God, Aliens, and Other Stuff

This post is not really about suffering. It's about expanding our understanding of God. Aside from the fact that the book of Job is great literature, who among us can't empathize with Job's predicament? He is being tested by God. He has lost his children, his goods, and his health. He's covered in painful sores and he smells. Dogs lick his wounds. His wife is shrieking at him and his supposed friends, those misguided comforters, are accusing him of being a sinner. Job doesn't understand what is happening with his deity. God is behaving in ways that don't make sense. Something is terribly wrong, but what and why? The fact is, Job's friends and accusers were standing on solid ground. They were drawing on God's holy, inerrant, unchanging Word. Deuteronomy 27 and 28 assure the reader that bad things happen to disobedient sinners. Good things happened to the obedient. They had ineffable tradition on their side.  "Ask the former generation and find out wh...

This post is based on an article published here: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article38604.htm#.U4KPi7XJgb4.email Frank Schaeffer is the author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. He also wrote, Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God. An ex-pat from his fundamentalist roots, Schaeffer is writing from frustration bordering on anger. I’m not an expert on his viewpoints, but he seems to be saying, “Why did you waste so much of my life with thoughtless, shallow, religious nonsense?” In the article above, sent to me by a friend, he lists the many instances in the life of Jesus where Jesus broke the rules, mostly ritual regulations elucidated in the Book of Leviticus. These imperatives involve the purity laws in the Torah/Pentateuch [the first 5 books of the Bible]. In the Law of Moses, one could be ‘defiled’ (temporarily disqualified from being able to appro...