Yes, trained, I think that's a good question. One thing that makes me angry, actually, are people who presume to know the nature of God to the extent that they judge others horrifically. For instance, God hates homosexuality, so homosexuals are sinners, and poor people, they're sinners, but I love THEM but I hate their sin, and on and on. True, you can read the Old Testament and find laws in, for instance, Leviticus, that proscribe and prohibit all sorts of arcane stuff we find silly today. But the Jews of the time were codifying laws that, I think justifiably, were for the protection of the Jews, nothing to be criticized. Things were different in those days, and I don't hold it against the Jews with all these esoteric strictures that we can, purportedly, laugh at. Those laws made for the cohesiveness of a society in sometimes precarious situations. Did GOD really spell out these laws specifically? Well, that's for the Jews of that time to have considered, and who am I to judge those times. I've never claimed that every word in the Bible is specifically from the mouth of God. Did the Jews hear God? I think they did.
But, for me, God is so vast, so huge, so infinite, so, well I don't know what to say, there are no words. I may be cheating on your question, trained, but for me, God is, literally, UNKNOWABLE. I may, and do, scream at God for the misfortunes in my life, but do I doubt that he exists? No. And, yes, we can say, well, if there's a benevolent and loving God, why is there so much cruelty and evil in the world? But that gets into some pretty deep theology, and that whole thing of free will.
We can have only a taste of what the vastness of the universe is, that distance that can't be measured. I mean, can you imagine voyaging out and passing by some of those nebulae? I mean, for me, I will never get that chance, but something tells me if I was taken on a ride and flew by other planets and stars and swirling clouds of colorful gasses, I would start crying, and I would almost dissolve in what I'd call the most abject fear. Not horror, but the respectful fear of God, the immensity that I can't even begin to conceive.
But I do think God did start it all. What the plan is, what the purpose is, I don't know. I also think he communicates with people. With me? Well, I don't think so in a earthshaking way, and I get a bit angry with people, as stated above, who claim they talk with God all the time. I don't think God is to be toyed with in that way, I do believe he is loving, benevolent. I don't believe in the, who were they called, the theists, who say he wound the clock and it's just running now on its own. I believe he is all those omni-things, omnipresent, etc. But to presume that I know much at all about him is hubris. At the same time, I think he's accessible, wants to be so, but I get pretty angry with him a lot.
But I think, in some human ways, we can and are deciphering the science behind it all. And I don't think at all there's a war between science and religion. In fact, I think God respects our efforts and intelligence. That's where I think we really err when we're always saying that aliens would be to us as we are to the ants. I think that diminishes the wonders of ants, and of ourselves. If you want a real wow experience, at least I thought it was for me, get Stephen Hawking's book, he's the editor of it, entitled On the Shoulders of Giants. In it you can read, in English translation, of course, many of the works of Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler, I think, and a bunch of others. You can read their actual words, see the actual pictures and diagrams they drew, and see their ACTUAL mathematical equations about all sorts of things gravity, orbital, mechanical, etc. Wow. And I think many people are very, very intelligent, and I think we underestimate man's achievements and intelligence all through the ages. Kim
