This was the last ecoTrain question of the week, but I missed it because I was in moving hell! I really wanted to answer it, though, so I'm gonna do it anyway!

I pretty much left Christianity many years ago because I determined that, if there was a God, he/she was an asshole. This question was a big part of why I thought that way. How could God let people starve, be raped, or murdered? Why would God allow war or the destruction of the planet? It made no sense to me. I had other issues too, but that was a large piece.

Rastas helped me find my way back to God. I'm not a Rasta, but I was inspired by their desire and willingness to live in joy and in simple, good health. I admired their vision of God as a jubilant and playful entity. So, I started looking for a spiritual path that worked for me. I really loved metaphysics and churches like Science of Mind and Unity. I liked the idea of creating my own reality. However, then I came around to why people would create horrible situations in their lives which is a similar question to the above one. I want to answer both. One at a time obviously.

Free will is where it's at.

For me, the God question is a bit easier. I think free will is everything. Obviously this is all opinion, but this is how I see it. God set everything in motion somehow. She just exploded love or something like that, and maybe that was the big bang. Anyway, I believe the point was just to see what would happen and experience contrast. Birthing a creation that would experience an illusion of separation allowed a being (not so sure God is a being?) that only knew love to experience and feel more. The only way for these beings to have an authentic relationship with God was for them to experience that illusion of separation, have free will, and interact with God by choice. I think it really is the only way for God to experience physicality through us and also the only way to have meaningful interaction with us.

Clearly that can only happen if God does not intervene. We have to be free to choose and free to screw up and free to turn the entire world into a total train wreck. That's pretty much what has happened, but this is also how we learn.

God steering clear of interference allows us the opportunity to behold the consequences of our actions and decide if they feel good or not. God is not really allowing bad things to happen. We are experiencing our own natural consequences. Just yesterday in my post about how what women wear bears absolutely no relevance to how men choose to behave, I was very clear about my feelings on personal responsibility. Here we see the beast again. We want war and famine and rape to be someone else's fault, even God's fault, but in each case someone, a person, is responsible for their actions. Often we, as a culture, are responsible for allowing or creating circumstances that fuel the fire of awful behavior, but every time there is a person or people who could have chosen to act differently. If we don't like what we see when we look out at the world, then we need to check the mirror before blaming God.

On to the second part.

Like I said, when I got into metaphysics, I couldn't wrap my head around why someone would choose a certain life or create a certain circumstance. I wanted to cover this here because I see it as overlapping territory. I think there are two different bits here.

There is a misunderstanding about what it really means to be creating your own reality.

Some people confuse these teachings with victim blaming. I think I was fairly clear in yesterday's post that I am totally not down with that, but that isn't what this is. Creating is not the same as "asking for it." What I mean when I say we create our own reality is that what we experience is a direct reflection of what we believe and feel - what we are focusing on. Living in a culture of fear and anger, it isn't that surprising a lot of people are experiencing scary and violent situations. You can only imagine how it would be if you grew up in some kind of violent, war torn nightmare. This is why so many people end up repeating so many mistakes of previous generations, particularly those living in poverty. It's hard to imagine anything else when you have no other touchstone for any other kind of life. So our experiences are a reflection of our thoughts, but our thoughts are often about our experiences. Our task is to break the cycle. Think a new thought. Reach for something a little better. Don't try to go from despair to joy. Try getting up to hopefulness - or even anger - first. My ultimate point in the context of this post is that there is no punishment or even judgement here. God's not punishing us for being bad or testing our faith. Experiencing challenges does not mean we are bad people or even that anything that is happening is necessarily bad. All these things are relative. What seems bad to you may be irrelevant, or even good, to someone else. And without a doubt, it is the contrast that allows us to feel the joy as well.

I also happen to think sometimes we are interested in creating a certain kind of experience to learn or teach something.

I don't like to call them lessons. Somehow that seems condescending to me and also like there's some kind of curriculum we are supposed to complete here, and I don't think that's true. Like I said before, I definitely don't like the idea of God testing us. I think that makes him sound like a petty middle schooler. Here's how I understand it. I feel certain that being sexually assaulted was a reflection of my feelings of powerlessness. I also feel that I learned something really important from it. I learned what it feels like when someone abuses their power over you, and I have indeed devoted a lot of my life to empowering women and especially children so they don't have to experience powerlessness.

The hardest for me has always been babies and children. Why in the world would a being choose to incarnate in a body only to experience horrible abuse or war or starvation?! Well, the only thing that ever made sense to me was this. These beings choose to leave the spirit world and experience these horrific things to help us evolve. It is so that hopefully, some day, we will see these horrific events and choose to behave differently. We will choose to share and resolve conflicts peacefully and treat one another respectfully simply because doing so feels better than looking upon the shit show we have going right now.

As always, I am curious about your thoughts. Is God horrible? Does he simply not care about us? Tell me what you think!

Much love, y’all!

As always, all pics are mine or pixabay unless otherwise noted.

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