Also, there's a line that I've seen attributed to Orson Welles about the director Luis Bunuel: "He is a deeply Christian man who hates God as only a Christian can." I was deeply attracted to this line, and it's one of the things that led me to a rather in depth study of Bunuel's films. I'm not sure how meaningful it is for an atheist to question God's kindness, and while this was certainly not the spirit in which you asked, I've sometimes seen atheists do it spitefully or tauntingly.
There are books in the Bible like Job and Jonah and Ecclesiastes (and to a lesser degree, Lamentations) that are all about man's eternal struggle to comprehend God's plan. If you haven't read them, I would recommend them cautiously. They're very strange books that in many ways feel awkward and out of place in the Bible (and the Rabbis of Yavneh argued about their inclusion at some length), but it's very important to me that they're included. Iyov in particular is about God's cruelty and its relationship to God's claimed attribute of mercy.
Not coincidentally, they are in their fashion some of the most brutally funny books of the Bible. Jonah, many scholars believe, is outright satire of other prophetic works, and Ecclesiastes is one of the wittiest works of language I've ever read.
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Date: 2013-03-05 04:40 pm (UTC)There are books in the Bible like Job and Jonah and Ecclesiastes (and to a lesser degree, Lamentations) that are all about man's eternal struggle to comprehend God's plan. If you haven't read them, I would recommend them cautiously. They're very strange books that in many ways feel awkward and out of place in the Bible (and the Rabbis of Yavneh argued about their inclusion at some length), but it's very important to me that they're included. Iyov in particular is about God's cruelty and its relationship to God's claimed attribute of mercy.
Not coincidentally, they are in their fashion some of the most brutally funny books of the Bible. Jonah, many scholars believe, is outright satire of other prophetic works, and Ecclesiastes is one of the wittiest works of language I've ever read.