Murray Haar On Religion: Order and Chaos

Friday, September 28, 2018

Order and Chaos

Life is a mixture of order and chaos. We humans desire and seek order but sometimes create chaos. Order is when everything makes sense and we feel in control of what is going on. Chaos may best be defined as the feeling of being out of control.

In our scriptures God is pictured as constantly wrestling with chaos, the chaos of nature and the chaos of human nature. Sometimes God prevails and sometimes God fails to prevail. Example: Cain kills Abel and God does not stop it. The blood of Abel is pictured as crying to God and God laments the killing but loses to the chaos within Cain. Not everything described in the Bible is the will of God!

When we say God is in control of everything that happens we make God responsible for everything that happens. I suppose it matters what you mean by the word “control.” But, if everything happens according to God’s plan, it makes God the author of good and evil. It turns God into an arbitrary monster who hurts people every day in all sorts of ways.

I know it can be comforting for some to think everything happens to us as part of some grand divine plan but just think about it. If that’s true, it means the Holocaust was part of God’s plan. Destructive diseases of every ilk are part of the plan. Hurricanes, earthquakes, and every accident and every suicide, is part of the plan.

Some will argue God has a deeper, longer, grander hidden plan which humans cannot understand. That is possible, but if that plan includes God committing evil, why would anyone want to worship a God who does such terrible things as part of some mysterious plan?

The life we experience every day tells us order and chaos are real. Accidents happen. Diseases are part of life. Hurricanes and earthquakes are part of nature. God appears to be wrestling with the chaos of the earth, with the freedom and inconsistency of its human creatures, with the fact we all live on a small blue planet with distinct laws of nature in an obscure part of the universe.

The contest between order and chaos is messy and uncertain but it sure beats the idea of “the plan.”

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Notes from The Door

Whenever you care for the neighbor in pain, at that very moment, God is real. At that very moment, the Messiah has returned. In every situation where there is pain and injustice do what you can do to stop the pain. Murray Haar
Religion was not created by God but by people. What God thinks of our religions only God can say. If your religion teaches you to love God and to stand with your neighbor in pain, it is a good religion. If it teaches you to hate and to be indifferent, it is a bad religion. Murray Haar
Get Busy livin or get busy dyin (Shawshank Redemption)
The Holocaust teaches us that it is possible to be alive but no longer human. Murray Haar
I am wiser than this man; it is likely that neither of us knows anything worthwhile, but he thinks he knows something when he does not, whereas when I do not know, neither do I think I know; so I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know. Socrates
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now: put out every one; Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun; Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood. For nothing now can ever come to any good. W. H. Auden
For the most part, Christian pastors and priests are not taught to think but to transmit. They go to a vocational school called a seminary where they are taught how to transmit and proclaim the gospel but not how to teach their people to think critically about what they believe. They do not know how to teach their parishioners that Christianity could be wrong. Pastors and Priests are not prophets; they are religious functionaries who care about people and love Jesus. They themselves are usually nice people, will visit you in the hospital and give you bread and wine but they are not, for the most part, great thinkers. So, to expect them to reform the Church is just not realistic. Occasionally though, pastors show up who can think and believe at the same time and it is in them that there is hope for a reformation. I have met them. They are real and I have hope in them. Murray Haar
We do not believe in the Bible. We believe in God. The Bible is a vector toward God and the neighbor. When the Bible points us toward God and the neighbor, it is true. Whenever it does not, it is not true. We have to learn not only to read the Bible but to argue with it. Then the text will become real. Murray Haar
“In religion, the question is more important than the answer to the question.” A Midrash
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Dylan Thomas
“He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.” The Talmud
“We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or adrift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what we refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so are our lives formed.” Joseph Epstein

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Friday, September 28, 2018

Order and Chaos

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