Does God Set Us Up to Fail?

As you'll probably be able to tell from this post, I'm bored and my mind tends to race when I'm bored.  If idle hands are the devil's workshop, what is an idle mind?  With that said, I give you some idle thought which I hope makes a lick of sense.

Is God everywhere?  Does God see everything?  Does God know everything?  Is our life predetermined?  Well, to hear the devout and faithful followers of the bible tell it, yes, most definitely, to all of the above.  God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.  Really.  Hmmm.

So, God knows what I’m going to do before I do it.  Yet, knowing what is going to happen, God would ask a man to take his son up a mountain to build an altar so the son can be sacrificed for the glory of God.  God knows the man will do it.  God knows the man’s faith is solid.  Why this game?  God plays games?  In the Garden of Eden God gives Adam and Eve and edict.  Don’t eat the damned fruit!  God does this knowing full well that Eve is going to succumb to temptation.  God created Eve, so God already knows she has this built-in flaw.  It’s why women buy so many shoes and men look at other women.  God wired us this way.  I this is true, we have been set-up to fail, or not, from the very start.  Or, are these simply lessons?

"The blame is his who chooses:  God is blameless."  -- Plato

Herein is the rub.  God is going to give us tests for which the outcome is preordained simply to teach us lessons which God knows ahead of time we will pass or fail, because the outcome has bearing on the whole, for the express purpose of keeping the ball rolling.  God is either obsessive compulsive or bored silly.  Is this is what happens when the supreme power creates time so they will have nothing but?  God could have sat back and done nothing with all of this time.  God is an artist and an artist prefers not do nothing with something, but an artist loves to do something with nothing.  In the beginning God created the heavens and the Earth.  No, that’s not quite right.  In the beginning God created time, and in this time God created the heavens and the earth, in six days, and on the seventh God rested.  God what?  Rested.  God gets tired?

"God gave you the gift of 86,400 seconds today.  Have you used one to say thank you?"  -- William Arthur Ward

The bible is a book of parables.  It teaches us lessons on how to live productive, meaningful lives.  It is also rife with contradiction and fallacy.  Does this detract from the value of it?  As I have said in many of my postings, no.  But it is a tome written by men.  I think we have to consider these old men with less than perfect memories, young men with possible with possible political or religious agendas, and emperors wanting to spread the faith and control the faithful along with their lands and money.  I think we have to consider the translation of these books from several languages, and the people that were doing the translating also come into question.  Consider the Inquisition as a for instance.  Would you translate something in a way that would bring you before the court?  I think it more likely that a word or a phrase might become colored by the emotions of the day.

"All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit"  -- Thomas Paine

Is the bible the cold, hard, final word of God?  Or, is it better used as a guidebook for our personal faith in an artistic supreme being that thought we were worth creating?  Are we constantly set up to fail, or not, at the whim of a supreme deity, or were we put on this Earth with the inherent tools to do what we need to survive?  I would like to think nothing is preordained, that it is up to us to make it or fail, and we have been given the power by God to be everything or be nothing.

"Raise your head up.  Go forward believing; look up and expect the answers to happen, and leave them to the power of the will of God.  If your dreams don't come true don't get depressed and most of all don't lose hope.  Always remember that God may be preparing a better dream for you to fulfill.  Remember also that in every failure and success there is always a reason.  When God closes one door, He opens another."  -- Cathy Marquez

God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.  I think for the most part God steps back, as any parent would, and allows us to learn.  Sometimes we get burned.  Sometimes we create beauty and move forward.  Sometimes God needs to give us a little hint.  But for the most part I think God leaves us to our own devices.  If God had wanted us perfect why set us up to fail?  Because if everything was always perfect, what would be the point?  We would still be wearing fig leaves and scratching our butts.  We would have everything and want for nothing.  How boring would that get to be?  This is not God's plan for us, think about it.

 

Even God found the need to create.