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Candace

Talmadge

 

 

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October 8, 2007

The Days of a Judging God Are Long Gone

 

A Utah jury has convicted polygamist sect leader Warren Jeffs of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old child.

 

If the judge doesn’t throw the book at Jeffs at his November sentencing, the man is also wanted in Arizona in connection with eight felony charges that include being an accomplice to incest and sexual misconduct with minors in marriages involving more underage girls. Jeffs is also under federal indictment in Utah for fleeing prosecution.

 

Let’s hope Jeffs racks up enough convictions to keep him behind bars and thus away from young girls for the rest of his life.

 

How do people like Jeffs get away with perverting faith? How is it that some are able to attract others who then permit their so-called leaders to claim that God bestows on said head honchos the outrageous right to dictate even the most intimate aspects of their followers’ lives?

 

It’s possible, in part, because almost all of us have intermingled God and judgment. Most people of faith – and non-believers as well – cannot contemplate God in any other context except as some sort of Judgment Day, where eternal damnation awaits for the slightest infraction of an innumerable list of often contradictory rules and mandates.

 

While this prospect angers some to the point of disavowing God altogether, too many others respond with fear if not downright terror. Out of that fear, they turn to anyone who appears confident and who then invokes their fear of God’s judgment and damnation to manipulate, cajole or force them into obedience.

 

Fearing God is one of the deepest tragedies of human existence. It’s a lie. God is love – unconditional love. This is love with absolutely no judgments attached and no damnation involved.

 

At one point in the history of All That Is, God may have been the kind of vengeance-seeking, wrathful deity described in the Old Testament. But this part of the Bible also contains numerous warnings against making any graven image of our creator.

 

Why is that? What is there about a graven image that might so offend God? Perhaps the actual culprit is not the image so much as the property of being graven. Anything graven, images or text, is static. It cannot change or grow once it is engraved.

 

And, in an irony to confound Creationists and Darwinists alike, God who is love evolved. God did not remain the same as the deity at the dawn of creation. God changed and grew more loving and keeps on growing to this day and forever.

 

Is such an assertion really all that surprising? We human beings are created in the image of our creator. The very fact that we as a species also have changed and evolved is a big hint about the nature of our creator. We are not stagnant, and neither is the God who created us.

 

In other words, those who still worship and/or fear a damnation deity are bowing to a God that is no more and hasn’t existed for ages. Written biblical texts may be only a few thousand years old, but the stories about God that they contain are much more ancient, retained as oral traditions from the dawn of human speech.

 

The more we trust in God’s unconditional love, the less vulnerable we are to being manipulated through fear. Imagine what this country – indeed, this world – would be like if most of us were free of fear and full of unconditional love, for ourselves and all those around us. There would be fewer dictators of any kind, political or religious, and more freedom and joy.

 

Sounds absolutely crazy, doesn’t it? Still, it’s worth a try.

 

© 2007 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

 

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