As many of my Facebook friends can confirm, I am active on-line as much to promote my business as I am to break bread with them. And since most of my “friends” are clients or prospective guests of Evins Mill, I rarely visit polarizing topics like politics and religion. That said, en route to Florida’s Emerald Coast last week, my family passed a church whose marquee announced “You don’t need Facebook to talk to God.”~
I’ve been fascinated with religious signage for years and even once considered collecting these folksy adages into a book whose clever title would read “Signs from God.” Given my interest in religious marquees, my involvement on Facebook and my unending wrestling match with the Almighty, I took this sign as a sign to comment upon its message – albeit with Abrahamic misgivings.
~
To the extent God exists and is listening, the marquee’s plainspoken words seem obvious enough, but the message drove me to consider a counter intuitive notion – that Facebook would in fact serve as an elegant and effective platform for communicating with God, and more than that, for comprehending Him/Her/It. So far as I know though, God has yet to establish a page.
~
If so, atheists might cite His on-line absence as just one more indicator, albeit a flimsy one, that He does not exist. Other rationalists might assert that God’s absence tells us nothing about His existence, but only that if He does exist, God must be Aristotelian by nature, a prime mover that spun the web but no longer intercedes with His creation – that is to say, the kind of God many of our founding fathers embraced.
~
Some theists might take His absence only to mean that God refuses to forfeit his omnipotence to human constructs, though for most Christians anyway, there is precedence for such surrender – namely on the platform of a cross. If God does eventually create a Facebook page, it would at least, hoaxes aside, verify His existence and establish beyond doubt His intercessory credentials.
~
As illuminating as His registration would be, God's subsequent on-line behavior would reveal much more. Were God for instance to issue commands via Facebook with political or military objectives, we might gather that He is akin to the tribal God of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges, or even the eschatological God of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation – or of present day religious militants and Armageddon enthusiasts.
~
If God however used Facebook to draw our attention to social and economic injustice, we might identify Him as the God of the Hebrew prophets and perhaps even Jesus himself – or of many modern day social activists. If God used Facebook rather to highlight our sinfulness and need for salvation by grace or good works, we might accept the vision of God given to us by the likes of St. Paul and St. Augustine.
~
However God would or would not reveal Himself, one seminal problem with a Facebook divinity, outside bandwidth, privacy issues and other mundane considerations, is that it would diminish His mystery. And science is doing a fine job of that without God abetting it. And why would He, for one of God’s strongest suits is the mystery of it all - a mystery that has allowed God to be many things to many people over many millennia.
~
The mystery of our universe not only grants God a protean quality but also requires for our part a degree of faith in how we choose to understand that universe. Whether we place that faith in faith as a believer does, in reason as many scientists do or in some other elucidating mechanism, absent certain knowledge we can hardly escape having faith in something. Conversely, if we possessed unassailable knowledge of the cosmos, including God, I’m not sure we’d need to have faith in anything.
~
If the act of believing then is a by-product of uncertainty, embracing the fragility of our knowledge should foster a spirit of humility. Perhaps such humility, spawned by life's mystery, would inspire a collective respect for our manifold conceptions of God – unless of course those conceptions lead to acts of violence. By the way, I’m not looking for any Kumbaya moment here – just a breath of grace and forbearance.
I’ve been fascinated with religious signage for years and even once considered collecting these folksy adages into a book whose clever title would read “Signs from God.” Given my interest in religious marquees, my involvement on Facebook and my unending wrestling match with the Almighty, I took this sign as a sign to comment upon its message – albeit with Abrahamic misgivings.
~
To the extent God exists and is listening, the marquee’s plainspoken words seem obvious enough, but the message drove me to consider a counter intuitive notion – that Facebook would in fact serve as an elegant and effective platform for communicating with God, and more than that, for comprehending Him/Her/It. So far as I know though, God has yet to establish a page.
~
If so, atheists might cite His on-line absence as just one more indicator, albeit a flimsy one, that He does not exist. Other rationalists might assert that God’s absence tells us nothing about His existence, but only that if He does exist, God must be Aristotelian by nature, a prime mover that spun the web but no longer intercedes with His creation – that is to say, the kind of God many of our founding fathers embraced.
~
Some theists might take His absence only to mean that God refuses to forfeit his omnipotence to human constructs, though for most Christians anyway, there is precedence for such surrender – namely on the platform of a cross. If God does eventually create a Facebook page, it would at least, hoaxes aside, verify His existence and establish beyond doubt His intercessory credentials.
~
As illuminating as His registration would be, God's subsequent on-line behavior would reveal much more. Were God for instance to issue commands via Facebook with political or military objectives, we might gather that He is akin to the tribal God of the Pentateuch, Joshua and Judges, or even the eschatological God of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation – or of present day religious militants and Armageddon enthusiasts.
~
If God however used Facebook to draw our attention to social and economic injustice, we might identify Him as the God of the Hebrew prophets and perhaps even Jesus himself – or of many modern day social activists. If God used Facebook rather to highlight our sinfulness and need for salvation by grace or good works, we might accept the vision of God given to us by the likes of St. Paul and St. Augustine.
~
However God would or would not reveal Himself, one seminal problem with a Facebook divinity, outside bandwidth, privacy issues and other mundane considerations, is that it would diminish His mystery. And science is doing a fine job of that without God abetting it. And why would He, for one of God’s strongest suits is the mystery of it all - a mystery that has allowed God to be many things to many people over many millennia.
~
The mystery of our universe not only grants God a protean quality but also requires for our part a degree of faith in how we choose to understand that universe. Whether we place that faith in faith as a believer does, in reason as many scientists do or in some other elucidating mechanism, absent certain knowledge we can hardly escape having faith in something. Conversely, if we possessed unassailable knowledge of the cosmos, including God, I’m not sure we’d need to have faith in anything.
~
If the act of believing then is a by-product of uncertainty, embracing the fragility of our knowledge should foster a spirit of humility. Perhaps such humility, spawned by life's mystery, would inspire a collective respect for our manifold conceptions of God – unless of course those conceptions lead to acts of violence. By the way, I’m not looking for any Kumbaya moment here – just a breath of grace and forbearance.
