can’t see a pattern anymore, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” stops sounding like a good excuse. Sometimes there’s no possible lesson that would make sense, punishment is out of proportion or it’s indescriminate.

Then you look for reasons. You don’t want to be an atheist and piss off Mom and Dad, plus thaat would REALLY piss off God. Pascal’s Wager, you know.

God isn’t real is the theory of last resort.

Could be you settle on Deism. So there is a God who set it all in motion, but he doesn’t intervene. God makes the machine and lets it run. I could live with that, kinda. At least I didn’t have to claim the “A-word” as an identity. But it wasn’t very satisfying, plus, what the hell kind of fucked up machine is this?

It occurs to me there’s a worse possibility. Maybe there is a Supreme Being, but he’s essentially the Joker in space. Maybe he’s active in the world, but considers us play things. Maybe you had a tragedy because God just has a more complicated sense of humor than you do.

If there’s an all powerful god who makes us suffer for his own amusement, that would be the worst case scenario wouldn’t it?

What would this look like from that cruel god’s point of view? There is a song by Legendary Pink Dots singer and songwriter Edward Ka Spel that got me thinking on this topic. I’ll get into that in the next post. Good topic for Halloween season.